Blog 8: Learn by Playing

Great job for gaming group and hip-hop group~~ It was great pleasure!

Gaming workshop involved different types of gaming and materials, and the structure of the game was to push people collaborate and work as a group. I hadn’t gone through all the small groups, but I noticed the designing the small group activity involved different learning strategies, visual, listening, written, and the competition pushes participants pay more attention on the activity. Hip-hop workshop took advantage of the information we learned from 21^st century literacy workshop, which is also very good. Even though there are similarities between lyric and poem, I have to say they are two genres for me. When we tried to create our new lyrics for hip-hop, we were actually doing creativity composing when applying what we have noticed about lyrics. It is a brand new experience.

The most impressive notice from these two workshops is that we were so engaged in the activities and had great fun. The workshops are showing the application of the theories in real life or a situation close to “real life”. We are not doing a lecture, but playing with the ideas and trying to make them become real. These workshops make me think about the video “Digital Media-new Learners Of The 21^st Century” (http://video.pbs.org/video/1797357384/). In the video, there are a couple of examples that students can do a great job in the environment providing them enough criteria, like photography, movie, game design, etc. By doing these things that students are interested in, they have learned more about technology, learning, knowledge they have learned, collaboration, socializing, etc.

As a future teacher, I think these ideas and projects can be used for projects in class, like website design to show a portfolio or the research process on certain area, a song to show personal story, multimodal project to show a presentation, etc. I believe when students realize there are more methods than they thought to help convey themselves, they would like to learn more and learn by themselves, and this could be a circulation that is beneficial for them.