18 in the Bay
A push right now in my district is oracy. When I told my team were focusing on oracy they all turned, looked at me, and said, “What does that mean?” Literacy to me, is similar. While oracy is a word we didn’t have context for because we never used it, literacy is a word we’ve lost context for because we overused it. One of my big issues with talking about literacy is that we take it too literally. If our push is to really make sure students are “21st century learners” then we need to make sure the literacy skills they are developing are applicable in the 21st century. That includes oracy, online communication, but also the developing roles of language and how we use it.
18 in the Bay really struck me because it felt so authentic. Looking at the playlist selections, or the graphs that represent students’ lives, I felt 18 again. Looking at the Urban Dictionary entries, I then felt very old.
That proves, to me, that this works at authentically capturing the perspectives of these students. I particularly liked their assignment of conducting an interview and seeing a somewhat broader perspective of the people that surround an 18 year old’s life. Overall though, using these digital tools to allow students to authentically express themselves is what allows them to be really successful learning tools.
It’s great to see this being done in a way that does not ask these students to change who they are. My digital/technological pet peeve is using technology for its own sake. When I walk the halls and see classroom after classroom of teacher having their students complete their writing prompt on Chromebooks using Google Drive instead of paper and pencil, I think “what a waste.” And yet, 18 in the Bay isn’t that far away. It’s not a big scary thing to ask teachers to implement, it isn’t that much different than a diary, and yet the final result is something that is collaborative, comprehensive, and authentic. That’s a great way to bridge the topic of literacy and talk about what makes voice appropriate, relatable, relevant, etc. And using a digital tool that allows the use of other digital tools, such as the DITL using Snapchat, is also more likely to get consistent contribution from students.
I wanted to embrace our theme this week of New Literacy, particularly the fact that this course is embracing both coding and video games as potential literacies, with which I completely and wholeheartedly agree. To that end, I created a Twine- a click-based (sometimes) branching narrative game tool- of one of the stories on 18 in the Bay entitled “Imagine”. I didn’t make a branching narrative of this story because it just would have changed the story too much. Instead I just used Twine (twinery.org) as a way to put this story into the context of quasi-gameplay and involve a little bit of coding work at the same time, (full disclosure, with the help of my programmer husband). You can play the game version, hosted on philome.la, below:
I like the group learning, diverse voice element of 18 in the Bay. I could see using tools like Twine to go one step farther and allow students to see their stories and voices in the context of a new literacy.
