A Physical Educator's experience of online education games

The overall experience of this group project was a good one. My group was fully involved from start to finish, even though we were not all in class when we had to start. All members of the group were involved in every step of the process from thought collaboration to the final production of our presentation. Finally, I felt like everyone involved has a strong basis and idea of how the game worked and were all in a sense "experts of the game." Dockterman (2012) found that "that half of all kindergarten through eighth grade teachers are now regularly using digital games in the classroom," and that "nearly one in five are using them every day." I feel as though most of today’s surveys and research finds that we are using more and more technology in the classroom. We faced very few challenges in putting together a rubric because we were all in class together, but I feel like the biggest challenge was putting one together because nobody in our group had made one before. We had all been given one or two in our previous classes, but we never have had to put one together. I felt like another challenge we had was just getting it started and thinking about how heavily to weigh each item that we came up with. According to Hayes(2007), "gaming is an untapped resource for enhancing young people’s motivation and ability to participate in a wide range of sports and other movement-based activities," however; the game we chose might not be directly applicable to my field of study because I am pursuing a degree in Physical Education and Health, but I feel like it could be a great game to use in a classroom setting with computers and downtime to spare. Like I said earlier, I probably will not be able to use this in my general physical education classes because of the curriculum but I feel that if I were to maybe have an adaptive P.E class, then I would be able to pair up special education students with general education students and have them work together to advance in levels. We learned about so many different communication tools in this class, so we did not have difficulty finding some to use. We had a few different media that we used and it really helped when we could not all meet together and it kept us on the same page for when we actually met up and made our collective group changes and practiced our presentation.

Dockterman, D. (2012). 5 Ways Teachers Can Evaluate Educational Games. Retrieved March 06, 2016, from http://mashable.com/2012/05/18/educational-video-games-how-to/#HV3KrZdO7uqr

Hayes, E., & Silberman, L. (2007). Incorporating Video games into Physical Education. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, 78(3), 1st ser., 18-18. Retrieved March 06, 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ794565.pdf