Day Two at the MA New Lit Institute - Teachers Like to (Need to) Play
Day two at the MA New Lit Institute wrapped up well. We continued our series of Digging Deeper sessions. I think my session on Online Content Construction went well. In this session we focused on framing of OCC, and spent a lot of time with participants figuring out Mozilla Popcorn. I'll put together a post here on Digitally Literate to share how & why you should be playing with Mozilla Popcorn.
In terms of what I learned today at the MA New Lit Institute, I once again learned that teachers like to...and in many ways need to play. In several of our Digging Deeper sessions, or Digital Texts and Tools breakout sessions, participants indicated a desire to learn something new, drill down into the skills, and have enough time to play. Many times in our classrooms we ignore/devalue/avoid providing time to "play." Spending time with teachers today it reinforced our need to spend some time playing with the different tools, theories, and ideas. This is especially true when we're working with and making digital content.
In our classrooms play provides us with opportunities to explore and learn new content as they find the joy in learning. If we're really interested in life-long learning, we need to figure out ways to embed authentic "play" into our learning experiences. This form of play can be seen as we have guided sessions in breakout sessions at an institute. Play can also be seen as we have online "make with me" sessions in a Google Hangout with others. Play can be an informal learning environment in which there seems to be a relatively low risk of failure...but a high degree of excitement, creation, and enrichment.
We need to identify more ways to authentically and effectively embed play with digital texts and tools into teaching and learning activities.
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