Here's How Gamer-Teachers Use Video Games In The Classroom

Here's How Gamer-Teachers Use Video Games In The Classroom Games are being used much more widely in schools than they were when I first started writing about them 2 or 3 years ago. As of fall 2013, 74% of K-8 teachers were using digital games. 55% of these teachers have students playing digital games at least weekly, 9% daily. The games they are using are mostly designed to be educational, with only 5% playing commercial games, and 8% playing hybrids (commercial games adapted for education like MincraftEDU or SimCityEdu). These insights come from Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop, who recently released a study surveying K-8 teachers in order to understand how they are implementing digital games in their classrooms. It seems the majority of teachers (82%) play games in their own free time and that there is a relationship between personal game play and in class game use. Here are four different gamer-teacher profiles that the study identifies. The Dabblers (20%): Dabblers “play digital games less often than their peers” and “report relatively low levels of comfort when using digital games with their students.” This doesn’t seem surprising. One must be well acquainted with the skills one’s trying to teach. In the Guide to Games and Learning that I wrote for MindshiftKQED, I explain how important it is for teachers to play the games they are using to teach. Just dabbling won’t lead to success. Dabblers report facing “moderate barriers” to implementation and “moderate levels of support from parents, administrators, and fellow teachers.” But I’m curious what they mean by support. Because they also report low access to professional development resources and the best kind of support that schools can offer is training and resources. Certainly Dabblers understand this, they have 15.9 years of classroom experience on average. Interestingly, although they don’t necessarily have high confidence in the efficacy of games, Dabblers are more likely than the others “to indicate positive or no changes” rather than “negative changes” in student behavior and classroom engagement. Perhaps they are using games so rarely that they seem innocuous, just another moment in a much busier day. The Players (23%): Players are “avid gamers, but teach with digital games the least often of the four profiles--just a few times a month.” At first, I assumed this group must be fanboy gamers who wanted to preserve the purity of games as entertainment--that once you add educational content it is no longer a game, but suddenly work. I was wrong. It turns out the Players “demonstrate concerted efforts” to implement digital game based teaching methods, but they report many barriers and “the lowest level of support from parents, administrators, and fellow teachers.” Perhaps these are folks who grew up playing Mortal Kombat under the early video game stigma. Maybe they’ve internalized some level of paranoia about external authorities’ perceptions of gaming in general. I’m just guessing. The Players are the “most likely group to say that games haven’t changed student behavior or content delivery.” And on average, they’ve spent 14.5 years teaching (the national average for K-8 teachers).