Reply to this post with a response to the prompts below by the module due date.

• Introduce yourself with your name, college, role(s)
• Share the rationale cards you kept in your hand all the way to the end of the game. Why did you keep these to the end? Why did you discard particular cards?
• What connections can you make between the values you reviewed and the examples from people’s digital lives?
• How did you interact with the game? What worked / didn’t work about our game prototype? Did you follow the rules as written? Did you “tinker” with the algorithm (rules) of the game? If so, how?

Reply to this post with a response to the prompts below by the module due date.

• Introduce yourself with your name, college, role(s)
• Share the rationale cards you kept in your hand all the way to the end of the game. Why did you keep these to the end? Why did you discard particular cards?
• What connections can you make between the values you reviewed and the examples from people’s digital lives?
• How did you interact with the game? What worked / didn’t work about our game prototype? Did you follow the rules as written? Did you “tinker” with the algorithm (rules) of the game? If so, how?

[Stephen Powers]

Good day, my name is Stephen Powers and I am a professor at Bronx Community College, appointed to the Department of Education and Academic Literacy since 2000. Prior to that I had taught middle school, served as an elementary principal, as well as a high school assistant principal for academics.

The cards I kept in my hand through the end of the game (5, 8, 9, 11, & 16) I think reflect on my focus in trying to prepare teachers for the 21st century. I absolutely believe in the use of technology in education at all levels, and I do see CS not as a silo’d subject but as integrated into all teaching. I think those cares reflect that. I do not think I discarded any particular cards, I just made choices to keep those five. If I did it over, my cards may well be different.

Teaching at Bronx Community College, growing up in inner-city Brooklyn, having worked in Queens, East Flatbush Brooklyn, and now the Bronx, I experience not just an achievement gap but now a digital divide (card 5) When I started at BCC, in 2000, students did not have access at home or on mobile devices, so they came to the campus for access, then as the Generation Z students began arriving on campus, they were far ahead of the campus and the instructors in terms of technology, though not instructional technology.

I took the first five cards, and then made exchanges. Keeping it to five made sense, though at first I wanted 7-10, but narrowing down forced further thought. I followed the rules, somewhat, and got to the desired end (five cards, and five in the overflow pile) as directed.

[Elise Langan (She/Her/)]

Hello,

The cards that I kept were: 5, 18, 22, 31, 40 for many of the reasons that my colleague, Dr. Powers, has articulated. The foremost reason is closing the “digital divide” since many of our students @ BCC don’t have sufficient access and resources to close the gap.

I feel strongly that we need to train pre-service teachers in digital storytelling, etc. in order to make them competitive in their job search.

 

[Minkyung Choi]

Hi, my name is Min, and I’m an Assistant Professor in the Education and Academic Literacy department at BCC. My primary area of research is literacy.

I was left with cards 11, 13, 25, 26, and 30. Given my interest in literacy, I feel like many of the cards I selected speak to the digital literacy skills that will be required of students. These cards resonated most with me because I’m constantly asking whether students have the tools/experience/instruction/guidance to navigate texts, both traditional and multimodal.

I was struck by the examples provided of people’s digital lives — most notably, the breadth of activities. There was one particular one, Youth Platform NYC, which I thought was a great example in which young people integrated data analysis into a digital platform. I thought it was interesting because the digital platform allows for data to be presented in an almost narrative format. When you compare this to more traditional forms of data, it can be used to reach a much wider audience. There were also examples in which digital lives stretched far beyond social media and were used for civic engagement and advocacy. Seeing these examples and then looking back at my cards, I felt the cards made much more sense — I could see what the end-product of some of the ideas on the cards might look like.

The game worked well — some of the ideas did not resonate, and it took a while to try to visualize what they meant. In these cases, I just skipped.

[Carlos Liachovitzky]

Hi, Carlos from BCC, I teach in the Bio Department

After going back and forth a few times, I kept #6, #9, and #15,  which I interpret as different ways to understand how ed tech tools work, and take ownership and control of them. Or, opt for the first choice in the “program or be programmed” view of the world, as #6 states.

The other two are #5 and #12, although I would change the focus of #12 from “contribute productively to society as a whole” to “contribute to the well being to society as a whole”, that relates better with #5.

The five cards together answer (initially!) my why digital and computational literacy go together question as they cover different aspects of equity and empowerment for teachers and students.

Actually, I cannot find the rules. So, this is what I did: I shuffled the cards, I read them one by one and I separated those that interpellated me the most (maybe 10+). I saw a common theme among the 6, 9, and 15, and between 5 and 12 (modifying the statement of 12 a little), and those are the five I kept.

[Tonya Johnson]

My name is Tonya.  The cards I kept at the end of the game were #3, #5, #8, #13, and #17. I kept these cards because I felt that spoke volume to what I think and feel about education and technology. I discarded some of the cards I discarded, not because I felt they were less valuable, but because they were not a priority as to what I value.

The one that I connected to the most was #3 because I was a technology teacher when I was teaching in elementary school.  I struggled with ways to reach the students and keep them engaged.  With all of the limitations and knowledge that students had at that time it was a struggle.  I feel this card connected most with me and my experience.

I actually read through each of the cards and pulled out the ones that were most important to me.

[Propa Akter (she/her)]

Hi! My name is Propa. I am an adjunct in BCC’s EDU dept.

The cards I kept in my hand all the way to the end were 13, 26, 30, 41, 28. This was tough — I felt that so many cards were relevant to me! At the end, I did tinker with the rules a little bit…. After I drew all the cards from the deck into the the discard and overflow pile, I reviewed the overflow pile and switched some of the cards in my hand for those.

One card in my hand that resonated with me the most is 13, “tech is changing the nature of schooling. Teachers need to have knowledge and skills to navigate digital and computational tools and literacies.” I found this especially relevant as my first year teaching at a public school was teaching fully remote during COVID — everything was through tech! When we went back in-person to teach the year after, we still used/were required to use some of tech inside the classroom as well.

In addition, another card that stood out to me was 41, “data practices like collection, analysis, and visualization support teachers with learning about learners and communities, assessment, planning, and reflection.” This card reminded me of a time in the EDU 40/Fieldwork Seminar class I taught last semester during a discussion my class had about incorporating technology into the classroom and its importance. I shared that as a teacher, sometimes we administered summative math unit tests on the iPad, which was helpful to me as a teacher because the iPad/system graded the tests for me. An EDU 40 student who wasn’t the “biggest fan” of using technology shared that was an example of how technology was “making teachers lazy” for not being able to grade tests by hand. In reality, we had to administer the tests on the iPad because the system generates data from the tests automatically and we are able to use the data to determine the strengths of the student and what still needs to be worked on — plus the added benefit of saving us so much time! I use data collection practices in my college classes too such as administering surveys or polls to reflect about my teaching practices and determine the needs of my students.

I reviewed the Emoti-Con Digital Youth Festival and found some really cool projects! One project I liked that seemed still in the works was “Anime Selector”, where you’re randomly given an anime character every time you refresh and I though that connected to the CS value of “Personal Agency, Joy, and Fulfillment.”