Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Jane McGonigal is talking about how we can connect real life to games.

in this video, Jane McGonigal describes that gaming is used everyday and online gaming is becoming more and more important. She also says how online gamers spend about 8 billion hours weekly just playing online games. Also how she is trying to change it from just having fun but to solve real life problems.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

In Yasmin Kafai's article Playing and Making Games for Learning, Kafai claims that if one individual were to write a history on the development of child education, they would be forced to include the impact video games have made on child learning. Kafai writes that teachers have picked up on the fact that video games capture children's attention and have tried to use this to their advantage by incorporating video games into their teaching style. There are many ways to incorporate video games into the classroom, but Kafai generalizes that there are two main categories of thought when it comes to teachers integrating video games into the curriculum: instructionalists and constructionalists.

This chapter was about a topic that I have actually thought about which is being able to tell the "good guy" apart from the "bag guy" and what makes them that way. The fact that there are video games in which you can choose to play as the bad or good character in the story changes the way you play it and how you are perceived, Also as you choose which character to play, in the game alone even if you are the bad guy you are still the good character. In the real world people make out the world to seem black and white, your either the good guy or the bad guy. Who determines what is to be considered bad and good and just because a person makes a bad choice does not make them a bad person. The world is filled with millions of examples of cultural models and rule they way people think and perceive different things making a model of what we should all consider to be good and if we do something otherwise then it is the wrong (or bad) thing to do. Video games can teach the player that there is more meaning to to being the bad or good character and that a gray area exists.

In the book, In Mind in Society, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist in the beginning of the 20th century, talks about the role of play in child development.

Examples of educational efforts thinking about the idea of play

In this video, Jane McGonigal talks about how individuals (online gamers) can make a better world. She mentioned that individuals play online games because it makes them happier and give them a feeling of working hard. Gamers do not give up when they fail and they tend to have a more strong social relationship than in real life. McGonigal said that gamers are human resource that we can use to do real world work. Instead of playing games and trying to save the virtual world, she had created online games intended to help gamers play and think critically about how to survive

It talks how an individual could use gaming as a source to improve daily life. Improving daily life as in improving hunger, poverty, and obesity.

Sara Corbett's New York Times article Learning by Playing, focuses on a New York City non-charter public school that uses an educational program called Quest to Learn. The school uses video games to help teach kids and sometimes the kids make video games. Quest to Learn was created by a game designer named Katie Salen with the intention of making schools more appealing and relevant to kids today. Classes often combine multiple subjects into quests, "where the quests blend skills from different subject areas" (Corbett). Teachers do not do as much instruction as they do guidance. The article talks about how most kids who drop out of high school simply found it too boring. Schools today do not permit the use of cell phones and internet use is only allowed to do school related work, which cuts students off from the world. According to Katie Salen, "there's been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it happens in the confines of a building" (Corbett). Kids today do so much more interesting things outside of school.

In the online article "Playing Music can be good for your brain/Stanford study finds it helps the understanding of language", by Sturrock it goes over research done by Stanford. In their study they had two groups of adults, musicians and non-musicians. They found that musical experience helps "the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language."

In the article; "Digital Literacies" a 12th grade project about digital literacy is described. Elizabeth Boeser decided to develop an online role-play scenario for her students. The role-play was centered on the sites that were blocked by the school. Students made online avatars and discussed the pros and cons of blocking certain sites from students. Posts were being discussed after and before school and showed that the use of Ning (the website) showed students a positive way to use the Internet for school. It allowed for instant sharing of ideas. The author then goes into the importance of online identity where students can work with students by replicating, adding, and engaging in information. The four important digital literacy's are also mentioned; multimodality, connectivity, hyper linking, and collaboration.

This article shows us what this new thing "race to the top" is all about. In this article you will read about how much money the government is putting into this program for "incentive" to help schools be reformed and gain better test scores. It is a great article to read to get you started on knowing what is race to the top, but it makes you also question, why are we spending all this money just to make test scores higher? is the problem deeper than this? This is what i will be looking more into and hopefully getting some answer to post of here relating to this topic.

For those of you who are thinking about theories of "play" and how they relate to technology, this is really interesting: "A professor at USC shares video from a recent meeting that brought together artists, educators, researchers, and technology experts to discuss "tinkering" for learning in the digital age."

In "Learning Through Play" by Bob Mackey, Mackey argues that video games have been in classrooms for years but have never been used to their full capacity. In this article he explores ways in which video games made for fun (not for educational purposes) can be applied in the classroom.

This article explores the influence of teacher's assumptions and attitudes about boys and their learning practices. The introduction of this article begins explaining "overwhelming evidence that boys are falling behind in our education system"(74). It further explains that this problem is crucial to boys everywhere because boys with low literacy skills are less likely to engage, complete and advance their education. Henderson argues that there are multiple factors that are contributing to boy's low level or underachievement in learning. Teachers, students, parents, siblings and friends play a vital role in shaping children's literacy practices outside of school that are then instilled inside of school. Henderson asks an interesting question, why do the literacy practices at school, home and in the community have to be different? Why can't all of these practices be viewed equally important and valuable? Henderson questions whether boy's bad behavior in school is a result of underachievement or is it the cause of it? Do teacher's play the most important role in shaping children, especially boys, learning identity in school?

This article is about games and how a lot of global population is playing video games or computer games. Through digital media, it is helping put the games other there for people to see and get. The author believes that by playing video games, it helps improves decision making skills, hones hand-eye coordination, and may improve the success rates of professionals such as surgeons.

In Social Anxiety and Technology the author Tamira Pierce did a study by examining teens, and the use of the socially interactive technologies. For example social sites, cell phone/ text messaging, and instant messaging. The position that social anxiety plays on how teenagers communicate with others from technology or face to face.

Annotation 1: In Social Anxiety and Technology the author Tamira Pierce did a study by examining teens, and the use of the socially interactive technologies, for example social sites, cell phone/ text messaging and instant messaging. The position that social anxiety plays is how teenagers communicate with others from technology or face to face. The people that participated were 280 high school students, statistics indicate that from those students, 35%-40% said they use cell phones/text messaging and online sites around one and four hours daily . In which females use more cell phones and social networks than males. After these results it comes to a conclusion and affirms a relationship between social anxiety, meaning students seem to be more comfortable to talk through phone, text or use social networks than talking face to face. Females tend to feel more comfortable communicating through phone or computer than males.

Talks about and research on why girl doesn't play games like boy do.

This article raised a lot of good points and questions that have to do with gaming and where it is going in the future. It looks at the topic in different directions like group dynamics, game motivation, in-game behavior, and game play communication. The article also looks at the levels of hostility that may be associated with most online multi player games.

In Technology a Key Tool in Writing Instruction the author, Maya Prabhu, explains how a report done by the National Writing Project and College Board shows that "teachers play a critical role in driving the use of technology, to teach writing." For this report nine teachers, who were selected for various reasons, were observed by a writer for a day and then interviewed. Results showed that the use of such things like blogs, podcasts, and other software can actually increase students' engagement and improve their writing and thinking skills in all grade levels and in all subjects. These results help fuel the argument that more teaching needs to be done with technology in this new digital age. The NWP and College Board claims that there are ". . . three things [that need to] be done to meet the challenges of teaching and learning in the digital age at all levels of education." A child cannot learn or be impacted by technology if they do not have access, so therefore it is suggested that a child have one-on-one interactions with a computer or some time type of similar technology.

This article is about a veteran teacher who has taught in schools for 32 years all over Manhattan. He introduces a class in technology and game design. SARA CORBETT talkes about how students would benifit if teachers stepped away from what they thought was a typical classroom and focused on different approaches to reach and educate children. According to Sara Corbett, "Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today's children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration".