Blog 4 - Educational Games

This week I came across an online article that discussed these new educational online games.  As a person who loves a great video game it was a must read to see what all the hype was about.  It seemed like it was saying all the right things any educator would want to see prior to letting their students play games on the computer during class.  Says the games are aligned to standards and common core.  It provides teacher and student guides.  The producers of the game are even will to work with districts to modify games to best meet the needs of the schools.

Following reading the article, I went to the game website and saw the list of games that were available. Of course you need to create an account and it costs money to the play the games (not sure why I was surprised), but I do think the games would be beneficial.  It has posted information about each game, which standards it would work towards, and what I found the best is it sends reports/makes reports available to you of how each student it doing.  This is great information because when students are playing any other sort of educational game online or in class with other students you are not able to get the data feedback.  These games provide that for you and will let you know where the students are succeeding and where they have an area that still needs improvement.

On the site they had 17 total games available for purchase.  Needless to say I did not buy any of these games for the sake of Blog 4 (sorry to disappoint).   I do not think that I would purchase these games for my students.  One of the ELA games I looked at cost around $5 per student.  Even though I don't think I'd spend this money, since I don't think it would really be best use of my budget, I do like seeing the trend and changes that are occurring with gaming and education.  I really hope to see these things developing and would love to get to use these more if I think it would be worth the students efforts and the funding.

http://www.nibletz.com/events/iste/filament-games 
https://www.filamentgames.com 

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