Kevin Norris
ENG 665/Reading and Thinking Notes
Professor Rodrigo
November 18, 2014


“The Design is the Game: Writing Games, Teaching Writing”
Alice J. Robinson’s article “The Design is the Game: Writing Games, Teaching Writing,” discussed how games take on the same approach to developing it as writers. This is interesting because I said the same thing to my students the other day before I taught them how to use SCRATCH.

The article states that, like a story, a video game has a beginning and an end. The developers have to plan out what goes in between.
According to the article, there is a team that develops the games. In a lot of assignments in a writing classes there is collaboration learning. Each person can be assigned a task that relates to creating the whole project.
A video on how to write stories for video games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W792uQyjivg

 Furthermore, though it relates to the grade school levels. Gaming also relates to upper level college curriculums. For example, in the MFA in Creative Writing program, I’m given a basic framework of what I have to do, but like a game, I get to pick and choose a lot of my courses and the topic for my final project.

“Kindle in the Writing Classroom”
A video that gives you ten ways to use kindle in the classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFTBxBIf0I0

Acheson et al.’s article “Kindle in the Writing Classroom,” discussed how two librarians and an English teacher used kindles in their classrooms and the results of this experiment.
First, the article discussed how the teacher was forced to change the pedagogy. Students were able to choose whether or not they can participate. This reminds me of what my school is doing. Students are going to be supplied with notebooks. However, as far as I know, the students are required to check out a notebook.

  
To access the program, the teacher and librarians took observation notes. Then the students took surveys. The results showed that most students were comfortable with using digital text.
Then, new survey were conducted. One survey showed that most students preferred getting their news from online.
However, observations showed a sort of different perspective. The teacher noticed that students were not taking notes on the kindle. Instead, the students were resorting to taking paper notes instead of highlight texts.
However, the librarian’s observations showed a different story. The librarian noted that the student like downloading the text- it was quicker.
Nevertheless, a lot of students liked the convenience of the Kindle. It was lighter than a book and they could read while exercising and doing other things. However, some feel like they are closer to the text when they read a paper edition. Some found it easier to search a text because they only had to write one word in to search for a passage.

One of the major problems was breaking the kindle. Kindles are not as durable as books, plus they are more expensive.
The authors end it by stating that there is an evolution going on in the classroom. Different ways of teaching text will be necessary.