Category Archives: Participants

Using Popular Texts in the Classroom

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Emily Skinner’s text explores using popular magazines and movies as ‘mentor texts’ through which students could practice numerous skills.  Skinner explains that students can be encouraged to critically consume popular texts and to use these texts to examine various social issues and aspects of there personal lives on a deeper level.  Using popular texts not only can easily motivate normally reluctant students but can also allow students to enjoy learning something which I believe has been lost in many school systems.  The ability to instill genuine intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn and improve can be accomplished in several ways, one of these ways being through using popular texts and images in the classroom.  Basing writing exercises on popular materials encourages critical examination both of texts and of the writing and planning process in general.  Although the use of these texts in the classroom would seem to be a wholly positive experience for students, their use would definitely need to be carefully monitored in order to keep students on task.

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Katie Wood Ray’s article, “Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop,” gave insight into a pedagogy that seeks to construct knowledge alongside students. As she demonstrated, this is the ideal way to teach writing as a craft—as grounded as any practice, with concrete materials—rather than as a formula. Even more remarkable is that, by examining the mechanics of more established writers and writing alongside them, I think that students might see themselves as a part of a community of writers. Often, creativity gets mixed up with the need to be “unique,” but this mentality can often be an intimidating hindrance and an obstacle to learning. At a time when writing is so important, yet so archaically taught, I found this stance to be a useful guide.

Using the online audience to motivate students

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In “Unleashing Potential with Emerging Technologies,” Sara Kajder recounts her experience of creating a reader’s guide wikibook with her 11th grade English students. Upon realizing that the book The Stranger had an infamous reputation among her students, Sara decided to challenge her class to create their own guide to understanding the book. As a class, they compiled and posted pictures, charts, summaries, explanatory notes, and character lists alongside an online copy of the book. Not only did the 11th graders enjoy the fast-paced yet casual nature of wikibook, but they were also very motivated by the knowledge that others outside of their class were frequently viewing their work. Kajder noticed a remarkable upsurge in participation and online activity after she told her class about an English class is Seattle that was using the site to aid their own reading of The Stranger. “Within three days,” she writes, “content was explodingon the site. Students had added videos that offered enactments of scenes. Some were podcasting their literature group discussions. Others were linking to every bit of relevant content that they could find.” (223) Students were motivated by the knowledge that other people were following and appreciating their work. This seemed to give the project added value, as if the wikibook was a community service rather than a regular class project. I think this observation speaks to the effects of responsibility. When students realize that their work is helping others, it suddenly becomes more important. They invest time and energy into their work in order to make the project as legitimate as possible. Online technology is an easy and effective way for teachers to provide an audience for students. Perhaps giving students an audience that depends upon and benefits from the students’ work is one strategy for instigating motivation in classroom activities and projects.

Emily and Fiona: Movie

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Many thanks to Amanda and Izzy for lending their fabulous acting skills to our movie trailer project. We were able to finish our filming today, so we are right on schedule. We have chosen to create our movie trailer using iMovie, which has been both fun and frustrating. Neither Fiona nor I have a lot of experience using iMovie, so we’re learning as we go. The process of movie editing certainly requires a lot of patience! Next week we aim to finish splicing the clips and then add some cool special effects, mysterious music, and final touches.

Moral Quandaries

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Today Luis interviewed people in the class and asked them to answer one of the moral dilemmas he wrote last week. We recorded their reactions and responses in Audacity. We got 13 people to answer! Next time we will record Luis’s voice as the narrator of the radio podcast and we can start putting all the sound clips in the right order.

If we interviewed you, thanks for answering our questions!

Kate and Sam’s Update!

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We have finally uploaded and labeled all of Sam’s footage for the movie. We then ordered the clips to create a meaningful and coherent story of her day. After a lot of discussion of the clip placement, Sam chose different songs to pair with each clip or group of clips that add more emotion to the footage. We have already discussed certain editing techniques and transitions that we want to use and we are really excited to start putting it all together on Final Cut Pro next week! Wahoo! 🙂

Video Games, Education, and Playing Portal

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The Gee article was very interesting to me because it presented ideas that seemed like they should be obvious through an unexpected, but very relatable, template. Normally, most people don’t connect video games and education. Video games are more likely to be viewed as a hinderance to education than a model. Students sitting in front a screen day after day, not doing work, frustrates and concerns many. However, it also proves the point that, to a lot of people, video games are driving, even addictive. Since most teachers would probably love it if students found their classes driving and addictive, why not examine the principles that make video games this way?

What I find interesting is that these principles–interactiveness, understanding, customization, and so on–seem so basic, so self-explanatory. Of course we should be making lessons with these considerations. Reading them, I think back to one of the first things I read for an education class, an essay in which Freire condemns the “Banking System” in schools. Gee points out that video games–where the user is actively participating and making decisions, not just taking in the directions and information the game has to offer. I’m not making an argument that everything in schools should become virtual, by any means. I just think that he makes a very good point about what we could take from the way games are designed. I remember in elementary school and middle school, we did these sort of historical role-play units where we’d have to go down the Oregon Trail or come on a ship to Plymouth or something. I don’t think we really learned a lot with these because most of the game actions were based on luck (a die roll, for instance), and most of the “assignments” involved drawing pictures, but the idea behind them, of a game acted out in real life, was good, and we all loved them. If they could be redesigned to actually feel relative to students and teach important concepts, I think they’d be a really interesting tool and embody the ideas Gee proposes.

To fulfill this week’s assignment of playing a video game or doing an interview, I tried playing the game Portal at a friend’s house. Now, video games are a little out of my realm. I loved computer games as a kid, but only the ones that let me creatively design and customize thing–I liked kid pix, and I liked all the “tycoon” games, where you would design and run a zoo, or an amusement park, or something. I didn’t really care about Sims once the virtual people came to life, but I loved choosing their appearance and designing dream houses for them to live in. I think this makes sense, because I always liked creative projects, and the games let me pursue them on a much larger scale than I could in reality, since my mother had no desire to fulfill my dream of painting every wall a different color. So, I wasn’t really expecting to like Portal. But it was actually really interesting. The game is essentially a series of puzzle that you must get through by blasting portals–one to enter, one to exit–into the walls. You go into it knowing nothing, and must retain knowledge about what has worked in the past, and well as basic principles of gravity and physics. The levels become progressively harder–I got through about half of them before deciding it was time to stop replaying a dead-end and do other work. Another interesting component of the game is that throughout it, a female voice on an intercom is giving you false instructions and trying to discourage you, only to praise you when you solve the puzzles anyway. Before you begin, she will say the the puzzle has been proven impossible, they are sorry, and you should give up now. Then, if you succeed, she says that the previous statement was a lie, and well done. I don’t think this is something we should bring into the classroom. However, I do think it is interesting in that it shows how much people want to prove themselves. When confronted with a supposedly impossible task, we want to solve it. So, the idea could be toned down for the classroom–students should not be told they will fail, but they should be given interesting tasks and challenged to find ways to complete them.

Overall, I think this article really made me look at video games in a new way–it helped me see them not just as distractions or stress-busters, but  as successful learning devices. If we can bring the same inventiveness, involvement, and forward momentum to classroom lessons, we could surely achieve our own version of that success.

Beating the Game

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I loved Gee’s article on video games and learning. I hadn’t realized that every new game has to teach you how to play it through the experience of playing the game. I’ve played many video games in my life, and whether or not I enjoyed the game and continued to play it often was a result of the quality of each game’s early tutorials. When they feel too cumbersome and don’t feel situated in a meaningful context, I (and others, I imagine) give up before even making it to the actual gameplay.

While I appreciate the connections Gee makes, I also think he may be overstating the connection between video game learning and academic/intellectual learning. Many of his examples have to do with strategies and decision making. Questions like, “should I make my character a wizard or an orc?” or, “Which troops should I advance, and where?” are complex decisions that have a lasting impact on the game-life of whoever is playing. Video games that teach you how to make these decisions effectively teach broader skills of decision making and  make people aware of the fact that their decisions will have lasting impacts while teaching them how to identify the structures that dictate their decision’s lasting effects. Many of the skills taught in video games, though, are simple motor skills. In my experience, much of the learning that happens in games has to do with wanting your character to do a certain physical action, and figuring out how to manipulate the subtle mechanisms of the controller to consistently produce that motion. Currently, I mostly play sports video games. These have no story lines and are exclusively about fine motor skills. These motor skills form the foundation of almost all games, including story based ones. Games that involve role playing and strategy combine motor skills with character, emotion, and story.

I think this is where the the learning potential of video games is strongest. Humans love having a feeling of agency. We like to see our thoughts and decisions affect the world around us. The physical manipulation part of every video game satisfies this. It gets us hooked. Then, as we work our way through the physical worlds of games, we learn skills,  practice making decisions, and get experience decoding complex systems of information. If we want students to do these same things in the classroom, it all starts with a feeling of agency, the feeling that connects us to the world around us. When students’ actions in the classroom affect the environment of the classroom, they cease to be an isolated individual temporarily placed in the classroom and become a citizen of the classroom.

A good game makes us feel like we’re immersed in the world of the game. When the user/game interface is too salient, we feel separated from the game and thus it is harder to invest in the game. The classroom should reflect this, allowing kids to take on the identity of “student” and immerse themselves in “the game”.

What happens, though, at the end of any story based video game? You beat it. All of the learning that happens in a video game has an end goal of beating the game. What does it mean to beat the school game? If we view the end goal of school as graduation, then the skills we teach in school will reflect that. Then we run the risk of making school too much of a game (something I think many of us can sympathize with regarding our high school experiences), and the incentive of winning may supersede the kind of learning we want to foster. No matter how we structure our “tutorial” at the beginning of the “school game”, no matter what skills we promote as the most desirable and useful, students ultimately want to beat the game, and will adopt whatever strategies are easiest and most successful. In the world of video games, that means cheat codes, but what does that mean in the classroom?

Is Gee an Advocate of Tracking?

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I agree with all the reasons Gee puts forth about how video games and the concepts used to play them are excellent strategies that should be used as teaching methods in the classroom. However, I was struck by the section titled “Pleasantly Frustrating” It is unclear to me what this idea would look like in the classroom. Gee explains, “Learners should be able to adjust the difficulty level while being encouraged to stay at the outer edge of, but inside, their level of competence,” (10). Would this involve some sort of mobile tracking system within the classroom? If so, I feel that this would be discouraging to many students who realize that they are not at the same level as others in the class. Even if the tracking system leaves room for mobility, not all students will necessarily be able to move up. Those who stay in the same group and see their peers move up will eventually feel discouraged. I do like the idea of constant feedback from the teacher, which would give students encouragement in their improvement process, but would the initial idea of being tracked discourage them enough to stop trying? My little brother loves video games and I often saw him get so frustrated with games that he gave up altogether.

Rather than tracking reading and writing groups, I think the better route is to have diversified peer groups, just as Nancy Frey and DOuglas Fisher depicted in their article. By including students of all different reading and writing levels in smaller peer groups, everyone is comfortable speaking and students will be able to learn from each other. Those who have difficulty understanding might feel more comfortable talking it out with other students. Also, hearing classmates explain concepts and ideas may resonate more with struggling students. In addition, those who are at a higher level benefit from helping classmates through reinforcement by teaching these ideas to others.

I am just curious what other people thought about this section and how you think Gee would implement this in a classroom.