Blog #E

For chapter 7, I decided to skim the text first to see if something jumped out at me...and something did! Bloom's Taxonomy is something I have heard about in many different classes; from psychology to human growth and development. Bloom's Taxonomy is scale of types of thinking, it includes the following forms: Remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. This scale was designed to determine higher-order and lower-order thinking. The book uses the example of memorizing a sentence as opposed to writing a poem. This example illustrates the understanding level versus the creating level. This can be helpful for many teachers to categorize their students, are they all on the same page? Probably not! There are many challenging games for students that may be falling down the comprehensive ladder.

Link to a Voki!
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The next topic that caught my eye was the debate about games and gaming. Personally, I'm still a little skeptical about video gaming in education. They are a flashy tool and do catch a child's attention, but I feel that they miss the main idea of the learning games sometimes. In the text, it says that violent games at home desensitizes children from horrible violence. I had never thought about that before. If your child is playing a game where the idea is to blow someone up, they won't think a shooting is that catastrophic. The first violent game I played was Grand Theft Auto when I was in the stage of copying my older brother. But I was also exposed to inappropriate content from a non violent game when I learned how to play The Sims. I side with the people against video games until the child is 10 or so. I played Jumpstart and other games like it as a child and remember those being awesome. The games kids use for learning through iPads are from apps created by God knows who!

Relating to my last paragraph, the book illustrates strategies for using games with students. This was something I was just wondering! It instructs teachers to minimize the use of games that teach isolated skills such as a game that isn't actually teaching you a skill, but answering it because it helps you advance in the game. This means the child is mastering the game, not the content behind the skill. Another strategy is to scrutinize games that function solely on points won or lost. The last thing you want is a child to hate a math game because it says he "loses" if he does not answer correctly! I think these are really awesome and important points!

References:

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Novak, B (2016, Oct 2) Tech created with Voki http://www.voki.com/hb7ft66