Book Bag Blog

Media-gam-arama

April 30, 2008 at 10:06 pm | In Welcome |

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