I regularly use Scribblenauts Unlimited with my grade 3 students for working with language. We discuss parts of speech and I push them to use creative synonyms for adjectives they already know. Goes over great and the kids really look forward to solving the problems as creatively as they can. I know a co-worker also uses Poly-Bridge for a problem-solving lesson. Can't speak to this first hand though.

Games, video or otherwise, can serve many purposes in the classroom. My teaching situation is such that it's completely impractical to use video games in the classroom, but I make/use plenty of analog games. Some of them allow the kids to practice the material over and over again without getting bored because they're doing it within a much more interesting framework; they take the tedium out of repeating the same thing over and over and over again. Others can get the students engaged with the concepts being taught and how they relate to each other. Games, analog or digital, are extremely useful in education, but they are tools to be used, not packaged solutions.

When my school introduced French and German, I had a lot of trouble keeping up. I thought myself incapable of learning another language. But when I tried the Kongregate game Kana Warrior, I learnt all the 200 characters of the basic japanese 'alphabet' in just a few weeks! I think that's the true power of games.

So for me in the classroom I’d like to see,
what is a video game and what is not
identifying behavioral, influential, manipulative techniques (and a black-grey list of popular games attached to it)
a white list of games for their content, simulations, soft skill developpements.

Beyond soft skills and informal learning there’s many commercial games whose simulations or subjects have great potential for education.

That said for a widespread usage I strongly believe we must educate about what is a video “game” and what is not first in the classroom. We know games are not just passive content, they can influence when not directly manipulating behaviors by design. Extra credits did the Skinner boxing for example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

Few days ago I saw this article I mainly agree with,
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20150806/250584/Psychological_Exploitation_Games.php
The most interesting to me were the comments to the article. It reminded of the Stockholm syndrome applied to people subject or selling mainly extrinsic rewards games, a complete denial of a danger.

Aira

Sadly, this unjustified prejudice toward commercial video games in education is not uncommon.

I would probably try showing her good examples of why and how to use games. Mindshift (http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/series/guide-to-games-and-learning) is a good place to start, as well as the work of Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire and James P. Gee. There is an ever-growing number of educators and academics making a case for educational use of video
games, and one can only ignore these voices at the peril of one’s professional integrity.

I wish you the best of luck with your director! If she has any concerns or objections, she would be more than welcome to contact us at Nordahl Grieg High School and hear about our approach. Our principal and other administrators highly encourage us in our work with video games and learning, and would give the same encouragement to all who are interested.

I'm a teacher who uses gamification methods in my EFL classes (with 1st-5th graders). I love the approach, but I am stopped short of using actual video games in any way by the director of my program. Even though we have the technology to run some types of games (a fairly fast computer and smartboard in each classroom), she absolutely refuses to allow us to use any games which are not strictly "educational" (ie the incredibly boring Cambridge textbook-based software). I'm not even allowed to encourage the kids to play English-language video games at home because she hates games and thinks it "inappropriate" for us to encourage kids to play them at all. What would be most useful for me would be strategies to better communicate the advantages of using games in the classroom with authority figures who dislike them and overcome the outdated prejudice against games which is still a major problem in most schools with older administrative staff.