But games and game design areone promising approach, making use of a cultural form that is wildlypopular and wildly varied, both incredibly ancient and strikingly con-temporary. And intrinsically playful as well
It's so important to recognize how quickly the teaching field changes. Nothing stay the same very long, or nothing effective anyways. It's just as important for teachers to learn and grow alongside their students as they learn new and better ways to teach.
As an exploration of process, as the rigorous creation of meaning, andas a uniquely interdisciplinary endeavor, game design represents multi-modal forms of learning that educators and literacy theorists have beentalking about for years
As teachers, it's so important for us to acknowledge the impact that a lesson can have on a student when it teaches multiple things. It's like we always talk about in Language Arts, you can't teach a student how to write a paragraph without also teaching the prompt. Interdisciplinary ideas are everywhere and often more impactful, which could be part of why games are so impactful.
Games are, in fact, essentially systemic. Every gamehas a mathematical substratum, a set of rules that lies under its surface
I find this statement very interesting because even in my short time teaching I have noticed that my students tend to really respect and gravitate toward healthy structure in the classroom. I wonder if part of the reason that games are so popular is because they provide that structure that then allows for fun to develop in a safe way.
Knowledge is not (just) the stuff that ends up in our minds. It is what we do and make. Learning is a consequence of a series of knowledge actions, using multimodal media to externalize our thinking. We rely on the cognitive prostheses of writing, computers, diagrams, image and sound recordings, and the like. Learning consists of ways of acting in and with these media. By these means, our ways of think-ing develop. Learning for this reason is also very social, as we rely on the artifacts of collective memory, and work with others in the essentially col-laborative task of knowledge making.
This last paragraph really struck me. Always, as an educator, I hear the question "Why do we have to do this? When will we ever use this?" and it always makes me think about how I should answer it. Yes, it's important to know these things, but more than that, it's important what learning does for us. Learning should be productive and creative, it should extend beyond ourselves and be social. It's about more than just knowledge, it's about knowledge making.
Besides, it was becoming obvious that traditional literacy peda-gogy was not working to achieve its stated goal of providing social oppor-tunity.
Social opportunity was the original goal of literacy. It aimed to provide a level playing field where everyone could understand each other by conforming to a single idea of what communication looks like. Instead, literacy should aim to level the playing field by exposing everyone to each others' methods of communication in celebration of our differences.
Literacy’ in this sense means some quite definite things to be acquired: to read the ordinary texts of modern society— newspapers, information books, novels; to be able to write using correct spelling and grammar; and to appreciate high- cultural values through exposure to a taste of the literary canon.
Yes, it makes sense that literacy would refer to the ability to read "ordinary texts" but what is an ordinary text? What if my ordinary texts are different from the person next to me? Does the literary canon account for culture as much as it should?
Now, more than ever, the affordances of new digital tools and technologies have opened up our understanding of what it means to write.
I love this! I feel like a lot of the time teachers fear what it means to use technology, especially for writing tasks, but it can be a positive thing!
Understand concepts of digital citizenship and issues related to technology.
I would be very curious to learn strategies for keeping students on task while using technology, sometimes it feels like pulling teeth!
Articulate an expanding view of what literacy is in the 21st century.
As a Literacy teacher and a teacher who uses technology on a daily basis, I'm very excited to see how this pans out.
the changing landscape of 21st century reading instruction.
This is such an important concept in teaching. Even in the short time since I have been working at my school I have seen incredible changes to the way we use technology. If you aren't willing to try new things, you get left behind fast. Even in the time from when I graduated high school to the time I started teaching, things were so different there were times I felt like an alien. It's incredible to see the ways technology is used now.