The A-Team: Trina McGregor
Trina McGregor: "Technology doesn't have to separate people ..."
"Sometimes my daughter will catch me in the kitchen playing with the Nintendo DS Lite I got at the Advance Team meeting, and she'll ask me 'are you doing your homework?'" So says middle-school math teacher Trina McGregor, who now feels that learning about digital games is indeed part of her homework. "The most useful part of the Institute," she says, "was that I got exposure to a world I hadn't ventured far into before. We need to know about these games."
Not that Trina is any kind of stranger to using games to teach math. She uses them all the time with her students at theWashington Middle School in Allegany County because as she says "even kids who say they don't like math will play a game." Trina generally chooses games that encourage her students to work together, keeping everyone involved and not putting too much pressure on any one student. Until now, though, the games she's used have involved paper and pencil, manipulates and other non-digital media. While Trina, who’s been a teacher for 11 years, is very savvy technology-wise, she says that she hadn’t really explored digital learning games until the Advance Team Institute.
Trina now sees many potential benefits to using digital learning games, including the possibility of offering truly differentiated instruction. "In one math class, I usually have kids on at least three different learning levels. It's hard for one teacher to meet all those needs," she says. "But the good digital learning games usually have different levels of game play. That means that all of the students can work at their own pace." Trina imagines her role in that scenario as something of a facilitator and as someone who encourages the students to learn from each other as they try to win the game. "I want learning to be a choice for students, not an obligation," she says. "These games could help make learning something that kids want to choose."
Trina says that the Advance Team Institute even had an impact on her life at home. "My son loves 'The Sims,' and the meeting got me really interested in asking him about it. He was so excited to tell me about his game, and he was pretty excited about my new Nintendo DS Lite, too. Technology doesn’t have to separate people. It can really bring us together."
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