New Media and New Literacies

  https://oregontrail.ws/ Oregon Trail, created in 1971, is a classic educational computer game simulating the historic journey of pioneers traveling to Oregon. Initially, it was a text-based game designed for high school history students. The players are a group of settlers guided by a wagon leader traveling to Oregan. The game involves talking about the travel pace, food ratios, and challenges such as weather conditions, diseases, and river crossing. The game came to American classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s, and over the years, it has undergone numerous updates and adaptations, including versions for different computer platforms and mobile devices and updates to graphics and features ( https://oregontrail.ws/ ).  The game can be implemented in middle school and high school social studies, humanities, and U.S. history courses while teaching topics such as Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, Exploration of the West, the Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea journey, and the Oreg...

  M6 Blog Post 5 Google Classroom: Google ClassroomGoogle Siteshttps://sites.google.com › view › classroom-workspace Google Classroom is a learning platform developed by Google. The platform became popular at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when schools were forced to work remotely. The goal of the platform is to create, distribute, grade assignments, and share files between students and teachers. The main features of Google Classroom are streaming, classwork, and people. The people who have access to a particular classroom are teachers, students, and their guardians. All stakeholders can navigate the content like assignments, students’ work, announcements, grades, and feedback. Through Google Classroom, students can also use several apps of Google Workspace such as Meet, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Chat, etc. This allows communication between students, teachers, and guardians to constantly be engaged in learning progress. Google Classroom is relatively easy to navigate and offe...

  Artificial Intelligence in educational settings It has been a few years since ChatGPT became available to the public. This significant milestone in technology has started to impact many areas of our daily and professional lives including education. In the field of education, AI can offer many benefits. It includes personalized learning, efficient administrative tasks, convenient access to resources, language support, and many more. On the other hand, integrating AI in education presents several challenges, for instance, data privacy, bias and fairness of algorithms and outcomes, proper training to effectively use AI, ethical considerations, etc. Addressing these challenges and maximizing the use of AI requires a collaborative effort among educators, policymakers, technologists, and other stakeholders.  At this point, it is evident that AI is becoming an integral part of our lives and learning. It also contributes to the development of new literacies by shaping and extending ...