2nd Class Video

The video we watched today about students in real classrooms using technology focused on playing a kind of game where students ran their own virtual corporations. This type of technology was Instructional software on a computer. This type of software the students are using is meant to help them understand supply and demand. They also use a microsoft word processing software to help them make a press release for their corporations. They also use spreadsheets to keep track of revenues for their virtual corporations.
I think that using instructional software to help students understand any type of material is a good idea because it is different from the normal classroom learning. A strenth is that doing different things keeps the students interested. However a weakness could be if a teacher doesn't relate it to their daily lives. If a teacher doesn't help relate it for them students will think it was just a game on a computer and never put it in to their lives. The teacher did a good job of using real life examples to help the students understand how they could later use this material.
I really liked the idea of having students write long term and short term goals for the project. It is good for students to write goals because later they can reflect upon those goals and see how they achieved them or how they fell short and what they would have done differently the next time. However goals are useless if a teacher never has students revisit the goals the students wrote.
Something that I would have added to the lesson is I would have had students do the project in groups. I feel that groups would have been more realistic because most corporations are done as group projects.