Connected Learning Summit 2019

Teaching Young People to Communicate (Better) Online
Michelle Ciccone

Communicating online effectively, positively, and powerfully is essential, for personal and professional success, as well as for the forward movement of our democracy. This showcase will explore best practices for addressing the online communication skills of young people, and will get you thinking about how you can explore this topic in your own classroom context.

The Museum of Me: Exploring and Exhibiting Identity With the Video Game, “What Remains of Edith Finch”
Matthew Farber, Susan E Rivers, Paul Darvasi, Michelle Bertoli

There are currently few appealing, developmentally appropriate methods for engaging teens in their own social and emotional learning. Commercial video games offer rich, mediated, interactive narrative experiences that can be integrated into the classroom to support teen students’ core academic knowledge as well as their social and emotional resilience. We used the award-winning video game and digital “museum,” “What Remains of Edith Finch,” as the basis for a curricular unit to engage high school students in building literacy skills as well as key aspects of resilience including autonomy and self-awareness. “What Remains of Edith Finch” tells the story of an 18-year-old girl's ostensibly cursed family history through the mechanic of exploring her childhood home, which has become a museum preserving the identities of her family members, most of whom have succumbed to tragic fates.

This digital museum can be used in educational settings to explore with teens how they become aware of and represent their identities publicly and privately through a series of lessons that include gameplay and cover topics including: how objects can be used to define and perform identity; self-expression on social media; healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms and the labels associated with them; family and social influences on identity formation; questions of diversity and sociocultural differences in understandings and expressions of identity; the impact of choices on identity and questions of fixed versus malleable traits. The session will describe methods for integrating existing digital games into instruction to support teens’ holistic development.