Leveling Up: Information Literacy & Video Game Strategies

As I begin a new semester and finish some writing for publication, I'm looking backward to some of the instruction sessions with video game strategies and looking forward to what our information literacy program can improve on.

While I've posted lesson plans before, I have not posted the first gaming strategy session I attempted. Now, the first time I tried it - it failed. But not because of the lesson. It failed because created too open of an assignment and the students were confused with what to do after each step. But like most teaching, it improves with practice and the successive times that I taught this musical period web exploration and evaluation it was successful.

I hope that it can provide others with ideas about how to structure information literacy sessions that incorporate video game strategies.

Lesson Plan


Introduction to Music Time Period Research

Goal: Students will identify a variety of quality resources from each musical period.

Objectives:

- Selects efficient and effective approaches for accessing the information needed

- Examines and compares information from various sources in order to evaluate reliability, validity, accuracy, authority, timeliness

- Determines probable accuracy by questioning the source of the data

- Maintains a log of activities related to the seeking and evaluating process.

- Participates in peer workgroups

Activity: Identify one internet source on a given time period; verify the quality of the source; identify one subject from the period (artist, style, composition) with both a print and online source.

Class Period:

- Introduce the session, goals, and Internet Evaluation (10 min)

o Handout web evaluation worksheet

o Clarify content and terms of worksheet, using example

- Students organize into groups of two & receive objective worksheet

o Worksheet describes goal (as listed in the “Activity” above) and the criteria needed to achieve each goal

o Each group is given a musical period to research

- Students work together to complete each goal (25 min)

o Goal 1: Locate 1 internet source on your time period

§ Use the Web Evaluation worksheet to determine the quality of the source

§ Record the search strategy used (terms, search engine, different sites viewed, etc…)

o Goal 2: Identify 1 focused subject from that period based on the information discovered through Goal 1

o Goal 3: Locate 1 internet source on your focused subject from Goal 2

§ Use the Web Evaluation worksheet to determine the quality of the source

§ Record the search strategy used (terms, search engine, different sites viewed, etc…)

o Goal 4: Locate one print resource on the focused subject of Goals 2 & 3

§ List any differences you observe

- Review results of Goals 1, 3 & 4 from selected groups (15 min)

o Each group will describe their results for one of the Goals

§ Using the lab software, a group will be selected to describe the results

§ The software will push the groups screen onto the rest of the class

§ The selected group will described why they choose the website/material they did

2 comments:

Kiara said...

Woow, cool, you have seminars for Games? I hope I can be part of such informative sessions. I hope to know more of Download Games, and fully understand the gaming industry.

Ipsos games research said...

Just discovered your blog and have enjoyed reading through some of your posts.