Post-Presentations Pondering

Whew! With the Article Group Presentations now behind us, I suppose its time to reflect on all the cool stuff I learned about from each group over the past few class sessions. Each of the groups brought something new to the table and I enjoyed listening and participating during their presentations.

I think it was the Fairy Tale group (can’t fully remember) that introduced the class to the Pinterest app. I had heard about the app before but had never tried it myself. After spending about 10 minutes navigating around the app to acquaint myself, I quickly became engrossed. Pinterest is an awesome app for illustrating and sharing one’s identity, and I definitely want to spend more time with it once the semester is over.

The Hip Hop and Literacy group showed how raps can be educational through the DNA song about the double helix with Watson, Crick, and Rosalind Franklin. The students in the videos were quite creative in conveying a story and important information through their raps. As a future educator, I want to try integrating music into my curriculum, be it hip hop or another genre. This group also warned us to not assume what music the students like and to leave such assignments open ended, which makes a lot of sense.

The Adolescents and Literacy group’s poll was interesting and I liked how we discussed the results as a class and why we chose what we did based on gender, interests, and other factors. Social media is a huge part of any teenager’s life, and it dictates how we judge pictures and people.

My own group, Gaming and Literacy, had the class play a variety of games to try to show them that video games, and games as a whole, are not a waste of time and have meaningful applications to education.

The Make/Hack/Play group might have been the best, in my opinion. I wish we had more time so we could have experienced all the other ‘makes’ being created at different stations. My group made Robo-Claws with tape, cardstock, scissors, plastic straws, and string. I failed miserably on my first attempt but didn’t give up, and my second try was not perfect either, although it was better than my initial try. My takeaways from this presentation is that failure should be built into the curriculum for some lessons to teach students to be resilient, not give up when they fail, to work around issues, and communicate with each other.