gaming

Teachers Teaching Teachers #192 - Students and Teachers Finding our Missions on Evoke: Rachel Smith and Robin - 03.17.10

Robin is playing Evoke, and on this podcast he tells us why. Robin is in Paul Allison's English class. He's a tenth Grader at the East-West School for International Studies, and on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Robin talks about his experiences in the first couple of weeks of playing Evoke.

We are also joined by Chris Wood, a student teacher from Queens College, CUNY who is working with Paul this semester.

Ninmah!
Rachel Smith

is also playing

Evoke

and she joined us to talk about this Alternate-Reality Game (ARG) as well. Rachel Smith is the Vice President, NMC Services

the New Media Consortium

. In addition to being the lead writer on the Horizon Report, Rachel writes on her

blog

that she has

 

a hard time explaining what I actually do. Some of it is writing (a lot of it, lately, which is not a bad thing). Some of it is drawing, which is pretty cool. I used to doodle in high school and get detention. Now I doodle at work and get kudos. Go figure. I also organize things and direct projects and try to be generally helpful.

Rachel wrote an wonderful introduction to Evoke on her blog, "

Urgent EVOKE: Agent Ninmah is Born

," and she started a Discussion on Evoke, in which she is “

calling all teachers!

” to find ways to collaborate.

Robin is playing Evoke, and on this podcast he tells us why. Robin is in Paul Allison's English class. He's a tenth Grader at the East-West School for International Studies, and on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Robin talks about his experiences in the first couple of weeks of playing Evoke.

We are also joined by Chris Wood, a student teacher from Queens College, CUNY who is working with Paul this semester.

So what is Evoke?

EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world.

It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.

The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.

The game begins on March 3, 2010. Players can join the game at any time.

On May 12th, 2010 the first season of the game will end, and successful participants will form the first graduating class of the EVOKE network.

Ninmah!
Rachel Smith is also playing Evoke and she joined us to talk about this Alternate-Reality Game (ARG) as well. Rachel Smith is the Vice President, NMC Services the New Media Consortium. In addition to being the lead writer on the Horizon Report, Rachel writes on her blog that she has

a hard time explaining what I actually do. Some of it is writing (a lot of it, lately, which is not a bad thing). Some of it is drawing, which is pretty cool. I used to doodle in high school and get detention. Now I doodle at work and get kudos. Go figure. I also organize things and direct projects and try to be generally helpful.

Rachel wrote an wonderful introduction to Evoke on her blog, "Urgent EVOKE: Agent Ninmah is Born," and she started a Discussion on Evoke, in which she is “calling all teachers!” to find ways to collaborate:

There have been many posts in other threads about getting a group of teachers together here on EVOKE. I’d like to pull us together. Here’s my suggestion:
1. In this thread, post who you are and what you teach — or, if you’re a teacher-type but not actually a teacher, like me, tell us what you do. Tell us also where you’re from!
2. Check out the google doc that happyseaurcin started — it has ideas about how to engage teachers in EVOKE.
3. Take a look at the wiki (http://urgentevoke.wikia.com/) and visit the Calling All Teachers page. Add your name (and a link back to your EVOKE profile, if you like) if you’d like to collaborate. If you have an idea for a project, add it to the brainstorming section.
Let’s see if we can get traction over the next couple of weeks and maybe pick an idea or two to develop more fully!

How did we get here?
At Educon 2.2 in January, Paul Allison had a conversation with Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss shortly after Suzie had interviewed Jane McGonigal for WorldChanging. It was Suzie’s excited comments that led him to begin to follow her McGonigal’s work and end up at Evoke. In March, several of us in the New York City Writing Project introduced Evoke in our English, Art, and Technology classrooms.

We are working together to become mentors for our students as they also play Evoke. We’re all very excited about it, so much so that on a Saturday morning last month, Susan Ettenheim, Chris Wood, Paul Allison and a few others traveled though a cold, rainy wind storm in NYC to meet for three hours, just to play Evoke together, and talk about which parts our students would need more support on and which they could do on their own. It was a lot of fun on that Saturday morning to share some of the stories of a couple of our students who had managed to push themselves onto the Leaders board already (e.g. Hannah Kohn).

Our students and we have already learned a lot with Evoke. We love the project prompts and the overall structure of Evoke! Our ultimate goal this semester is to look at other games, and to have students build prototypes of games, as well as mess around with some game building. (Oh, and we’ll be planting gardens and volunteering for City Harvest too!)
 
Please join us in this ongoing conversation!

We want to invite any teachers and students who are playing Evoke themselves and/or using it with their students to listen to this episode (and the next one, TTT #193, which is also about Evoke). We want to get your voice on a future episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. We do these conversations on Skype. Please let us know when you can join us to talk about Evoke on a Wednesday in April (4/7, 4/14, 4/21 or 4/28) at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times. Plan to join us at http://edtechtalk.com/live if you want to find our more about Evoke and what were up to this Spring!

 

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #188 - A snow day in NYC gives us a chance to do some collaborative planning - 02.26.10

We welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

Because of a rare snow day in New York City, four NYC Writing Project teachers used some of our "found time" to do some impromptu thinking together. Our students are using Youth Voices, and recently we agreed to build a new curriculum this Spring.  We got together on Skype today to discuss our budding plans for teaching "I-Search, Diigo, and Gaming."

What you will hear us discussing on this podcast is the beginning of a plan for a research and gaming curriculum and a proposal for a series of three or four professional development sessions this Spring that are focused on some portion of the game-playing and game-building curriculum that Global Kids has developed. We also have a plan for inviting other interested New York City Writing Project teachers to join us by experimenting with gaming themselves and by developing this curriculum with us.

What our small study group, the New York City Writing Project's "Tech Thursdays" group wants to do is to create a curriculum that has modules that can fit into different types of for classes, especially core subject areas. For now we are doing this work in the following content areas:

  • Computer Arts (Susan Ettenheim)
  • English (Paul Allison and Chris Sloan)
  • Technology (Shantanu Saha and Madeline Brownstone)
  • Art (Renee Dryg and David Marini)

We are creating a curriculum that assumes that teachers will be able to commit to doing it two times a week for at least 10 weeks (or similar parameters).

Those  of us working on this curriculum this Spring will build successful collaborative game-based learning experiences for our students and we will learn from our failures. At the same time, we will be constantly building the rationales and the theoretical framework for including a curriculum like this into core classes in grades 6 -12.  We are thinking about how we might involve other New York City Writing Project teachers in this work, perhaps in summer institue that integrates gaming into our current Advanced Summer Institute model. We are also planning for day-long workshops and regular study groups like our Tech Thursday groups in the Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.

We would also welcome your participation! As we say in this podcast, we will be using the What's Up? section of Youth Voices to have our student-gamers become more reflective about gaming, and we'll ask the students to contribute to the knowledge based of serious gaming by developing analyses by adding Discussions to Youth Voices, for example here are Comparative Essays from the first week of our new curriculum. If you have been looking for a way for your students to join Youth Voices, perhaps you could adapt, adopt, and contribut to this curriculum as well. Please join Youth Voices, and let us know!

In the meantime, we welcome you to eavesdrop on this impromptu planning session shared by four New York City public school teachers enjoying a rare snow day in New York City: Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, and Shantanu Saha.

Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #182 - A student-centered follow up: More on games, YouTube, Twitter, and Research - 01.13.10

On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices. Paul Allison invited several of his students from the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NY onto the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on TTT#181 the week before when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. The student had asked for a student-centered follow up. Listen to find out where gaming is in their lives.

And if that’s not enough, this week's podcast also includes George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to talk about a Twitter project he was about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo George has written us recently to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube."

On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we had some follow-up’s, and some room for new voices. Paul Allison invited several of his students from the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NY onto the show to explain more about gaming. These students were listening and in the chat room on TTT#181 the week before when we talked about gaming in schools with other teachers, researchers, and consultants. The student had asked for a student-centered follow up. Listen to find out where gaming is in their lives.

And stay tuned every Wednesday evening this Spring as Paul and Susan Ettenheim and other students learn about bringing gaming into their curriculum this coming semester. If you know of a gamer, please invite him or her to join us as well! We’d love to include other students via Skype!

And if that’s not enough, this week's podcast also includes George Haines, a 6th grade teacher back on the show to talk about a Twitter project he was about to launch. George was on TTT in August: Teachers Teaching Teachers #165 - 08.26.09 - Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo George has written us recently to say that he hasn’t given up on “video and self-directed learning via youtube."

I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a youthvoices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with Youth Voices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.Here is the basic outline for the project: The idea is to have kids search for answers from the crowd of kids with no help from the adults (aside from monitoring and guiding offline).

The idea is to seek answers to “why” questions as opposed to “What” questions. For example, a question that a kid can simply Google like “when did the civil war start?” is a bad one, but a question like “WHY did the civil war start?” is a good one. Questions that start discussions, lead to independent research and sharing links fit the bill. The idea would be to keep it loose and low impact- not a heavily dependent collaboration. I will probably tell my kids to post a new question each week and I will probably give them an arbitrary number of questions from other kids to help answer.

For the first month we will work in depth on the project, then I hope to make it part of the routine when they come to the lab, meaning they login and check twitter for 5-10 minutes before we launch into whatever other projects we are doing at the time. video and self-directed learning via youtube.I haven’t scrapped that platform yet, but I decided to try to use Twitter for self-directed learning first. It is so much more nimble of a platform, I figured it would allow for a more fluid discussion and more immediate feedback and clarification.I saw that you have a Youth Voices account on twitter and I just started following it. My kids are almost ready to start tweeting out their questions and connecting to other kids as part of this “KidSourcing” project. My kids are 6th graders, but I have invited any classes in the ballpark to connect with my kids. We are connecting to kids in Tanzania (http://epicchangeblog.org/2009/10/21/the-twitterkids-of-tanzania/) and I am working out the involvement with schools in Peru, Brazil, China and a couple here in the old U.S. of A. I don’t know how neatly our project meshes with what you are trying to accomplish with youthvoices, but I figured I would reach out and gauge  your interest in connecting.

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Teachers Teaching Teachers #181 - Getting Schooled on Gaming: A conversation with Global Kids and Quest to Learn - 01.06.10

If you were itching to include gaming in your curriculum, what would you do? Susan and I, and others in the New York City Writing Project started by having a conversation with some pretty smart people earlier this month on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We met most of these educators in November 2009 at the National Writing Project's "Digital Is..." Conference, which was an invitational one-day conference supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

On this podcast we are joined by these amazing folks:

  • Barry Joseph and Rafi Santo from Global Kids.
  • Jonathan Richter and Peggy Marconi who are working together at the Oregon Writing Project at the University of Oregon.
  • New York City Public School teachers, Al Doyle and Shantanu Saha

If you were itching to include gaming in your curriculum, what would you do? Susan and I, and others in the New York City Writing Project started by having a conversation with some pretty smart people earlier this month on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We met most of these educators in November 2009 at the National Writing Project's "Digital Is..." Conference, which was an invitational one-day conference supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

On this podcast we are joined by these amazing folks:

  • Barry Joseph and Rafi Santo from Global Kids.
  • Jonathan Richter and Peggy Marconi who are working together at the Oregon Writing Project at the University of Oregon.
  • New York City Public School teachers, Al Doyle, David Marini, and Shantanu Saha

Let's start by quoting Global Kids on Games-based Learning|:

Since 2002, Global Kids has been a leader in the use of online games to promote global awareness, engaged citizenship, and  21st Century Learning Skills. Through Playing 4 Keeps, Global Kids trains urban youth to think critically about digital games and design games about important social issues. Here is an article that just came out about their most recent program for individual educators: American Library Association on Global Kid’s games-based trainings.

Here's more about Barry Joseph and Rafi Santo:

  • Barry Joseph, Global Kids, Inc., Director of the Online Leadership Program, holds a BA from Northwestern University and an MA in American Studies from New York University. Barry came to Global Kids in 2000 through the New Voices Fellowship of the Academy for Educational Development, funded by the Ford Foundation. He has developed innovative programs in the areas of youth-led online dialogues, video games as a form of youth media, the application of social networks for social good and the educational potential of virtual worlds, combining youth development practices with the development of high profile digital media projects that develop 21st Century Skills. He has also worked with GK’s development program to secure funding from a number of foundation’s and corporations. Barry served on the steering committee of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative and his writing appeared in the Foundation’s Ecology of Games volume in 2007. He has spoken at numerous conferences and published articles in a wide variety of publications.
     
  • Since joining Global Kids, Rafi Santo has been developing and implementing educational technology projects as varied as youth advisories on digital media, online youth dialogues, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with organizations including The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, UNICEF, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has worked with many of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. He has ten years of experience in youth development and education. Prior to joining Global Kids, Rafi did field work in international development in India, helping to build bridges between Hindu and Muslim communities in conflict. He graduated with a BA in Integral Studies from New York University.

Next check out this is brief overview of a gaming project that Jonathan Richter and Peggy Marconi are working on:

The Simulations Gaming Development Initiative (SGDI) program at Lane Community College aims to integrate programming and gaming industry curricula into a distributed 3D virtual and web-enhanced platform in order to enhance access and innovation for people across the country. The project has been designed to start locally and scale up as the capacity for a geodistributed Community of Practice emerges to include distance students from participating high schools and community colleges. An introduction to Second Life course is being piloted Fall 2009, with concurrent design of a gaming and simulation programming course to be implemented Spring 2010. The SGDI project features a focus on building capacity to attract non-typical students into the computer sciences - particularly females - by developing support structures for learning such content in accessible and collaborative ways.Center for Advanced Technology in Education.

Here's more about Jonathon Richter and Peggy Marconi:

  • Jonathon Richter, Ed.D is Director of The Center for Learning in Virtual Environments at The University of Oregon where he currently is co-Principal Investigator on two National Science Foundation grants – one to integrate computer science and game development into virtual environments at Lane Community College in Oregon and the other investigating the way globally distributed teams use virtual worlds to collaborate and innovate. He is the co-founder and current chair of the American Educational Research Association’s special interest group on virtual worlds named the Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) and is leading the MERLOT Taskforce on Virtual Worlds.
     
  • Peggy Marconi is the Associate Director Oregon Writing Project at the University of Oregon, Center for Advanced Technology in Education . Peggy is good at making curriculum connections for classroom application for gamimg. And she iscurrently working with colleagues to develop Oregon Writing Project Institutes in Second Life.

Finally, allow us to introduce you to two New York City Public School teachers, Al Doyle and Shantanu Saha:

  • Al Doyle | Sports for the Mind domain teacher Al Doyle, a native of Brooklyn, has interests ranging from art and animation to set design, digital imaging and most recently, game design. He was the producer and lead animator for the Salvadori Foundation’s Art of Construction, a web site designed to teach basic architecture and engineering to middle school students. For more than twenty years, he has taught computer graphics and multimedia at leading independent New York City K-12 schools. Al developed a popular course for adults, Learning Photoshop Through Art, at the Guggenheim Museum. Al received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship to create a portfolio of prints at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop which is now in the Library of Congress collection. Al studied stage design at the Polakov Studio in the West Village and was resident designer at HB Studio for several years. In addition, he designed over 100 educational theater productions and over 25 professional designs for ballet, dance, drama, musical theater and opera in off-Broadway and regional theate33674186_59582d2200.jpgr. As Director of Internet Training at the National Teacher Training Institute for New York’s Channel Thirteen / WNET, Al traveled extensively in a “train-the-trainers” model of technology integration for K-12 teachers. Currently, in addition to his role at Quest, Al teaches for the graduate division of Touro College’s Masters Degree Program in Instructional Technology

  • Shantanu Saha is a technology teacher at Baccalaureate School for Global Education. On his Google profile, Shantanu lists his Superpower as: “I can heal electronics by touch.” His Interests are “games, games, and more games.”
     
  • David Marini and Paul Allison are colleagues at the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, Queens. David mainly teaches Art, and he is a big gamer.

Gamer or not, you'll be inspired by this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers. Let us know how you are using games in your classroom!


Image:  “Darth Vader getting schooled about Japan’s keitai culture,” Uploaded on August 13, 2005 by chriskk

Click Read more to see a transcript of a chat that was happening during the webcast.

Women of Web 2.0 March 20 Bonus Wow2.0.bonus-2007-03-20

This is the greatest interview! Thanks to Edward for sharing some insight about gaming at home and gaming at school. You will love this podcast. Leave Edward a comment. We have some serious competition here, ladies.

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