Blog 9 Article Groups

I’ll admit I was a little skeptical of what Tomb Raider had to offer in a classroom setting when I first sat down. However, George gave brilliant connections as to how the beginning walkthroughs of games where the user passes obstacles through a process of trial and error with only a little prompting to classwork. In my education experience, typically assignments given included detailed rubrics, steps and my teachers held our hands most of the way through it until we get to the end where we were left to complete the scariest part all alone. Yet when I was given more flexibility in projects and less structured processes to finish it, through collaboration with peers and problem solving I got much more out of the assignment.

I found the games that took potential real life scenarios and made them a series of problems to solve to be the most interesting. I feel that I would be more likely to use these types in a classroom since they are so relatable to real life issues, necessitate creative problem solving and require working with others. Plus, they just sound fun.

The gaming group also pointed out how successful games are in the classroom since so many students can relate to games. I suppose this caught my attention because 21st century students are gamers which relates to my own article group.

I am part of the 21st Century Literacies Article Group and have learned that this topic is much larger than I anticipated and therefore much more difficult to condense. It is so important that teachers educate students on these new literacies and even prepare them for using tools that are not even in existence yet. 21st Century Literacies are not going away and are fast becoming necessary tools people need in the real world outside of the classroom. But we already knew this, we are a part of the tech-savvy generation so the issue for most of us is incorporating new technologies into our future classrooms.

I focused on the digital storytelling aspect of 21st century literacy because I found it everywhere was I understood what it was. I would recommend anyone in the class interested in using digital storytelling in their future classroom to got to http://edtechteacher.org/index.php/teaching-technology/presentation-multimedia/digital-storytelling for ideas.

There are plenty of Ted Talks on youtube about the 21st Century teacher and what they need to do. I watched many of them (none particularly stood out) and a message often repeated was that as teachers we need to also learn from the students. Educators are not always the specialist in the room anymore and involving students in our development as teachers is critical if we wish to continue teaching relevant information to students.