Professional Development

I have tried to get a wide range of professional development in my first year of education studies. There was one session of particular note to this blog was during the Manitoba Association of Teachers of English SAGE Conference: Videogames and Literacy in the Post CoD World: How We Can Use Video Games in the Classroom, Change the World, and Avert the Apocalypse by Devin King.
There were a few sections in his presentation. First, he went through the popular depiction of video games as violent and brain-melting. He mentioned that adults are now the largest population of gamers and that it should be no surprise that video games have become more adult. The industry is targeting their largest market.
Second, he stated the positives of this story-telling form. He focused on how gamers embody characters while playing the game, that video games are open-ended, with gamers co-creating the stories by playing through them. He shared a personal example in which he chose the "Hard" gameplay option for the newly released Batman: Arkham City, because he would be playing as Batman, and Batman, as a normal human, is not able to take any short-cuts. He advocated making informed decisions as there are some great games, with great themes, gameplay and story that are not inappropriate. Similarly to how an English teacher needs to make informed decisions as to which novels to include in class. There are good and bad examples of both.

Box art courtesy izelda.net

Third, he went through how he has implemented The Legend of Zelda: the Windwaker as a text in his English classroom. His students would play with a partner to discuss and insight as they played.Students would cycle through a 15 minute playing period once a week, or until they reached a teacher-set check point. At the end of the week the class would discuss themes and challenges found in that game session.
Windwaker deals with heroism and exploration and discussions focused on how these themes played out in the game, how the players incorporated the themes into their gameplay and decisions as they had control of Link, and extending the themes from the video game into their own lives with questions like, "How can we, ourselves, be heroic in our daily lives?"
I was fascinated with the topic, especially since I LOVED this game! I hope to be able to do this in a future classroom of mine. I think many people see the new adult nature of gaming and write it off, but I think approaching emerging literary forms as we approach established ones enables us to extract great content from a medium that our students are already immersed in.

Image courtesy of IGN.com

Link, whom I embody while playing the game, sailing off towards discovery, adventure, heroism and EDUCATION!

Animoto

I had wanted to title this Kangaroo Island but forgot, so here is my Animoto creation, Untitled Project


Try our video maker at Animoto.
Animoto automatically makes videos around a chosen theme, imported pictures, and text. Free videos are limited to thirty seconds, four plus of which are taken up with the Animoto advertising at the end. Longer videos are available if you purchase a subscription. I would assume that the final ad would be much smaller, or non-existent, on the longer videos. However, I haven't subscribed so I can't say, but it makes sense to me.
I wish there was a theme preview I could see when I am choosing my theme. They were all static thumbnail images and I had to chose one without knowing how it would display, and transition between, my pictures.
All that being said, Animoto is easy and fun. I especially liked the suggestions given in class as to how it could be used: Mini-stories, Phys-Ed skill demonstrations, even Christmas cards! I think Animoto would be very effective as a summarizing tool. Say a student read War & Peace (it was the personal choice reading assignment...) and they could do the book review, but really that could be the length of a normal novel. Here comes Animoto! The challenge is to summarize the novel in pictures, in 30 seconds. This forces students to pick out important information and interact with the text in a new way. I use an English example because I'm familiar with English, but I believe it can be an interdisciplinary tool.

On a side note, here is the shortest review of War & Peace I could find in ten minutes of searching that also was thematically relevant to this post. It's almost two minutes and doesn't actually say anything about the book, aside from it being very long. 

Weebly

For the classroom website assignment I chose to use weebly, as I already had experience with blogger and a lot of google products and wanted to try something new.
I found the weebly editor incredibly easy to use. I've spent a lot of time tweaking my personal blog design over the years and weebly is very intuitive. Your page is displayed on the lower section of the browser window and you click and drag features from the editing from to where you want them on your page. I was impressed by the wide variety of elements available. I signed up with weebly for education and the education specific elements, like the homework submission form, were excellent.
Setting up links was easy and I liked that I was able to create links to other site pages. This feature, combined with the ability to hide pages from the navigation bar enabled me to create many specific pages, like a grade nine course outline, but not clutter up the navigation bar.
While there are many templates available, I found them to be very restrictive. The only modifications an average user can make to the template is the link colours, font type, colour and size. There is an option to edit the HTML/CSS, but I'm not proficient at it and so for me it isn't really an option. I would have liked the ability to modify the height of the title picture, colour of the navigation bar, etcetera. I felt limited being unable to tweak the template to my liking.

Overall I found weebly to be a great tool for building a website, but in the future I think I would use a service that allowed me more freedom in modifying design.