New Media & New Literacies

  Blog 6: As a social studies teacher, two games that immediately came to mind were Oregon Trail and Monopoly. Being that Oregon Trail was specifically developed to simulate historical events during westward expansion for students, it seems very fitting for this topic in New Media and New Literacy. I have not used Oregon Trail as a resource extensively within my classes but I am certainly considering finding more of a place for it within my classroom. In my first two years of teaching, I had the pleasure of teaching economics classes for a portion of my day and one of my favorite activities that I did was a modified version of the game monopoly to teach students how monopolies work through their actions within the game.  In my small, five or fewer student, economics classes in the past I would introduce the topic of capitalism and its impact within our national economy and within the world economy. As we would get a few days into this unit of study, we would delve into the...

Google Meets & Kami   ________________________________________________________________ Google Meets Overview: Google Meets and other video conference call technologies have become much more prevalent in schools around the country and around the world in response to the recent pandemic. Google products such as google meets are the platforms primarily used by the districts in which I have been employed. It is difficult to narrowly define the primary function of Google Meets within school because the applications of this product are so vast. All uses of Google Meets fall under the broader category of communication, and this technology can often be substituted for in person/face-to-face interactions.  User Engagement/Influence On Communication/Information Consumption: The use of Google Meets by students began during the school shut downs that resulted from the Covid pandemic. In these early uses of Google Meets, students were able to join their classes virtually to receive i...