Where Does Play Begin?

Of course, there is one major thing to remember while pursuing a change in your education style and integration of play: DIGITAL IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR PHYSICAL AND VICE VERSA. Both have room within the classroom and specific use cases, and both deserve advocacy. Remember, you are preparing your students for life out in the real world, a society which has shown increased use in technology, and so we should prepare them for that experience. As Maryanne Wolf puts it, our preparation of students for integration within our increasingly digitized society should be "akin to nurturing a deal-language learner," and to do that, they must understand how to code-switch between physical and digital mediums to fit the proper occasion.

The ways we might encourage this growth also depends on the age and skill of our students. For example, younger students may be better suited towards physical forms of play, which could be as simple as encouraging use of their imagination, playing make-believe, and engaging with them to strengthen social-emotional skills. This would also include the use of physical print while reading as a means of building "tactile associations," along side "core temporal and spatial dimensions in reading." As our students learn these abilities, you might want to integrate faster-paced digital methods of interaction which give more room for play and development of STEM skills. While this may sound reductive towards your subject being taught, the purpose is actually to help students develop other skills in their "deductive, inductive, and analogical skills" in technological playgrounds. Students begin to understand sequencing and logical orders of systems through these digital lessons which may then be applied to the core subject they are learning, acting not as a replacement, but as a form of supplemental education that will also provide them practical skills in our technologically developed society.

As students explore these creative outlets, it is again important to remember your role as the teacher in their play. Research has indicated that many teachers make minimal effort in regards to integrating themselves within their student's play, which results in lack of development within those students. Without the support of their educator, a lack of change in curriculum can occur for students to properly utilize play in the classroom (Devi, Fleer, and Li, 2018). This thought extends beyond the classroom, as other stakeholders within a student's life hold influence over the development of their play and thus their skills. Discussing and collaborating with these stakeholders, both in and out of school, staff or family, help to further develop a culture of play, expanded to accommodate students and their needs (Johnston, Highfield, and Hadley, 2018).

Discussion as to what forms of technology can be utilized for play within the classroom will vary as a result of these discussions, and each has their place within the classroom as to how effective they will be. However, by becoming more tech-literate, we as educators can help our students develop practical skills within our classrooms.

Of course, one of the biggest hurdles that an educator can face when integrating technology within their classroom, whether for play or other purposes, is available resources. Many students grow up within underprivileged environments which lack the same ability to access new technology that may also be utilized within the classroom. There is also the matter of how the technology may be utilized, either as a tool meant for furthering their educational goals or as a means of pure entertainment, perhaps resulting in a hinderance in learning. This is again more reason to include a student's stakeholders in the discussion of integration, as leaving parents ignorant to the cause is only more reason that students may inevitably fall back into the trap of spending hours swiping on popular social media apps.

Situations such as these are far more global and difficult for individual teachers to tackle. However, there have been developments in resolving this gap present within students' lives, as seen by the winner of XPRIZE for impact, which gave students access to open-source and localized technology, which can be downloaded for free here.

This is all well and good, but it brings us back to the question of what you can do within your own classroom. How can you integrate play within your classroom in a way that also accommodates the need for students to become bilingual in physical and digital mediums? Unfortunately, the answer remains more or less the same as what was discussed earlier in this article: take steps to integrate technology within your classroom that are directly applicable to your students and their skill-level. Unfortunately, there are very little studies on the topic to provide much more advice beyond that. Understanding your students, building relations with them and assessing their skill in a stress-free manner are probably your safest bets to beginning the process of integration. By doing so, you will understand what types of play you can lead your students into, what will be effective for their growth, provided you have the resources to give it to them. The most important thing you can remember as an educator is to guide your students to a future of success by giving them the tools necessary for growth forcing the answers upon them.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started on integrating:

Silas Solutions:

Helps meet "the social-emotional needs of students in general, special, and transition-education programs through an interactive, avatar-based software platform."

Twine:

"An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories."

CAST:

Organization that provides guided support and digital tools to assist children in advancing their learning.