Ted has been a writer, produced video games, virtual worlds and animation, earned an MS in Education Technology, and taught online graduate courses in instructional design and EdTech. For many years, he was a video game producer. He believes the games kids played for hours on their Xboxes, PS3′s and Wii’s, could serve as powerful learning tools in the classroom.
He wrote a course as the thesis for his Masters in Education Technology called Using Video Games as Learning Tools and have had the pleasure of teaching it as part of National University’s excellent MS Educational and Instructional Technologies program for the last six years. The final project for the course is a teaching guide for a commercial entertainment video game (they play lots of games during the course – who said grad school was boring?). These guides are designed to address specific state standards while providing a deep, experiential understanding of the topic at hand. All of these guides were created by working teachers as part of their MS in Education and Instructional Technology at National University.
So you are free to use all these guides, just a few titles are as below:
Experience the Trials and Triumphs of Early American History with Empire: Total War for 5th graders
Environmental Explorations in Simulations for 10th Grade Economics & Environmental Studies for 10th graders
Social Capitalism and Labor in Final Fantasy XI simulation for Economics study of 12th graders
Understanding Civilization through Conquering One – Using Settlers 7 for 3rd Grade Social Studies for 3rd graders
Assassin’s Creed II: A Virtual Tour to the Italian Renaissance for 7th Graders
American Conquest: A 5th Grade Social Studies Exploration
and more…
Get these Video Game Teaching Guides and post your experiences or add any new material you create, so there is a constantly evolving and improving repository of game-based learning practices.
