Five Friday – 2/10/17
1) The most intriguing article in this week’s reading assignments is Mitchel Resnick’s “All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten.” Obviously, I had an understanding of the importance of play for a young child, however the notion that it is an important manifestation for nurturing a creative and imaginative being is a new concept. I had never associated play with creativity, but when it is crystallized in such a way as Resnick has done, it gives an entirely new dimension. Resnick mentions modern conceptions for play such as Leggo and Cricket kits, the Cricket kits being totally unfamiliar to me, which are designed so that children can integrate creativity and imagination both under the guise of playfulness. In my day, the most important toy for me was the “Erector Set” which, when I look back, provided the opportunity to use my imagination and be creative.
Friederich Fröbel, envisioned the kindergarten as a place for very young children to have a place to enrich their creativity and imagination, but I doubt whether he ever considered this to extend in school life beyond the those very early years of a child’s education, as this article suggests. I agree with the author’s statement that “ kindergarten is becoming like the rest of school.” Societal pressures are being exerted on very young children to be able to perform in quantifiable units and tests, which is indeed tragic, for the kindergartner should be given every opportunity to be a child, and not an adult. The classic kindergarten tradition should be maintained, however when Resnick argues that “it should be extended to learners of all ages,” I tend to disagree. School activities need to concentrate on learning information and structure needs to be provided by educators to enhance a child’s creativity and imagination. In today’s world, I believe there is ample opportunity to play outside of the schoolroom and should not be extensively fostered from within.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/CC2007-handout.pdf
2) The question arises, is a game a venue for being playful? Well, I believe that it is, yet is a highly structured event and should be integrated within the classroom as it can serve to be extremely beneficial. Several games were mentioned in the Monday post, and I find the literary subdivision to be the most useful for educational development.
Five Card Flickr, where a student needs to be imaginative by creating a story from a random set of photos with additional photos is simply a great idea! Since literacy can be embodied in more than just words, this game promotes a tangential literacy form which may tap into a student’s creativity without the use of words.
If the teacher wishes to promote literacy in the more traditional sense, Blackout Poetry is unique and another. Imagine creating poetry from a newspaper article by deleting words!
The Daily Digital Academy is promoting the #dda40 One minute to Write the Prequel game. I suspect that almost all students have a device with them at all times these days, this game provides the student an opportunity to think fast and make sense using the written language when confronted with a random photo, such as a man walking a duck on a leash.
3) Only a few years ago,I was a moderator on Paltalk ( an audio-video chatroom service) principally for the purposes of playing trivia quiz games with contestants from around the world. Almost all of the players were adults, sometimes as many as 70, in the voice-only room,.Two readers would throw out questions from all categories, science, geography, literature, movies, current events, etc,and the contestants would as rapidly as possible type in answers for their team and attempt to score points if the answer was correct. For me, this an example of play and games being essential, even for adults. I was always entertained and often my competitve spirits really kicked in – however the game provided a really great source of education if one was an addict for sometimes esoteric pieces of information.
Unfortunately, the audio trivia game rooms succumbed to the advances in technology, and were no longer fun. Contestants would routinely google the answers to the questions and post them in the room for points, effectively destroying the entire concept. Today, I still enjoy a good trivia or quiz game, and if I were a classroom teacher, I would incorporate this concept on a daily basis. How I would do this, I am not sure, but the format is both entertaining and educational.
To this day, I will often access a static trivia game on the computer when I really need “edutainment”, for example, I may access this site: http://www.funtrivia.com/
4) In perusing several of my colleague’s blogs, I read that Ms. Sunny http://lsunny.edublogs.org/ is an advocate of using Kahoots and Quizzizz.com in a classroom setting. This answers my ruminations about how to incorporate quizzes within a classroom from my previous statement. The Kahoots concept looks extremely interesting and the Quizzizz site is more of a traditional static quiz website, at least that is what I gather from my cursury glances. I recollect from a class I had taken last year that https://quizlet.com/ has a similar, interactive feature for a classroom environment, but I am not sure exactly how it worked. I personally have used Quizlet for my vocabulary studies and have created hundreds of sets of foreign language cards over the years. It is quite easy to test myself, and to even make it into a “game” with these sets of electronic flashcards. Maybe it is really play, once again?
5) The James Gee article entitled Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a Waste of Time. As I had mentioned in the Bluejeans Hangout of last night, the author failed to convince me that video games are not a “waste of time”. Granted, I understand that video gaming “ is a multimodality par excellence”. I am sure that in the very near future, Virtual Reality and it’s associated gaming environments will outpace today’s typical video game. Gee attempts to justify video gaming as an educational asset by creating labels, such as “semiotic” for events which take place place in almost every facet of human endeavor.
I do concur that “in the modern world, print literacy is not enough”.Video games surely do create semiotic domains which can be shared with any number of participants, but how does that necessarily translate into a “learning event”? From my limited exposure to video games, there seems to be an underlying premise of violence and destruction in almost every one. What purpose is it for a student to become a participant in this semiotic domain? Gee himself, seems to answer his own question by writing ” Activities that are entertaining, but that themselves do not involve such learning, are just ‘meaningless play’.Of course, video games fall into this category”. I still maintain that video games, as I understand them, are a waste of time.
6) Constance Steinkuehler has an interesting video regarding gaming and education: http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/blog/?p=794 . I think it goes without saying, that most kids will learn quicker and their “literacy” rates will improve if the subject matter interests them.