CCMS Book Bag Blog

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After the SCASL conference in March, I became very interested in the idea of “gaming” in the library.  For years we’ve had checkers, chess, Trivial Pursuit, and Scrabble and the students love the idea of playing with the games.  I’ve always tried to make visits to the library media center fun and for some that meant games.  However, we went through a period when tech departments were instructed to come in and take all the games off desktops - “no playing Solitaire in school!”  District filters even blocked sites that have “game” related to it. 

Fortunately, we’ve done an about face at our school in relation to games - yes, I believe we’re still having some filter problems with a few game sites, but even so, the idea of engaging students with games has been integrated throughout the school’s curriculum.  While gaming, we see students engaged in cooperative learning situations, developing social skills, problem solving, decision making, and having loads of fun.   Our school has had Scrabble tournaments, the 6th grade had its own March Madness extravaganza, we own Webkinz for the school - one per grade level, PE classes use Dance, Dance, Revolution, Uno, the music department uses Guitar Hero,  we have had a Chess Club, and class sets of card decks can be found throughout the school.  Our library student work stations have bookmarked, several game sites for student  use and I’ve made it a passtime to continue searching for great student games, especially those with educational content.

90% of our staff is WOW (Working On The Work) trained and the commonality among our classrooms, is that total engagement of students, especially when involved in activities with game components featured as part of the learning.  I’ve been feeling pretty good about our exploration with games.  Except now!  I just read about a state movement to include games in education and library settings to the extent that they have correlated various and numerous games to their state curriculum standards.  The game featured on their blog Home page is even one I bought for my husband at Christmas, Snorta.  The School Library System of Genesee Valley BOCES  has done a remarkable job identifying games that support their curriculum standards.  Chris Harris has even aligned the premise behind some games and the skills involved with the AASL’s Standards for the 21st Century Learner.  WOW, never did I think about how those basic board games that we all have stuffed away in our closets could be so closely related to the curriculum and provide hours of engaged learning in our schools! 

My goal for this summer is to clean closets in search of games, examine the games for their potential value in the media center, hit some yard sales, and add a new component to our library collection.  Of course, I can’t put down my Mac, so I’ll be constantly reading all those wonderful blogs and discovering other great games online.  If you have ideas or suggestions, please share in a comment on this blog.  Otherwise, be sure to check out some of these blogs that focus on gaming in the library.

Gaming School Libraries and the Curriculum

Library Gamer

Game On: Games In Libraries

The Shifted Librarian

Schu’s Blog of Lit and More

School Library Land

I am always amazed to see many new and different Web 2.0 sites for educational use.  Today’s great ideas come from  Larry Ferlazzo’s  Blog.   My favorite is Bookr  a cool site that lets students import their own pictures from flickr and create a slideshow.  Too easy to use!!!

Another great discovery today is Community Walk. This is a great map program that lets you create paths and tag areas of interest with images and video clips.   Very easy to use!  And then there is the site with the game templates, Modern Language Teachers Association of Victoria.  This site has templates for interactive games and downloads for teachers or students to create.  It provides easy to follow instructions and they are easy to save and share.  You can burn them to a disc, save to a flash drive, or save to a webpage and share with others.   For you math teachers, there’s Numbernut.  You’ve got to check this math game out - it covers everything.

Check out this free software http://www.mystudiyo.com/ that is designed to let you create quizzes online and post to your blog.  It’s called StuDiYo.  You have to register, then decide if you want to add quizzes that end with a banner promotion or an email form or you can even let your users add questions, of course with your approval only!  It scores quizzes, supports various media inserts (video, podcasts, pictures)  Your quizzes can be multiple choice or short answer.  You can even provided immediate feedback to the questions and a time limit. WOW!  I suggest you use this to create quizzes and add to your website or blog because the actual website may have some more mature material than your students need to see.  Let me know if you have any success with this.

MinyanLand  is an online game designed to teach and entertain children about the financial market. Gamers have to make purchases. obtain services, donate to charities, buy food, stay healthy and other financial activities that will help keep the economy balanced.  It is totally free, funded by sponsors that you may see throughout the communities in MinyanLand.  Great educational online game!  Learn more about at Keith Jarret’s Blog.