Blogging? For a grade??

That's all folks. My first online class is almost over, and our blogging assignment for the past 8 weeks is over. I must say it was both fun and a bit challenging. I wasn't ever really sure what to write about for my posts, so I just shared pieces of the books I was reading that I thought my classmates would also find interesting (hence the meme below)

But I also really enjoyed the chance to use blogging "for good", rather than just as a forum for venting and raging and ranting. I grew up in the era of MySpace, Livejournal, and Xanga. These were never, in my eyes at least, used for school or anything remotely educational. They were just spaces for people to share thoughts and feelings, and customize their page to look however you wanted it to. While modern blogs like Blogger and Wordpress still offer similar customization techniques, more and more blogs for educational purposes are popping up all over the Net. And I think that's great. It gives people a chance to look into other topics they might be interested in, but the material is presented in a way on a blog that's not intimidating or overly academic (most of the time).

Overall, I had a great time sharing information with my classmates through my blog and I'm really excited to continue exploring blogging as a writing tool that could be used in a variety of ways in my classroom.

Thanks for reading!

-Catie 

"Make Me a Story" chapter 5

This chapter was really short, but had two really important takeaways for me. The whole of the chapter centered on assessment and making sure that student's storytelling projects are aligned with standards.

With regards to standards, Miller provides several examples of how digital storytelling aligns with standards from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as well as the International Reading Association. But she goes even further to say that "it's important to realize that digital storytelling involves skills that some educational standards suggest students should master. It's not just an extra added on without connection to the curriculum" (Miller 80). While New Mexico has adopted CCSS as it's state standards instead of the other two standards mentioned above, I'm sure it would be just as easy to take a digital storytelling lesson/unit and demonstrate how it meets several of the CCSS standards for Language Arts for any grade level.

The other important point that this chapter emphasizes is that digital storytelling offers students the chance to show real learning and growth. It's should not be looked at as "a waste of time" or just something pretty that students are doing on computers. Miller explains it better than I can with this quote: "It's easy to demonstrate that students are doing much more than simply creating pretty slide shows when they're working on digital stories. They're practicing important skills and learning to think in meaningful way about the process of writing and using technology to put the different elements of a story together" (Miller 84). She then talks about the opportunity for students to create a rubric for this assignment, should the teacher choose to use one for grading and assessment. Personally, I don't like rubrics. As a student, they don't offer me anything helpful and often just encourage me to write my paper to fit the rubric, rather than the other way around. As an upcoming teacher, I don't want my students to get stuck in that same trap. Additionally, as objective as rubrics try to be, there is always an element of subjectivity involved in creating the criteria for a rubric.
Having said all that, I understand that rubrics will work better for some classes and students than others. If I were going to use a rubric, I would definitely follow Miller's example and allow my students the chance to contribute to the criteria, if not to set it up entirely based on what they think an outstanding assignment would look like.

That's it for this book! A pretty short read, and not quite what I was expecting, but definitely some helpful tips on how to successfully incorporate digital elements in to the processes of writing.

"Make Me a Story" chapters 3-4

This chunk of the book that I read for this blog post focuses on taking young writers through the writing process, making sure each step gets focus. Miller's version of the steps in the writing process are:
(I'm paraphrasing her steps, the whole list is in her book on pg. 33)
Write before writing: This is the step that involves brainstorming and asking questions about your subject

Research for writing: pretty self-explanatory; this step is all about finding more information about your subject through whatever method works best for you: library, Internet, or good old fashioned encyclopedias.

Begin writing: Finding a focus and starting writing! Things to consider: point of view, audience, images that might go with your story.

Keep writing: This is the step where you make sure all the parts of your draft are solid and coherent. Here would also be where you could plan where your images would go in connection with your story, as well as pumping up your story with exciting and interesting details.

Finish writing: Here is the final push, getting your story and all it's components together. This could include: putting your story in the computer, adding music and fancy transitions, and the presentation of your story to an audience.


Miller also strives to make clear that the writing process is most definitely not linear, even though this process is listed as such. I could definitely see many students getting confused about that, so I would prefer to present them with a model that looks more like this:

The wording is a bit more confusing in this picture than in Miller's linear model, but I think it better articulates the non-linear process of writing and revising. Maybe a combination of the two? Not sure, I'd have to try it.

I'm almost done with the book so my next post will be the last one from the book. Stay tuned!

"Make Me A Story" chapters 1-2

Ok, new book! Here we go!

This one's called Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing Through Digital Storytelling  by Lisa C. Miller. It's a total 180 from my first book: this one is designed to be more a help manual or a how-to on teaching digital storytelling. Another big difference: it's designed for teachers of K-5.

Dun dun dun...

Joking. As the daughter of a 4th grade teacher, I have only love and respect for elementary school teachers. It's definitely a job I could not do, and I'm pretty content in Secondary Ed.

I digress.

One of Miller's main points in these first two chapters is emphasizing that really, the digital stuff (Clip-Art pictures, voice overs, etc) is all icing on the cake that is the writing of whatever assignment you're doing with your students. In fact, she says that "limiting the number of images students use makes them concentrate on the story, and the story becomes the deciding factor in what images to use, not the other way around" (Miller 25).

She gives some examples of digital storytelling that she helped some 3rd grade students create. While I love the ideas, they seem, well...elementary. One story was about how an apple feels about being boiled up in to applesauce (not very, as you might imagine).

Any thoughts on how to incorporate digital storytelling in high school/secondary level? Bonus points if it is about Romeo and Juliet :)

Fin: The Bases Still Belong To Us or, Blog Post #4

Short post today. I'm through with my first book for this class! It was really an excellent read, despite what Goodreads says. (Seriously, don't go through those reviews. I try not to, but every once in a while I get sucked in.) I still wouldn't consider myself a gamer in the way that some of my friends, or my boyfriend is. I just don't have the patience for it, I think. He can sit for hours and hours (he's doing so right now, blasting away zombies! I know who's team I'd be on for the zombie apocalypse...) and play a game, and I can barely watch a movie without feeling like I have to do something while I'm just sitting and watching. (As I post tonight, I have two other tabs open in my browser, and I'm seriously considering turning on Firefly to listen/watch while I do other homework after this.)

So what did I learn from this book, you ask Dear Reader? Well, for starters: a whole heck of a lot more about the history of video games than I ever thought I would know. The book went in mostly chronological order, so the later third of the book was about games that I recognized: Grand Theft Auto, BioShock (which started out under the title "System Shock"), Bejeweled, and many others. It was interesting to read about the history of these recognizable games. I wonder though, if these games are too dated for our students? Maybe not BioShock, but definitely some of these others. The latest in the series, BioShock Infinite was released in March 2013. And what a damn good game that was! But I digress. I'd be curious to know what my students are playing, if they play video games. I know some of them play the 2-D exploration platform game Terraria (one of my favorites, and they lost their minds when I told them I've logged 150+ hours on it!) and some of them love playing first-person shooters games like Call of Duty. But I'd love to know what games they're playing in the middle, between those two rather extreme examples. Then I might have a better idea on how to incorporate games in to my class.

Do you play videogames? Share your favorite game below!

Ok. That's that, let's put the kibosh on video games for now. Tune in next time for the first post from my next reading choice, Make Me a Story: Teaching Writing Through Digital Storytelling by Lisa C. Miller.

"All Your Base Are Belong to Us" post #3: Women in Videogames

Finally! Women in videogames! The chunk that I read for this post talks about Roberta Williams, creator of the King's Quest series. IBM had asked Roberta and her husband Ken for an adventure game that would help launch their new machine, the PCjr, complete with two ports for joysticks and scheduled for release in March 1984. Even though the PCjr failed miserably, King's Quest went on to be quite a successful game! And to think that it started just as a game that the Williams's sold for $24.95, distributed in Ziploc bags.

This quote from the end of the chapter interested me the most:
"Roberta was the only woman game company founder who consistently made creditable, bestselling series. The fact that she has not made another game is troubling. Women certainly have made strides in game making over the years. For instance, Jade Raymond produced the Assassin's Creed series for Ubisoft, and Amy Hennig directed and wrote the Uncharted series... Both have been bestsellers that consistently receive stellar review scores. But sadly, no woman since Roberta has had such a long-running impact on games and on game companies. Decades later, Sierra still represents the high point for women in videogames." (Goldberg 158)

No wonder! Who do young girls in this generation have to look up to in video game creation? That's certainly not to say that they can't look up to the men in this business who are making incredible strides for the genre. But when women are constantly ridiculed in the videogame world, such as during Gamersgate last summer, it's no wonder that girls are so often discouraged from following their gaming dreams.

That's it for this post really. I was just excited to share that I've reached a point in videogame history where women are starting to pop up in to the picture!

"All Your Base are Belong to Us" post #2

This one doesn't have a fancy title. Mostly because I've read way more chapters that what I would like to talk about in this post. But, here goes!


So I'm up to the point in video game history where gamers are just starting to see the emergence of the Playstation, and the great battle between Sony and Nintendo. Not long before this console's birth though, a little company called Electronic Arts (EA) created the widely popular Madden NFL games, collaborating with actual football players and coaches. One quote stuck out from this section to me, even though sports games aren't really my cuppa: "Yet Madden was the franchise that made history, earning more than $3 billion since it was first released. Much of that success was due to a new marketing plan for games, a kind of preplanned obsolescence and keep-up-with-the-Joneses business ethic...If you didn't have the new Madden, packed with this year's players...you weren't as cool as your game-playing who procured the newest version" (Goldberg 105). This mentality, in my opinion, is still around in video games today, but it's expanded outside the realm of sports games. If you don't have the newest Call of Duty game, or the latest DLC (downloadable content) for Dark Souls 2, you just aren't hip to the jive. There are, of course, gamers who could care less about the latest updates; they play the game for the story, which bring me to the next piece that stuck out in this section I read.

PC gaming found it's niche in 1980, with a text-based adventure game called Zork. (Text based games basically go like this: Computer: "You are walking along a path and come upon a boulder in your way." You type: "North" and based on that command, the computer will either progress your character or tell you you can't do that, forcing you to figure out the proper command.) Zork had zero graphics, which left everything up to the player's imagination, much like the role-playing games it was based on (such as Dungeons and Dragons). Zork led to other iconic role-playing games, most notably The 7th Guest. This was really the first immersive role-playing game that put players in to the world, through the eyes of the character they were playing as; the developers of The 7th Guest spent a tremendous amount of time and money creating the game to almost exactly resemble the experience one gets when they are watching a movie.
Now, RPG's are a genre in their own right, with popular titles such as: the Final Fantasy series, The Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Trigger series, Elder Scrolls series, and many others. The common element that all these games share: players spend a great deal of time becoming engrossed in the story of the characters. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that my boyfriend is a super serious gamer. RPG's are some of his favorite, and he's logged over 500 hours in Final Fantasy VII (not all in one-go, don't worry!) What interests me the most about this type of immersion is that the exact same type of immersion happens when readers get lost in an excellent book. So, that begs the question then O Reader, how can we engage our students who love video game stories, but hate reading, in the same sort of immersion that happens in their video games, but in literature?

Lots of food for thought, I know. And I did get a bit rambly. But I love this book and I can't recommend it enough!
Ok, 'til next time Dear Reader.

-C