Melissa Cole New Media & New Literacies

Growing up, I never played many video games. I know that I’ll be dating myself here, but I remember when my older brother would bring home Sega Genesis games that he would borrow from his friends to play on his console. As older brothers do, he never allowed me to have a turn, so much of my “gaming experience” comes from peering over his shoulder as he spent hours playing games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Sonic & Knuckles. Though I never had much of an affinity for gaming and will admit that I could have been counted amongst those curmudgeonly voices asking kids to abandon this form of “frivolous entertainment” (Lynch, 2021, p. 120) and get out and play, researchers like Abrams and Gerber (Lynch, 2021) show us just how misguided that attitude is. Abrams and Gerber enumerate the many benefits of video games highlighting them as forms of authentic assessment within educational settings, with Shaffer (2010) lauding them for cultivating problem solving skills.  The Inter...

Inspired by a discussion amongst fellow colleagues in my graduate program, I have decided to explore two K-12 digital communication tools, ClassDojo and ParentSquare . While I have used ClassDojo both as a teacher (at a previous school) and am now becoming acquainted with it as a guardian in the current school year, I wasn’t familiar with ParentSquare at all, that is, until other teachers in my program raved about it.  With that, let’s take a closer look at each of the two digital platforms and learn more about how they function, influence communication, impact learning and more. ClassDojo ClassDojo is a digital communication tool that allows teachers and families to connect. In their words, it’s “[w]here classrooms become communities” (ClassDojo, n.d.). In short, teachers can use ClassDojo (or just “Dojo” for short as my colleagues and I called it) to send mass messages to families or communicate via private message. ClassDojo harkens popular social media platforms with their Cl...