My Etec 565a Portfolio

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Why was this the right tool to tell my story?
I approached this story like a documentary. I had an idea of what I wanted to explore and I wanted a strong narrative. I wanted my students to lead me to where the narrative should go. I ended up combining interviews with various online tools that I explored. I used iMovie as a starting point allowed me to create the narrative and pull from various media sites to contrast the student work. The narrative is a little loose, and exploratory, but I still think it gets a point of view across. I was trying to explore the intersection of games, school and computers.

How did I purposefully select these tools?
I selected xtranormal because I hate seeing myself on camera; it is that simple. This allows me to be more expressive, open and intentional without worrying about my acting or how I look. The other packages I picked because I wanted to learn them. Prezi, impressed me a lot and allows you to create word maps and logic trees, and connect them. This is a great extension for brainstorming and is a tool I think we can use in class.

How does this story work within a course that you teach?
I want students to think about games outside of the audience they typically imagine catering to. I also want students to target genres they are not familiar with. Educational games have a bad reputation (some time well deserved), but there is an intuitive sense from that games, applied correctly, can help them learn. This hopefully will have students thinking about creating more engaging, relevant educational games that relate to their academic experience.

What’s your pedagogical rationale for doing this?
I wanted to explore the intersection between games, education and technology from the student’s perspective. I see many students when they find out how games are made all of a sudden are interested in programming, math, and physics. Most of these students started taking their education seriously after they left high school. I am also trying to have students think about different audiences to reach for their games with goals outside of entertainment.

What are the strengths of the storytelling approach?
I try as much as possible to put as much of what I teach in a story. With structuring a module with a strong beginning, middle and end, makes the work more meaningful for the students. I found over time, the more I can make the subject matter I teach interesting, the more the audience is engaged. Turning as much as I can into an engaging story increases their attention and retention (I can tell what is not working when I test them).