This book really open my eyes about education, games and learning. We as a human race have been playing games since the beginning of time. Games are a way to collaborate with others, talk about ideas and strategy as well as have fun. Growing up in the 90's it was kind of a weird time for games and technology. Gaming was starting to be more popular the internet had just been invented and it was a new frontier for learning and technology. In school we didn't really play games it was more of a solo education where you didn't really learn from your peers. You did your own work, you were to be quiet and it really wasn't a community of learning. I didn't really have a community learning until college where we would have class discussions about specific topics. This was odd to me because I had not been accustomed to this. A lot of people dislike common core in my area we see signs in peoples front yard to stop common core. I really like the communication students have with common core it allows them to help each other and to build ideas. I have been back to work teaching for two weeks. I wanted to implement this gaming ideas with my students right away. I gave them a choice on different games they could work as a team and they chose building. I had the students move into 3 groups and they had over 100 blocks. The goal was to build the strongest structure. They were working as a team, learning different ways to build and using their skills to put this task into practice. They really enjoyed this activity. The end result was to test their structure by putting book on top of the structures to see how much weight it would hold. The task was a success that would have been frowned upon in years past. What did we learn: The students worked as a team, they used critical thinking skills, they had to take ideas from their peers to make their design better, they had to test their results. I learned all of these ideas from the book. Games really do change our ideas about learning and makes learning more enjoyable. We have grown so much in the last twenty years learning from games. It's very exciting on what the future holds.
After reading the book Show Your Work it inspired me to show my students work in not only creating a weebly, but Instagram as well. I realized that more ideas come from sharing my students work with the rest of the world. Taking this course really helped me in changing my teaching ways. Not only am I looking for ways to use technology, but I can use technology for every single subject. On Diigo an article caught my eye called 10 Surprising ways to use Instagram. There were many great suggestions, but the one that I liked the most was the number 1 answer. “Showcase students work” the students are the stars of the class room we are just the producers. Another article that I enjoyed reading was How to manage an Instagram contest. All of my students have access to Instagram. I thought it was a great idea to create creativity not only in their work, but in their lives. It gave me an idea to have a class room contest with prizes for the top 3 best Instagram accounts. Criteria would be amount of follower, how frequent it is used and the content of the account. Our administrators can judge each Instagram. The winners will receive prizes for their efforts. These were great articles that opened up my mind and allowed me to think outside the box in my class room for the upcoming school year.
Beltran, C. (2013, June 7). 5 Simple Steps to Running an Instagram Contest. Hudson, Hannah. "10 Surprising Ways to Use Instagram in the Class Room." I really have been enjoying this book so far. I really like how Jane really believes that video games can help the world. I am actually starting to believe her which is a great thing. She talks about how real world and gaming are different in terms of desire. There is a game called "chores" where the player does actual chores online like making your bed and doing dishes. She states that her husband plays this game, but will not do chores in real life. "If we are forced to do something, or if we halfheartedly, we're not really participating. If we don't care how it all turns out, we're not really participating. If we're passively waiting it out, we're not really participating"(124). This made me really think about me education growing up. When I was in school as a child I didn't go to school for the right reasons. I went so my parents wouldn't be mad at me and I went to get a good job some day. I would study the information that I was supposed to do, but I never retained the information after the test. If you asked me what I learned in 8th grade I could not tell you. I was only going through the motions and I was not being a thinker. I love this new era of educators where they are teaching kids how to think outside the box and are not forcing them to just memorize facts, but learn skills. In my era there was only one way to do things and that was it.
After listening to The Danger of a Single Story it made me think in a lot of different ways. It kind of through me off guard about stereotypical behavior. It made me think a lot about my grandparents who I considered “narrow minded” they were just like the people Chimmanda Adichie described when they she was staying in America. They already felt bad for just because they believed the things they heard on the media or what they think she should have acted like. I am thankful that things are changing in terms of people not being so narrow minded and judgemental. I believe we are the first era of humans that actually care about the person rather then the preconceived idea of their personality. Our world is not perfect, but I believe we have came along way in the last twenty years. The most powerful statement in my opinion of the whole story was that, “If you give someone only one story that is what they become.” This is so true. Kids are influenced by so many different things in the world from family, friends, media that you only have a short time to tell them about what life really is until they corrupted from the world around them. I have students whose parents are either gang members or drug addicts. I have a duty to tell them that this not reality and I can give them hope for a better world they have not even seen yet. Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story. Perf. Chimamanda Adichie. Youtube.com. N.p., 21 Aug. 2001. Web. 21 Aug. 2015. I have really changed my opinion of learning since reading this book. It really made me think differently on our approach of learning. I believe our focus on learning has changed over 100 years. When school first began education was only for people who could afford because most people had work just to make ends meet. We shifted in desire when we mandated school in America. Students are held to the same standard to students who actually want to be at school who have the desire. “We need to be open minded and critical about what actually raises our quality of life.”(144). This is what school was supposed to be about. Improving quality of life. It has turned into a forced thing. I see why our country does that, but there has to be a grey area we are too much black or white. We have this goal for 100% college when not everyone was meant to go to college. What if a student likes to build with their hands or fix cars it seems like these type of interests are considered “not the norm” or looked down upon. The new age thinking allows students to have interests in what every they like and not what society says to like.
I have always enjoyed playing video games since I was a child. I consider my generation as the first generation to always have video games. I first started playing video games when I was 3 years old. I played Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo. I was really good at this game at a young age. I was that generation that upgraded video games systems every few years when "something new" came out. My friends and I would spend hours playing Zelda and trying to figure out the right paths to beat the game. I didn't realize we were actually learning, working together as a team and problem solving all in one. My mom would always get mad and tell us to go play outside and she would say that we were "wasting time." This is why I chose to read the book Reality is Broken Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can Change the World. This book gave me validity on what I was doing as a child. "In the United States there are 183 million active gamers."(4). Video games have become the norm for all ages now a days instead of just for children. My 80 year old grandma plays candy crush on her Iphone. This is the world we live in. Videos games are not going away. It is only going to get bigger and bigger. Jane Mcgonigal is a video game programmer that uses games to bring people together to solve problems. She believes that gamers are excellent at problem solving and working together as a team. She also mentions that we have not even scratched the surface on video game innovation and the future is going to be filled with even more gamers. I am very excited for the future that video games will bring to our culture.
Mcgonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Group, 2011. |
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