Video Games in the Classroom

The game I played for this assignment was Pandemic II. The goal of this game was to spread a disease, either a bacteria, virus, or parasite, around the world in the smartest way possible. The player has to try to evolve, spread their disease, and kill everyone worldwide in the least visible and noticeable possible to avoid panic from the people and the governments. The objective is to keep the disease’s visibility low to have everyone be relaxed to make it easier for the disease to spread, but the governments and the people will eventually panic and start closing down borders, airlines, school, etc. and even creating curfews to try and prevent the disease from spreading.

The game allows you to pick between realistic and relaxed mode. Realistic mode takes a longer time for your disease to evolve and complete the game but you are able to save your progress. This version of the game is recommended for people who already have experience playing. On the other hand, relaxed mode allows you to complete or finish the game within an approximate 20 minute period. Which is recommended for first time or beginning players.

As your disease is spreading you collect “evolution points” and with those points the player can “buy” new symptoms, resistances, and transmissions for your disease to make it more lethal and effective. But when adding to the lethality and effectiveness the player must make sure the visibility remains at a low amount. You can buy and sell these attributions, if a certain quality you just added increases the visibility you can sell it back to get rid of it also using your evolution point. As the player is making all these changes and additions, they must keep an eye on the news that are displayed on the screen. Keeping up with the headlines helps the player be aware of how their disease is spreading and what the governments are doing to prevent it, which helps make adjustments in the attributes of the disease.

The content of this game could be used during a Biology/Life Science lesson on disease, viruses, bacteria etc. Standard 10 of the California Content Standards of Biology/Life Science states that “organisms have a variety of mechanisms to combat disease” to help with the understanding of the immune system. This game would help fulfill standards 10c and 10d. Standard 10c establishes that “students know how vaccination protects an individual from infectious diseases” and 10d establishes “students know there are important difference between bacteria and viruses with respect to their requirements for growth and replication, the body’s primary defenses against bacterial and viral infections, and effective treatments of these infections.” The game provides information for the user to determine whether they use a bacteria, virus, or parasite based on their characteristics. So the game would establish differences between bacteria and viruses as stated in standard 10d. Throughout the game the player is also given the chance to make their disease “drug resistant” and it explains to you what that means. During the game the “governments” also work on creating vaccines to prevent the virus to continue spreading, this aspect of the game would fulfill standard 10c. In Pandemic II, the player can also “buy” a variety of symptoms for the infected to have, some of those include simple symptoms such as sneezing and coughing to memory loss and kidney failure. The players are also provided information regarding how these symptoms would affect the lethality, effectiveness, and visibility of their disease based on how each symptom affects those who become infected. This aspect of the game would also help fulfill standard 10e which establishes that “students know why and individual with a compromised immune system … may be unable to fight off and survive infections by microorganisms that are usually benign.” Pandemic II, fulfills 3 major sub-standards of standard 10, so it would be a good idea to use this game to help students understand how diseases work and spread.

Technology Review - Edmodo

The technology that I want to review is Edmodo. Edmodo is an website, that is pretty much an educational version of Facebook. It was created to give education access into the environment of the 21st century. With this website students have the opportunity to communicate with their classmates and are able to do group conversations without having to be in the same place. In Edmodo teachers are able to assign homework assignments, schedule quizzes, keep track of each student’s progress and so much more. All this becomes possible with codes for students to join each assignment or task. Using Edmodo, teachers allow parents to be a part of their students learning, by also being able to see what they did during the day and if they have homework or not. Edmodo has the ability to make parent-student-teacher communication much easier.

Edmodo gives a classroom a fun and interactive learning environment. It helps keep students engaged, because this website acts like a social media account which keeps students interested. It also allows users to access their accounts through an application on all Android and Apple devices. Giving the parents direct access to their children’s online classroom also helps support the students learning because they can make sure they are getting their work done, parents are able to see any important announcements, and are also given the chance to see how their child is doing in the class.

A challenge or pitfall for this technology would be that some students may have more access than others outside of school. If not everyone has a device, Internet, or Wi-fi available at home then they don’t have the same opportunity as the rest of their classmates either review assignments or communicate with their group when they have group assignments for homework. Along with that, students may also be using group discussion boards to talk about more than just their assignments, which could be a distraction, and in the worst case scenario allow students to bully others through online conversations. These are some of the challenges that this technology could possibly have, but if the teacher makes sure to address them before beginning to use it then there shouldn't be any challenges.

For more information on Edmodo, click here

To visit the Edmodo website or to sign up, click here

Professional Learning Network Experience

I have never been very interested in getting a social media account with twitter because I found it very confusing, and I had definitely never been exposed to LinkedIn or Feedly at all before. So I was a little hesitant and nervous to do this assignment, because I was afraid to get lost or not do something correctly. I tried using twitter maybe 6 years ago but I found it very confusing so I decided to not use it after all. Now trying to create my professional account for this course I felt that it wasn’t as complicated or hard. I think my reason for finding twitter easier to use would be that I have now been more exposed to technology than I was 6 years ago, so it was a lot easier to navigate through the website and understand what I was doing. Especially since I was now on a PC and when I first tried it I was using the application on my cellphone. I found that Twitter and LinkedIn were really easy for me to use and understand than Feedly. I was really confused on how to use Feedly, the whole time I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.

Now that I have figured out how to use all three websites I feel that I will get a lot of them. On Twitter and Linked in I now follow Education Week to keep up with current events. I also added Teachers Pay Teacher, which is a website I see teachers use at the school I work at, they use it to buy activities from other teacher or download free activities they can use in their classrooms. Teachers Pay Teachers has special sale days, and I know this because I currently have an account with them, but I usually forget to check the dates in which the sales are happening. So having them on twitter will help me be up to date with what is happening on their website and what is new. I learned that with social media accounts such as these 3, us as teacher candidates, can build up our knowledge and connections for future references, and can even refer back to these accounts when teaching. The accounts I just created will come in very handy as I try to build connections into the teaching field and find resources for my own classroom.

        I feel that online professional learning communities support teacher’s professional growth in that teacher’s don’t have to actually go find help in a physical building from the start. With all these tools available online teachers can search up whatever they need and find someone or something that can help them. And like I said before, like in Teachers Pay Teachers, teachers help one another in sharing many different lessons and activities they use in their classroom sometimes you can get it for free and other times you might have to pay but in the end it’s worth it because another professional helped you, and you didn’t have to figure it all out on your own.

        My overall experience with the Professional Learning Network made me feel relieved. It made me realize that there is a lot of help out there and I don’t just have to jump into the real world and into teaching all on my own. Many resources are available, and they continuously make new resources available, which is very helpful to future and current teachers.