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Badges are a hot topic in education these days. Edutopia has a list of badges you can self-select or apply for, Mozilla’s Open Badge Project provides an infrastructure (still in Beta), including code, for the designing, earning and issuing of … Continue reading
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Ironically, while Common Core is causing a shift in pedagogy in traditional face-to-face classrooms, online classrooms are proliferating with the previously used pedagogy. The Common Core movement has veteran teachers rethinking and changing the way they teach. It is not … Continue reading
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Large international conferences always create a buzz, feeling of excitement and lots of talk about “where do we go from here?” Often it dissipates over the following weeks, not with ISTE’s SIGVE. The ISTE SIGVE 2012 Playground at the annual … Continue reading
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The Internet is vast, diverse, and can be dangerous just like our physical world. Helping our youth by imparting information regarding the world and how to deal with it goes back to the beginning of time, I am sure that … Continue reading
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The Google Hangout screen on the right includes the screens of 9 colleagues, each of which can be viewed with a click. The screen on the left shows me in a game moving about and getting instructions from more experienced participants. … Continue reading
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I come across an article several times a week that describes a K-12 district or a state’s efforts for offering the opportunity for students to “learn online”. Higher education has been involved with online/distance learning for a longer period of … Continue reading
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The VWBPE MOOC took me into WoW last week. It was a bit of a learning curve, but my Virtual World (SL, RG, Opensim) experience did give me some frame of reference, particularly with basic movement and communication skills. … Continue reading
Teachers attend Machinima Monday at the Montmarte Theatre in Second LIfe.
The second week of the 4-week VWBPE Games and Education Tour MOOC had a Machinima focus. What fun to watch and participate with fellow educators as they crammed an incredible amount of energy, curiosity, intellect, humor and talent into developing machinima to help us all learn to do it better and to help our students with machinima as a learning strategy. The word that kept cropping up was FUN…and fun it was, sometimes funNY.
The week started with a Second Life Machinima Monday meeting with non-educators, an introduction to some machinima created by artists using this medium to relay emotions and ideas. There was much discussion on technical issues…aspect ratio, capture tools, in world camera devices, editing software, special effects, space navigators to name a few. Always a benefit to get a different perspective. Our Hostess, the gracious and talented Chantal Harvey facilitated the conversation and welcomed teachers to join the digital artisan group.
Discussing a possible script with an alien avatar – the alien ended up in the movie Sand Surf Saloon.
The remainder of the week consisted of working groups, and some individual work on machinima with the of using the medium for teaching and learning. The MOOC participants were all comfortable in virtual environments and some, though not all, had significant comfort with creating machinima. The week was an opportunity for educators to work together on a machinima project and reflect on the potential use with students and in delivery of instruction. K-12 and higher education educators worked side-by-side, incorporating strategies, taking on a variety of roles (script development, actor, director, machinimatographer, builder, costume designer, sound editor, video editor, stunt actor, special effects editor), and collaborating to complete a project in less than 1 week.
Attendees enjoy teacher created machinima at the Gaity Theatre on Second Life.
The exercise served to help us understand what we can expect of your students and what skills our students will need and will develop as they participate in this kind of learning activity. The culminating activity was a Premier held at the Gaity Theatre on Caledon in Second Life, a tour destination from week 1 of the MOOC.
As the ISTE Conference this summer draws near, this talented group of machinima educators will continue to polish off their work and encourage colleagues and students to submit their digital creations to the ISTE EDUmachinma Fest. No doubt we will have entries form the growing number of virtual worlds and from a growing number of participants.
The VWBPE Machinima developed last week:
Sand Surf Saloon; Cowboys and Aliens
http://staff.tamucc.edu/jdoan/MOOC/Cowboys and Aliens.mp4
VWBPE 2012 Volunteer Appreciation
They Came for the Cavorite
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzj6oDfq8T0
The students in “Norma Underwood’s” class in an Arizona public school are building and scripting in a 3D environment, sculpting in Rokuro, collaborating on projects, and communicating with their peers and interested visitors. I had the opportunity to visit Norma’s virtual class space on Reaction Grid, never having to leave my home state over 2000 miles away. What a treat to see 12 and 13 year olds assembling, communicating and cooperating in a medium that many are completely unaware of.
The class is an art class, lucky for these students they have a teacher who acknowledges and has taken the time to learn an art medium for the future. The young architects and 3D artisans have used floor-plans to build 3D homes, decorated them and added items like video games and chess sets. Learning objectives focus primarily on standards in the area of art and mathematics. Additionally, Norma is incorporating 21st Century objectives like collaboration, communication and problem solving. These are not as easily tested in the traditional assessments required by the state but obvious in the products the students have created and obvious as well when you watch them engaged in their work.
A lecture hall filled with students and an instructor lecturing about a topic he/she knows very well does not guarantee learning is taking place, neither in real life nor in the virtual world. Good teaching requires that the students do something in order to meet the objectives of the lesson. Student engagement can range from taking notes and asking questions to discussing and working on an assignment that requires using information and skills. The level of engagement correlates with the learning that takes place. The video below is one created by students at Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood NJ. Students undoubtedly learned more than the significance of Apollo as they interacted, on various levels, to create the video. Additional work from middle school students at this school is posted on their wiki.
Some videos illustrating the concept of changing our teaching paradigm are Ken Robinson’s Changing Education Paradigms and Dr Tae’s Building A New Culture of Teaching And Learning . They are not short videos but definitely worth a watch…. and a share. The men in these two videos describe eloquently how teaching needs to change in order to impact student learning, I suggest teaching in the virtual world should have a level of engagement similar to what they advocate.
Educators who have ventured into the virtual world have some innovation and sense of adventure to begin with – just by their presence. Instruction in the virtual world must mirror that innovation by changing the paradigm, making sure that students (whatever their age) do more than “just sit there”. Getting students to move into groups and perform activities in the real world requires classroom management skills, and an impact on space, time, and sound that could be disruptive if not handled with expertise. The virtual world has these elements but it is easier to move and alter the space, it takes less time, and sound can always be mitigated with individual headphones and microphones. The part that takes some effort is ensuring a student focus. At the lowest level of engagement, the instructor should ask students/participants for feedback and then address the questions. For more intense interaction and more learning the instructor can:
In either world, the person doing the communicating is the person doing the learning.
