Educational Games?

I have mixed feelings about educational games, especially after the experience I had with my selected website, "ProProfs Brain Games".  After a failed attempt at creating a word search for my vocabulary words, I decided to try a crossword.  The crossword was created (http://www.proprofs.com/games/crossword/night-vocabulary-1/) and, although it was easy to make, I'm not sure how useful something like this would be with 12th grade students.
I remember having a lot of fun with educational games in elementary and middle school (Reader Rabbit, The Oregon Trail, etc.), but I think a game would need to be more complex and pedagogically sound at the high school level.  A better activity for my students might be to have them create the games themselves as a review or extension activity.
Overall, I can see the value for games in education, but a game would need to be a little more involved than a crossword or word search in order to elicit higher order thinking.  My students have told me about some games that require them to reason and synthesize information and I know that programs like Second Life allow students to interact with a lot of educationally valuable resources.  So, just like many of the tools and resources discussed on this blog, games need to be evaluated and appropriately utilized in order to facilitate learning.

Videos! Videos! Videos!

As most of you probably gathered from my presentation, I feel that the use of video is a fantastic way for students to display higher order thinking while having fun and it definitely engages students of all ability levels in any content area.
Although iMovie is my favorite video creation program, there are no Macs at my school, so the students have to use MovieMaker or their own software.  MovieMaker is not a bad program...unless you compare it to iMovie.  If the students are doing a smaller project with still images, I usually encourage them to use PhotoStory (since they can download it for free at home if they have Windows) or Animoto (since I have a teacher code that they can use to make lengthier videos).
The teachers I work with have made stellar and award-winning projects using these tools and I'm sure that they would all tell you that video projects are worth the time and planning required because students get so much out of them.
Here are a few different videos made with different programs since I couldn't decide which ones to include:

I just made this short intro to Kite Runner to use with my Anticipation Guide when I begin teaching this novel in a few weeks:
http://animoto.com/play/70CuvnIXN9d8QjzxSWS76g


These Public Service Announcements were made (by students) with MovieMaker:

 

I included this video of my baby's first week made with iPhoto to illustrate how we can have fun with these programs outside of the classroom:

Ian Summer 2011

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly photo books offer a variety of layouts and cover options to choose from.

I didn't mean to post this to our class blog, I was just playing around with some features on Shutterfly!  I don't want to delete it because of Katie's comment, so I hope you don't mind my digital scrap book in the middle of our assignments :o)