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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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Teachers are generally a creative and resourceful bunch, and though we do make use of commercially produced materials, we often customize them for our students. Unusual, humorous, poignant and the relevant materials (pictures, artifacts, movies, stories) help us to … 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
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.
Transmedia Storytelling is a strategy that uses current and emerging technologies along with traditional strategies to enable the participant to become immersed in a story to increase engagement and understanding. Henry Jenkins, Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California, explains that “In transmedia, elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole.” It is a strategy that is used in the world of marketing and entertainment, still lagging in the education sector.
Telling stories across multiple platforms and formats addresses multiple learning modalities, encourages participation and motivates participants. Stories are used to teach a wide variety of concepts at all levels of education. A virtual world with a sim designed to draw students into a “game” could potentially result in a high level of learning of a literary work, historical event, or scientific phenomenon. The compelling attributes of transmedia storytelling are the capacity to engage participants and the capacity to promote creativity among the participants. Engagement is crucial to meaningful learning and creativity is identified as a 21st Century skill necessary to solve problems and be competitive in a global environment. As we look into school reform and teacher preparation for 21st Century schools it may be beneficial to ensure that teachers have some knowledge and skills in the the use of Transmedia storytelling.
The Internet is a text-rich environment, smart phone technology and social networking facilitate the use of text, in a virtual world instruction can be provided in either text or voice mode and each has pros and cons. Shambles Guru provides a useful video describing the setup of voice in Second Life using Viewer 2.
Text allows you to think about what you are communicating, seeing the written word allows for some processing and editing prior to clicking the send button. Text can also be saved and referred to at a later time, always beneficial. Text is the preferred method to communicate when language translation is required and the appropriate communication with hearing impaired students. The downside of text is that it is difficult to simultaneously demonstrate while communicating in text. Another potential drawback is “text speak” and typos. Though typically understood there is potential for misunderstanding and it develops a habit of ignoring typos and using abbreviations. A class participant must be able to read and follow instructions in text. This has potential for problems depending on the audience and individual capabilities. Responding to individual questions in IM texting can be confusing (not seeing the message, having too many message boxes open, blocking view of the screen due to message boxes).
Voice allows an instructor to deliver a message the way that an instructor delivers in a real life classroom setting, a clarification is immediate and intonation is clear. The lack of visual cues requires an instructor to use other methods to engage students and to ensure the message was delivered. Ideally the students are also using voice so that 2-way communication can take place. This requires an etiquette system of watching the screen for who is speaking, listening to the spoken text and speaking at a specific pause, so as not to interrupt the speaker. It requires that the communicators listen more carefully than they may do in a real life classroom. The teacher must also be watchful of students as they are performing particular tasks in the virtual setting. The teacher needs to continuously move the camera around and watch students to ensure that students are performing tasks as directed, providing appropriate verbal direction as needed.
The ideal strategy is to use both text and voice. This addresses various learning styles and takes advantage of the pros of each method, minimizing the cons. This can be done is several ways. The instructor can:
Teachers should practice the strategies in order to become comfortable and adept at using them, ultimately selecting which is most appropriate.
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.
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Assessment is a necessary part of teaching and learning. Although standardized testing is a piece of the evaluation picture, other evaluation strategies add to the data and provide a more comprehensive view of the success of teaching and learning. … Continue reading
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