Lesson plans incorporating video games? Absurd! Or is it?

Maybe when I first started this class I would have thought it absurd to apply the literacy practices found in video games to a classroom setting, but not anymore!

“Our environment molds us into the people that we are today.”

I posted this in an earlier blog. It was a quick reflection on something that we had read in class previously. Do I still think this to be true? I think it holds a lot of truth, but I think that we are free to shape ourselves in more than one environment. Yeah, every environment that we are in could be considered “our environment.” Why shouldn’t it? Well, people like to think of our environment as strictly home and school when we are growing up. That’s just not true. Within each of those environments there are smaller environments that we can identify as things that mold us. Not just school, but classrooms, friend groups, lunch lines, things we hear in other people’s conversations, etc. Not just home, but all the things we do at home, the people we see, the trips we go on, etc. Also, sometimes these little environments mesh with the other big environments. Sometimes school will go home and then we have homework. Occasionally this can be difficult, but we don’t have to let it stress us out. Let our environments do their thing and we can live in a stress free world.

Literacy is a social practice; it has to be. How can we live in a world and be completely illiterate? Can we really even describe anyone as illiterate?

Illiterate: 

1 having little or no education; especially :  unable to read or write <an illiterate population>

2 a:  showing or marked by a lack of familiarity with language and literature<an illiterate magazine>

b:  violating approved patterns of speaking or writing

3:  showing or marked by a lack of acquaintance with the fundamentals of a particular field of knowledge <musically illiterate>

My attitudes towards literacy are definitely a lot more positive now. English is here and it’s ready to stay!

The world is our personal playground. How do we make it our own? Do we just slide into success, or do we have to climb the ladder to get there?

We climb the ladder to success, but we realize that we are still successful even when we slide down. There are more obstacles ahead of us to plow through.

Group work, like I said in my last post, can be an amazing learning experience! The work we did in English 332 was very interesting and different. We did a few different activities. We created our own fairytale spinoff story, created a rap, played video games, and made creative objects like robot fingers. How in the world could all of these things be in the same class and relate to the same type of learning?

We are learning about literacy. There are many different forms of literacy in this world. As society is concerned, literacy seems to only be about reading and writing and stuffing your nose in a book.

Literacy is much, much more than that! We use literacy every day. Literacy was shown through each of the group presentations in different ways. We can combine the fairytale spinoff and rap into the same type of category.

For these presentations (fairytale and rap), we were using written/spoken literacy. These were incredibly beneficial to the class because, rather than conforming to societal standards of literacy, they pushed the boundaries and showed that literacy is ever expanding and can be applied to our daily lives in the modern world.

Fairytales are old and outdated, yet we still consider them classics. What happened when we did a spinoff of either Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood? Well my group, for one, did a spinoff of Little Red. This is what our group came up with.

• Little Red off to Grandma’s and finds a lost wolf pup
• Takes it to Grandma, she warns Red of the dangers and responsibility of raising wild animals
• Raises wolf to be a hunting dog
• Years later go on hunting trip and they encounter feral wolf and in self defense kill it
• Wolf pup realizes the dead wolf was it’s mom
• Wolf pup attempts Red’s murder but Grandma swoops in and saves the day at the last second

As you can tell, it is miles away from the original story, but it still has some of the same intrinsic issues and characters. One other group had an interesting spinoff of Cinderella where she, was now a he. There were a lot of new and inventive ideas. It really pushed for creativity with all the groups.

There was also a group who showed us how rap can be for learning purposes. Each group came up with a few lines about literacy that had to do with their group’s topic. It was inventive, creative, and a genuinely fun activity! Listening to people try and rap was definitely an extra treat for the day.

There were two other groups, the gamers and the builders.

The builder group had multiple stations. There was a group building these PVC flyers that would spin when you pulled the string, the balloon racing group, the cell phone vibrating mechanism group, the kaleidoscope group, and last, but certainly not least, the robot fingers group.

I was a part of the group making robot fingers. We had to figure out, through looking at the instructions and having a little verbal instruction, how to make the straws bend correctly with the string and attempt robot fingers. It was a very exciting adventure for our group, and for myself! This is to give you a visual of the robot fingers.

Last was our group, the gamers. We let everyone play a variety of board games, computer games, and one group even created their own game. We had them figure out various principles from games. For us, the learning principles presented by James Paul Gee proved to be incredibly helpful and relevant.

• Clue: Probing Principle–>Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis

• Life: Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment

We found all of these to be useful and helpful. Our favorite to watch was the group creating their own game. They were inventive and excited to learn.

Every group was fun, exciting, and helpful for understanding various literacy practices!

Sometimes you go until you break down.

Sometimes this feels like you’re taking the right path until it is much too late.

Sometimes group work can feel like you want to destroy every other individual leaving only yourself to do the work because that’s what was happening anyways.

Sometimes though, sometimes we get lucky. At some point, people discover that group work isn’t all that bad. All it takes is for the entire group to take the projects seriously and to contribute reasonably equally.

How do you make group work enjoyable?

1. Learn the names of your group members.

It might not seem that important in college, but these people could be your lifelong friends! Even if they don’t become something near and dear to your heart, people would usually rather work with people who bothered to at least learn the tiniest (yet incredibly important) detail about them. You’ll have a better work environment for all of you and people might be a little more enthusiastic about giving their input.

2. Bring snacks.

What person doesn’t respond well to snacks? Of course people have allergies and things, but people love free food! Be mindful of health concerns. For example, you might not want to choose something that has to do with peanuts because there are quite a few people with peanut allergies and those get pretty serious. Have a cereal party! You can’t go wrong with a couple bowls of delicious cereal. Or you can opt for some fruit and vegetables

3. Make it fun!

Who said group work had to be boring? You already learned people’s names (or at least tried) and you brought snacks, that sounds like the start of a fun time! When you have a long period of time where you’re working in a group, you need to take breaks every now and then. Use those breaks to have a good time! You should try and laugh and enjoy yourself, because chances are that everyone else is kind of uncomfortable and bored as well. Take away those negative feelings with laughter and games. If you really don’t know what to do, go on youtube and watch some funny cat videos. Guaranteed to make anyone smile.

If you’re not having a better time with your group by now, well, I’ve done all I can do to help you. Enjoy your group work, bond with them a little, and branch out! Get out of your comfort zone. Work together and have a good time. Apply this to your life now, and the rest of your life will prove to be easier. Peace!

“…there is a common concern about the popular culture of the day from sensationalist newspapers

in the 1880s to movies in the 1930s, television in the 1970s, and video games and text messaging today.”

-Bronwyn T. Williams

No matter what generation it is, there will always be complaints about the youngest generation. Whether these complaints be about newspaper articles, movies, risque television, or the video games and texting of the modern age, people will always find something that they feel the need to complain about. When we look back on previous generations, we see that they must have had it all figured out. We look at them and completely disregard the problems they had with their youth. Why are their problems seemingly nonexistent while our problems must be the worst thing to hit planet earth? These problems are right in our faces! We can’t go back in time to compare to how previous generations felt about things, but we can take a better look at our generation and focus on the good things about it rather than what we think is terrible.

Why do video games have to be such a terrible thing? Why are text messages destroying our youth? The honest answer here is that video games aren’t bad for our children. No, I wouldn’t recommend you let your 6 year old who just beat a Winnie the Pooh game to start playing Grand Theft Auto. You need to be smart about your decisions. What makes texting so bad? Are kids really writing how they text in their academic writing? For some reason, adults tend to think that texting is just going to destroy everything that is good and sacred about writing. Why would it? Children don’t use “lol” and “lmao” in their papers. They are aware of where these literacy behaviors are appropriate and where they would be detrimental. If anything, texting is improving the newest generations critical thinking skills!

We seem to think that there is only one clear-cut way to learn. What is it, you ask? Well it is terribly boring and it will leave you never wanting to learn another thing in your life, that’s for sure! Teachers, politicians, and any leader-figures all seem to push that learning has to be structured the same way for every child in the same environment. That seems brilliant, right? Every child is the same, right? I’m the same person as the reader of this blog, right? Wrong! We are all different so naturally we would all learn differently as well. There is no reason that school shouldn’t have a structure to build off of, but when we say that it needs to be structured exactly the same for every child is just ridiculous. We can’t learn that way! Some kids are going to feel like things are way too difficult and other children are going to skate by in school and not learn a thing. Children need to be challenged and they need to feel that the effort they put in is going to be worth it in the end.

We have multiple (and often unlimited) lives in video games. If we get to hit the redo button to try and do something better because we want to, not because someone is forcing us to, why would that seem like a bad thing to apply in school? Sure, people need to learn from their mistakes, but I think that what we really need to do is evaluate what we have going on in the teaching world, and try and adapt it to the modern generation. We need to challenge these children and make sure that when they put in effort, the reward is correlated to that and they get a proper reward because of it. If you put in effort and all you do is fail, that isn’t going to make you want to continue, is it? So we need to figure out ways to push people to their limits and challenge them! Let us redefine what literacy is and apply it to everyone!