True confession. I am technologically challenged. 1985 freshman year at NYU. Computer? Commodore 64. Whaaaattttttt…?! Yes. I’m old. There you have it y’all. I did not grow up with technology the way my own kids and students seem to have been born with iPhones attached to their hands, panic-stricken if their battery is in the red without an accessible charger or socket to refuel their addiction. Civilians without daily exposure to teens may balk with astonishment at the real-life melt-downs portrayed when a cell phone is taken away from a teen videotaped in CNN’s study on social media and teens, “#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Teens.” (2015) But this is not Kansas anymore Toto, you feel me frfr, this is some real shaaaaa…we as educators must deal with every day. So how do we navigate these tsunami waves of teen dissention to phone separation anxiety when negotiating the curriculum, classroom management, and frankly, our sanity as educators? “Embrace the rainbow” you skittle head my kids would tell me. So here I am.
For the past two weeks I have laboriously interviewed my students, who were so psyched to school me on social media platforms for this paper: Instagram, Finsta, Snapchat, and World Star…Yikes! The teacher becomes the student and my students definitely felt the breadth of my frustration as this role reversal was quite enlightening for all involved. Bottomline? My kids were enthusiastic to teach me all about the idiosyncratic nuances of all of these platforms, but when I finally explained the why, that I needed to choose one to focus on with the goal of using it to promote more engaged, motivating curriculum development; they were just like, “Nah. That won’t work Miss.” (Insert bug-eyed emoji face here) Ok. Redirect.
Chapter Two. My son has dyslexia and a processing disorder. He’s had an IEP since 3rd grade. He only has two social media platforms he engages, Snapchat and “Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), also known as action real-time strategy (ARTS), which is a subgenre of strategy video games that originated as a subgenre of real-time strategy, in which a player controls a single character in a team who compete versus another team of players. The objective is to destroy the opposing team’s main structure with the assistance of periodically-spawned computer-controlled units that march forward along set paths. Player characters typically have various abilities and advantages that improve over the course of a game and that contribute to a team’s overall strategy. MOBA games are a fusion of action games, role-playing games and real-time strategy games.” (Wikipedia) Sean is an athlete, was always an outdoor-playing kid, until last year, freshman year of high school. He suddenly wanted an Xbox and a Microsoft Live Subscription for Christmas. He literally was no longer part of the male-bonding social circle at school any longer if he did not participate in this platform. He needed to learn this at home to be part of the socialization at school. I have never seen/heard my son more engaged, motivated, excited, focused, and ultimately confident than I have when he is in MOBA world with his friends. So now I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how I can incorporate video gaming, specifically MOBA, into my English classroom curriculum without the bloodshed, cursing, trash talk, and violence that these now 10th grade boys live for. The more research I did, the more positive aspects I stumbled across for gaming to be beneficial in educational environments. There were actual studies demonstrating how gaming can enhance brain flexibility improving a teen’s ability to learn, improvise, problem-solve quickly and efficiently, focus intently on goals in spite of external distractions, increase visual and audial acuity, multi-task, collaborate, make predictions in order to plan and implement strategies for success, and even relieve stress to be able to clear your mind and body of tension that could prevent learning – all issues that my son with SLD struggles to overcome in the classroom. How can I transfer these benefits to my students in my inclusion classes with similar obstacles?
I found the amazing gift of Kahoot! I’m not gonna lie; I was real scared to approach a computer-based technological activity that required my kids to actually USE THEIR CELL PHONES IN CLASS! But if I’ve learned nothing else in my experience as a teacher, I’ve learned to be honest with my kids and admit when I do not know everything. Bingo! The students become the teachers and proceed to step up to the challenge vigorously to demonstrate to me how this modality can enhance their learning. All I could think was, is this what curriculum integration looks like? Basically Kahoot! is an international interactive gaming platform with over 50 languages available that can be downloaded in a free app to cell phones or a website opened up on a pc in which teachers and students can play educational games individually or on teams that they themselves create on any academic subject. In addition to creating their own academic games in every language my kids speak, they can play other students’ games that are shared publicly on the site. Recently Kahoot! released a new Challenge Mode for HW used to assign after-class challenges to students, either by sharing a unique PIN or link via e-mail, Google Classroom or other messengers they use. The challenges called “kahoots,” or trivia quiz games, can be customized and cover a range of topics i.e. English, Science, Math, History, Geography. The company also recently launched an online library for curriculum-aligned kahoots for K–12 classrooms. I am still trying to learn all the cool ways I can incorporate this medium in my classes, but so far my favorite is having my students’ create their own Kahoots! to share and play in class. My ELLs focus on creating vocabulary games so they are learning the synonyms and antonyms in English so deeply since they have to create the answer choices as well as the questions. My more advanced students create formative assessments without even realizing it on literature we read in class like Macbeth. I can even retrieve data on each kid’s answers and note their progress in the reports option. Coolest thing ever though is that the immediate scores come up on the leaderboard on the Smart Board but no one knows who got which answers correct or incorrect except for me and that respective student.
The potential problems that have arisen with my student population which is Title I, is not having a cell phone to play with or not having a data plan with service. So I reserve class sets of laptops just in case we need them and I provide them with my hotspot for data. This easily avoids kids feeling bad about not having and prevents teasing because no one really pays attention to who has or has not because they are all so engaged in the game designing and competition of creating the best questions and researching the best answer choices. Resources to participate fully are made available to all. My ELLs love creating games in their native language and sharing them which gives my native English speakers a great insight and lesson on how it feels to try to learn content in a different language. Very empowering for them!
Only other negative issue I have experienced was bot hacking our games. I’m not sure I am saying that correctly or even sure I can explain in writing what that is, but it happened, it ruined our games, and we had to start over. I did figure out who did it but it wasn’t the norm. Only one wise guy in one class who eventually stopped when I redirected his brilliant sinister gamer mind by assigning him more rigorous tasks to focus on completing! Conclusion: Kahoots! has opened up a whole new world for my kids to succeed and learn. I am super stoked! Game on!