Happy Super Tuesday!

I introduced Scratch to a new group of 8th graders today. I got a little carried away with the example I gave them showing how they could take an existing game on the Scratch website and modify it to make it your own. Since today is Super Tuesday I thought it would be appropriate to make a MOD of Angry Birds using the candidates heads and throw in a bunch of the ridiculous things they've said on the campaign trail. Enjoy!

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Weekly Tech Tip - Game-Based Learning Environments and Self-Selection

Weekly Tech Tip:

Related Links:

• Team - Drill Head (Ananth Pai's Classroom Website)
  
• Tutpup (Web)
  
• Tumblebooks (Web)
  
• iCivics (Web)
• Manga High (Web)
• Raft Race (Web)
• Timez Attack (PC)
• Personal Trainer Math (DS)
• MathBlaster (DS)
• Learn Math (DS)
• Brain Age (DS)
• Learn Geography (DS)
• Bookworm (DS)
• Scribblenauts (DS)
  

Video Festival:

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Link Stew:

• Eden Prairie OKs changing school lines (Star Tribune)
• Facebook vs. Twitter Infographic
• Books Ngram Viewer
• Future of Education Talk With Alfie Kohn (December 16th) Recording
• List of Resources for Developing AUPs
  

Blog Carnival:

• I Don't Give a Crap by Dean Shareski on Ideas and Thoughts
• Ban fiction from the curriculum by Grant Wiggins on ASCDEdge
• Backwards by Design by Bill Ivey on Independent School Educators Network
• The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time by Al Franken on Huffington Post
• Tip of the Week – 65 History Twitter feeds by Glenn Wiebe on History Tech
• A week without technology? by Ira Socol on SpeEdChange
• Crowdsourcing Alternatives To Delicious by Alec Couros on Open Thinking
• What Makes Kids Creative? A Box or a Spaceship? on The Daily Riff
  

Retweetable Tweets:

MDE approved two more charter schools authorizers: Audubon Center of the North Woods and Northfield Public Schools, http://ht.ly/3sQpuless than a minute ago via HootSuiteMn Dept. Education
MnDeptEd

I find it odd that an infant will ask "why" 300 times a day yet adults are infatuated with asking just "how".less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJoe Bower
joe_bower

#TIES10 STEM Panel Discussion

On Monday at the TIES Conference I attended a panel discussion on STEM. I was most impressed with what third grade teacher Ananth Pai was doing with technology in his classroom. Mr. Pai is a second career 4th year teacher who says that in his first year he realized that he had to make a change in his classroom. He started collecting technologies that could enhance learning in his classroom including many that some would find surprising like the Nintendo DS and other small portable devices. What struck me most about his approach was not so much how he integrated the technologies but how he selected them. His principal, three of his students, and their parents attended the session to support and share the good things that Mr. Pai is doing in his classroom. What struck me was their testimony about how much their teacher listens. Mr. Pai says he starts with what technologies the kids tell him they think they should be using admitting that they know more about what will engage them than he does. I absolutely love this approach and hope to visit his class sometime in the next couple of weeks to discuss more with him about his strategy for assessing technology and creating a student-centered learning environment. I highly recommend you check out his class webpage.

Geo Game & Text Messaging Idea #iteach

OK, it is 3:00 on December 23rd, with 20 minutes before Christmas break. Why do all my most creative ideas happen when I know I won't be able devote energy to them for at least 2-5 days? Grrr!

So, here is my big Eureka!:

Two tools I have know about for a while now but have not given too much thought to are uMapper and JotYou. uMapper allows you to create your own Google Map-like embeddable maps with pushpin markers and other information. JotYou is a free text messaging service that allows you to send text messages that are location based. Basically, JotYou lets you send messages to anyone on your contact list who is within so many feet/meters/yards of a specific GPS coordinate. It also lets you set times on those messages so they are delayed or persistent. These two tools used in conjunction could be used to create highly engaging geo games.




Here are just a few, off the top of my head, applications:

1. Create an adventure based on a piece of literature (ex. Turn your school grounds into Mordor).
2. Historical tour.
3. Scavenger hunts.

It is now 3:15 and I need to go. If you can think of any other creative uses of these two tools please leave a comment.

JotYou™ - Location Based Mobile Messaging via kwout

Atmosphir

A couple of months ago I heard about a new game that was in development called Atmosphir. This game is a first person shooter game similar to Mario Bros. What sets it apart from other games is that all the levels in the game are created by the users. When I heard about this I thought it might have some potential for education so I signed up to be a beta tester. This week, after having completely forgot about signing up, I received an email from the developers of this game accepting my invite.

Now, for a few years now some commercial games have come on the market that allow users to make their own mods. What is different about Atmosphir is the whole game is a mod. When you download and install the game you are asked to go to their website and create a user account. When you load the game it asks you to login with your username and password. You are then presented with a few options. You can play, create, or modify your character. When you choose the play option you are presented with a display that looks kind of like YouTube where you can choose from among other user created versions of the game sorted by ratings, most played, etc.

When you choose create you are brought to an editor screen with a blank grid. You can choose among many different objects to build your level. My 4 year old and I spent a good afternoon engaged in this world building and game play. The game engine itself is nice. You get a rich 3D environment, smooth graphics, and complex movement. The biggest downfall I can see is there are no options for users to build or import their own objects. If there were such an option I could see this program being ideal for building educational games. For my purposes this limitation is a huge downfall. However, this project is in private beta and possibly this kind of feedback could make it into later edits of the game.



In its current version it is still a nice constructivist toy. You can build much in the same way you can build with legos. There are quite a few user created levels that exhibit high ammount of creativity. It could also be used to teach about game theory to an extent.

My hopes with this program were that it might have the same potential for engaging students in programming and game creation that Scratch or GameMaker have. While my hopes have been slightly let down at the moment I will continue to watch the development of this game and how it influences other game developers.

A new version of Scratch that works in Second Life came out over the summer. I have yet to play around with it but it looks promising. However, Second Life is not free and presents some unique challenges for use in K-12. I also intend on taking a look at later this fall as it also looks like it might have some potential for education.

Do you know of any other free programs for game creation or free games that allow users to make mods of their game?

Metaplace

Two years ago, as part of my capstone project for my MAED, I was fully entrenched in a study of virtual worlds and their application for education. As part of my research I tested as many free virtual world platforms as I could get my hands on. One platform that was in development at that time that I was not able to access was Metaplace. Metaplace is a totally flash based virtual world platform that can be accessed on any computer. It is free, though some of the things you can do there are not free. When you sign up for an account you get a free world that you can build on. Metaplace provides you with lots of building materials but you can also create your own. Unlike other virtual world platforms you create objects from jpg images. Additionally, you can assign properties to your objects that perform various functions such as opening web pages, playing YouTube videos in the integrated player, perform animations, etc. The list of options is pretty vast.

I played around with this platform for just 30 minutes tonight and found it very easy to build things. I didn't create anything that I feel has any value as of yet but I do see enormous potential for this platform in education. Imagine assigning students to construct their own worlds or multi-player games to demonstrate their learning. I also noticed that these worlds are embeddable:

My Latest Digital Distraction

When I was in college I used to drive 5 miles to use a laundromat in North Fargo even though there were quite a few other laundromats much closer. Part of the reason was that this laundromat always seemed to be cleaner and I could always find open machines but the other major reason was they had an arcade game there that I was addicted to. I never saw this game anywhere else and have not seen it anywhere since. That is until last week. The game is called Puzzle Bobbe and the point of the game is to try to clear the screen by grouping 3 or more bubbles of the same color. This game is extremely simple but rather addictive. I have lost at least an hour a day to it since I discovered it again online in Flash form. So, in the interest of promoting distraction, here it is:

• Mouse click on the flashing "Push 1P Start Button"
• Use right and left arrows to aim
• Press space bar to shoot bubbles

Crayon Physics

Crayon Physics

Prensky Rubish? A Response to a Skeptical Native

Back in January a post was made on TipLine - Gates' Computer Tips regarding a student response to Prensky's, "The Need For Change."
The following is my response to this blogpost. I don't normally repost my comments on others blogs but I feel strong enough about this topic to do so here:

I have always been skeptical of Prensky's work though I am always intrigued by his ideas and inspired by much of what he says. Prensky has a way of convincing most of us that our there is a neurological difference between the generations and that the current young generation is significantly different. He does this by pointing to things that all of us see and speaks to frustrations we all have. He does this in nearly every book or scholarly article he writes. I have to admit that I have at times been convinced by some of his arguments and I still think he has some valid points. Our students are different and the world is changing. That is nothing new. The world is always constantly changing. Change happens in different ways in different fields. Ask a 60 yr old in 1890 if the world was the same as when they were young and I am sure you would get a similar response. Ask an illustrator in the mid 1800s if technology is changing the world and I am sure you would hear an earful since photography brought that profession to a near standstill.

It is the nature of our brains to shape and form based on external stimulus. The stimulus that is around now is different than the stimulus that was around before and is different than the stimulus that will be around in the future. However, there is no affirmative evidence that the way we learn is significantly different today than it was in the past. The way we teach is changing and as Scott McLeod pointed out we have twenty years of research that affirms that a constructivist approach to teaching and learning is more effective than other known models. This does affirm what Prensky tells us about how we teach but what I have always been skeptical of and critical of is the method of content delivery Prensky prescribes. It is not that I don't think games have a place in education, to the contrary I think there is solid research to support their effectiveness (see Malone & Lepper, 1987). The problem is that Prensky represents a business interest that benefits financially from the adoption of a game centered curriculum. Also, as Jamie McKenzie points out, Prensky is not really a researcher and the whole basis for his Native/Immigrant argument is based on one study that he misquotes and spells the author's name wrong.

Prensky represents a polar end of the argument/topic of technology integration in school. I feel his writings are important for reflective practice but that we are building our houses in the sand by basing important pedagogical and curricular components of our practice on his iterations. The other polar end of this argument is represented by the student/teacher response to Prensky's article. I have to say I whole heartedly disagree with most of what this student/teacher writes, although I must admit that I had some similar responses the first time I read any of Prenskys work. I will address each point separately here:

1. he wrote: "The problem with constructing a "student-centered" curriculum where the
   students spend their time "learning" by connecting with their peers all
   over the world through blogs and whatnot is that this only works if the
   student knows the material already...The whole point of a teacher is that the teacher knows more about the
   topic than you do, and you need them to impart their knowledge to you
   before you can really do anything with it." -This response missed the point. The use of online publication tools in education is not always meant to be some kind of summative assessment. The value in activities such s blogging or collaborating on a wiki is that these tools are fluid. Students learn from interacting with others. A blog can be used to keep a record of progress on a project and to invite feedback from others outside the classroom community. These tools open up a whole world of human resources to students that were not available, or not easily available, before. Also, a student-centered curriculum is not one where the student dictates what is taught or what they will learn but rather a curriculum where the student interests drive the learning. Idealy this would look something like a student and a teacher both taking turns driving somewhere.
   
2. he wrote: "so just because kids seem disconnected in school doesn't necessarily
   have to do with technology. More likely its the usual reasons - they
   see us, like their parents, as authority figures trying to "keep them
   down"." I don't think this comment is totally off-base. I do agree that drop-out rates probably have less to do with technology than they have to do with other factors. However, technology can play a factor in possible solutions. I worked at an alternative school for two years. I have seen a lot of students drop out and understand the reasons pretty well in each case. Most of the time these students dropped out for reasons stemming from external factors such as homelessness, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, or involvement in organized crime. Of all the students I saw drop out of high school in the past two years I can only point to engagement as being the prime reason in two cases and those were two of the brightest students I ever encountered in eight years of teaching. In those two cases it was less about the technology but rather the methods of teaching and learning that were at fault. Had we been able to personalize their learning more and teach them, or rather guide them, in academic study that was more rigorous they may not have dropped out. However, both students were not motivated to do more because they knew it would not be sufficiently rewarded. I am sure both of these students will go on, much like this teacher/student's father, and have a successful career and life despite their drop-out status.
3. he wrote: "What matters is not necessarily how much technology you are using.
   Instead, what matters is if you are moving past pure memorization to
   higher level thinking. If you can use technology to do that, so be it,
   but if not, it doesn't make it any less authentic." I completely agree.

Collaborative Storytelling

About a month ago our 5th graders started a collaborative project with a school 100 miles away. They have been taking turns writing a story using 21classes. This is not simply a story though. We have framed this project for the students as a game. Each student is paired with a student from their class. While one student is writing the other is out taking a picture. The student whose turn it is to write has to read all the blog posts in the story and find a way to incorporate the last picture added into the story. When they are finished they post the photo their partner took for the next group to write about. Their photography goal is to find a picture that the next group will struggle with finding a way to incorporate into the story. I predicted that this would force the students to be more creative and ultimately come up with more interesting stories. This project also promotes reading because to do the assignment they have to read the whole story that has been written so far. This project has, from what I observed, increased the engagement level of all students involved at both schools. Seeing that this has been successful in its trial run our next goal is to do this project, perhaps next year, with more than one school and hopefully on a global scale. Such a project could potentially involve as many as ten different schools granted that half are from Europe, Asia, Africa or Australia, and the other half are from the Americas.

To read these students blogs you can go to Grade 5 Collaborative.

Interactive Webcam in the Classroom?

I have spent some time the last two days playing around with webcam games. These are games that, if you have a webcam, you can play by moving. You control objects on the screen with your image. Amazing! My first thought is that this interface could be used to overcome 1st grader problems reaching the smartboard. Second, I thought this might offer some way of many students interacting with the projection at the same time. Third, and most obviously, this technology has immediate and definite uses in Physical Education. I wonder if there is an easy way to create these kinds of games and programs. It would be nice to be able to make interactive learning games and simulations that make use of interactive webcam technology.

http://www.extendedreality.com/webcam_games_info.html - site with links to interactive webcam games