Easy Video Review Game Templates for Your Classroom

December 12th, 2008 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

If you’re like 60% of the teachers researcher Dr. Jeff Ertzberger surveyed, you want to use video games in your classroom, but you don’t have a lot of time to create your own. You also want to customize the game for your curriculum and state standards and you’d like the technology to work every time, and to have plenty of LCD projectors and computers to go around.

Ertzberger, the Director of Technology at the Watson School of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, can’t help you with getting you the technology you need, but if you have access to an LCD projector and have basic skills with Microsoft Office programs, he has some game templates for you to incorporate into your daily plans at his Template Games and Utilities site: http://people.uncw.edu/ertzbergerj/msgames.htm.

Great fun with minimal prep time. Some games on the site, like the racing game, are ready to play with no preparation time, Ertzberger said. If you have your vocabulary list or review questions in hand, you can spin the wheel or keep score with the Racing Game, the Big Wheel, and the Sunken Treasure games with just a download and a click.

If you want to do a minimal amount of editing, you can play a TV game show version of a question-and-answer game on The Big Board. If you have all of your questions ready, replacing the category names and typing in questions should take about 10 minutes.

Instructions available. Over 60,000 people have visited Ertzberger’s site this year and downloaded games, so it would be overwhelming for him to assist users with problems they experience when they use the games. He suggests that teachers download and experiment with the games before using them.

“The games are nothing more than Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, which are pretty standard in schools,” he said. “These [game templates] have been around for three or four years, so all of the problems should be addressed in the instructions.”

Basic-level questions like how to open a PowerPoint file or edit an Excel document aren’t addressed in the instructions. Users should know how to perform simple tasks in the software platforms before using the game templates.

Games increase student engagement. Teachers who use these games have noticed an increase in student involvement, Ertzberger said. “Students can be apathetic and unmotivated,” he said. “Games get kids involved. It’s really an engagement piece. If I can get them involved I’m already one step above where I’ve started.”

All of the instructional models begin with student engagement, which is half of the teacher’s battle, he said. Without engagement, the rest of the lesson plan doesn’t work.

“Of course, these [games] are just tools,” Ertzberger said. “These aren’t a solution for the whole problem of student engagement. But e-mails show that these games are helping teachers reach kids.”

Tags: games, PowerPoint