 This week I'll point your browser in two directions.
The first is an incredible paper from Henry Jenkins (et al.) called, "Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," which is a great precursor to the other site I'll share this week: Play the News. According to Jenkins: "For the current generation, games may represent the best way of tapping [a] sense of engagement with learning." The Jenkins paper clearly defines the new skills necessary for a participatory culture which build on traditional literacy skills but with a focus on "community involvement" rather than "individual expression." The new skills include: Play, Performance, Simulation, Appropriation, Multitasking, Distributed Cognition, Collective Intelligence, Judgment, Transmedia Navigation, Networking, and Negotiation.
Jenkins defines the skill "Play" as "the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving." Play the News supports this skill and meets the challenges of making news engaging for a participatory culture because it strikes at the nerve of what has changed in our world: We are no longer passive consumers but prosumers who want to actively engage with our media. Play the News states it this way: "Imagine fantasy sports meets the evening news." You want your students to learn about current events? Have them play with it.
There are many layers to Play the News, but I'm just going to focus on areas that I think work well in the classroom. First off, you'll need an account to play. With older students, they could set up their own accounts; younger students could play together with the teacher running the games on a projector. Once signed in, the user chooses a news game from a category (i.e., World, U.S., Entertainment, Technology). The game opens up with background information about the topic displayed in a variety of ways: Images, text, and video. The video comes from actual Reuters newscasts and the text is presented in both a newspaper article format, as well as pop-up text. The information is succinct and balanced and provides excellent tutorials on the issues. Next, the user is asked to "role-play" by taking on different perspectives to submit an opinion. This is one of the strongest features for the classroom, in my opinion. It forces the players to look at "all sides" of the issues and try to understand where each party is coming from. So for instance, in the game, "Oil Balancing Act," you play two different roles -- OPEC and Russia -- and need to choose the opinion you would have in each camp, under those roles. After you role-play the opinions, you then vote on how you think things will actually turn out.
You can bank on five new stories a week from the site and all the old games are archived as "closed" games where the results can be reviewed. Games can easily be embedded in a website or blog and older students may choose to put them right on their own social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace. Registered users receive invites via email whenever a new game has been posted.
When the actual event being predicted comes to fruition, users get an email telling how their guess did. Winning "predictors" rise in "rank" as well as get recognition in the social network part of Play the News. Rank also increases on the level of participation: How active you are in playing the games as well as your involvement in the social network areas of the site. Depending on the age and interest of your students, you can decide how involved you want to get with the social network and threaded forums that run with each game as well as the site. All of this is just "icing on the cake" and superfluous to the real power of the site for classroom use: Engaging students in current events through participation rather than just consumption.
 Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.
POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
