New post up on the Follow Me web-site on how to integrate Follow Me into a program of instruction. Take a look!

Fred

Latest post at Follow Me

Had a great visit with the Texas A&M Army ROTC Aggie Warrior Training Battalion in College Station, TX.

For this article we will take a quick look at how to integrate Follow Me into a program of instruction.  Believe it or not this is not a difficult process, at least it doesn’t have to be.  Apply a little commonsense and the results may surprise you.

The easy answer is to simply look at your lesson plan then pick one or two lessons where it makes sense to integrate Follow Me.  Of course knowing what Follow Me is and how to use it will go a long way in determining where it fits best.  The point here is to know the tool you’re using and how it can be used, but more importantly what you want to get out of it.

Ok so that’s the easy answer, a more detailed analysis will get you a lot further and provide more bang for the buck.

Things To Consider

Here are a few things to consider when trying to determine an inject point for the game:

• How much time do you have with your students?
• How many students in a class?
• Do you have enough computers for each student or will they have to share?
• What are your outcomes for that lesson?
• Quality of instructors?

In the case of Texas A&M they have close to 1000 cadets.  In  many of their classes they may have up to 30 kids per class.  Their lab consist of about 25 computers in a fairly small room.  In regards to outcomes that will vary depending on where the cadet is in their development.  Last but not least they usually get one hour of class time and two hours of lab time during a normal week of classes.  Time and hardware are almost always the most critical factors when it comes to using any kind of game or simulation in the classroom.  We have observed, in most organizations that the pushback will usually come from the instructors, especially when you’re talking about students playing a game.  For most people they see it as a waste of time, that is until they see how we run our classes, but more importantly they see the learning that takes place during a Follow Me exercise.

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