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“Your students’ work is being affected by their out-of-school video gaming!  The average gamer plays 13 hours a week.”(McGonigal, 2011).  Don’t you wish your students were spending that much time reading and writing outside of your classroom?  Well—in many cases they are!  MMOPRGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) such as World of WarCraft, Minecraft and Guild Wars 2 are a powerful force in many students’ lives.  The good news for educators is that there are huge literacy demands of the players involved with these and other games.  In this webinar for the edWeb.net Game-Based Learning community, Boise State University’s Lee Ann Tysseling unfolded the literacy demands (text complexity in both reading and writing) of game play and explored strategies to help students learn to apply the advanced literacy skills and strategies they have acquired while playing games to their academic literacy tasks.  If you work with educators who blame video games for almost all the problems of youth, this webinar provided some concrete responses to their criticisms.  In addition to vocabulary and comprehension development ideas, Lee Ann also shared ideas for how to transfer valuable gaming soft skills such as persistence, resilience, research strategies, and group work to students’ academic tasks.  If we hope to achieve the goals of CCSS we will need to use every available resource.  Helping students leverage the skills and strategies they have honed in countless hours of gaming is a powerful strategy toward achieving CCSS mastery. View the webinar to learn more about gaming for literacy!

Earn your CE Certificate for viewing this recording: Join the free Game-Based Learning community on edWeb.net and take a quiz to receive a CE Certificate for viewing this webinar. Past webinars, presentation slides, and CE quizzes are available in the Resource Library under Web 2.0 Tools.

Game-Based Learning is a professional learning community (PLC) that provides educators, game developers, researchers, and industry executives with a place to learn, ask questions, discuss topics, and share information about games and learning.  This program is sponsored by Filament Games and co-hosted by edWeb.net, the Education Division of Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), and ISTE’s VEN.

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