Video games are good too
So, I have never had one of these blogs before. I assume most people use them to just “jot down” random thoughts as well as any feelings they have on certain issues. The main issue I am chosing to tackle is how technology can improve the reading environment in a classroom. By environment I do not mean like the actual classroom, but how technology can help students to read not only more but increase their reading comprehension as well.
There are a lot of viable resources in technology that lend themselves to helping students read more often and with better ability. The primary goal for me is to show how video games lend themselves to helping students in this way. Take games like RPG (role playing games) for instance. I, myself, play a considerable amount of RPG’s including the Final Fantasy series, the Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars series, and the Baldur’s Gate series. The amount of reading contained in these games are beyond any novel, I can tell you this much. The vocabulary in these games are immense as well. To add on to the sheer amount of text and vocab inside the games, a player must memorize a vast amount of the text in order to accomplish quests. This means that students playing the games must read the text, interpret what it says, and be able to comprehend the instructions given to accomplish the tasks within the game. Throughout the blog this semester I intend to show what exactly reading comprehension is and how students increase this through video games. The blogs that I am going to utilize for this are http://outsidethecave.blogspot.com/index.html and http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/. I will not exclusively use these, but they appear to be the most focused on utilizing video games within the classroom to promote different skills.
(PS this is an edited post fixing the previous problems that I had with the blog. I feel this is a lot more streamlined and focused topic compared to “technology in the classroom”)
Hey Dan,
Good start here. One quick observation about the format of your blog: you should definitely use categories to distinguish between your 310 and your 311 posts. Looks like you are beginning to add blogrolls, too.
Focusing on the same topic for both courses is okay, of course, provided that you continue to find and respond to meaningful articles. So far, your thoughts on educational technology are on the mark, though it should be said that the government has poured money into technology over the past decade. To get a sense of how much technology has streamed into the schools, you might check out “Technology Counts 2007″ at Education Week or the National Center for Education Statistics recent reports on Internet access.
Your idea that teacher training remains inadequate is spot on. You might think about using this blog to determine what effective technology training in the English language arts looks like . . .
PS Dan, don’t forget to identify the feeds you have subscribed to.
pos yourgirls