gaming

TTT #293 Exploring Minecraft with Joel Levin, Chad Sansing, Liam O'Donnell, Denise Colby, and Diana Maliszewski 4.18.12

This episode of +Teachers Teaching Teachers was recorded in Minecraft. We were Livecasting from +Joel Levin's / @MinecraftTeachr 's server with +Liam O'Donnell / @liamodonnell , Chad Sansing / @chadsansing , +Diana Maliszewski / @MzMollyTL , and +Denise Colby / @Niecsa .

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Watch or listen as newbies +Paul Allison / @paulallison and a colleague of his, James Joseph learn first-hand what's so engaging about Minecraft!

Consider this episode of TTT to be an "in-world" follow-up to these TTT episodes: http://edtechtalk.com/node/5001 and http://edtechtalk.com/node/4980 And also 21st Century Learning's recent interview with Joel Levin: http://edtechtalk.com/ett21_166

This was lots of fun and the perspectives shared by these Minecraft teachers about their students' lives in the game both profound in themselves, and easy to transfer to any classroom or learning situation.

Some ways to follow up:

EdTechTalk21 #165: Alan Gershenfeld on Education Gaming

EdTechTalk21 #165: Alan Gershenfeld on Education Gaming
February 15, 2012

Alan Gershenfeld from E-Line Media, creators of Gamestar Mechanic joins us to discuss games and their implications to learning and school.  Alan encouraged all of our listeners to check out stemchallenge.org.



EdTechTalk21 #165: Alan Gershenfeld on Education Gaming 
alan_gershenfeld
February 15, 2012

Alan Gershenfeld from E-Line Media, creators of Gamestar Mechanic joins us to discuss games and their implications to learning and school.  Alan encouraged all of our listeners to check out stemchallenge.org.


Teachers Teaching Teachers #255 Exploring Minecraft w/ Jo Kay, Dean Groom, Bronwyn Stuckey, Joel Levin, and Chad Sansing 7.13.11

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If you dig Minecraft (or wonder why other teachers--and their students--do) you'll enjoy this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, recorded earlier this summer. We were joined by a few teachers who have recently launched Massively Minecraft:

The purpose of this community project is to trial the use of the game Minecraft (http://www.minecraft.net) in schools as part of voluntary student activity. The community will engage in exploration and research, not to decide or direct any particular application of the game but, to understand where students might take it and how they and their teachers visualise possibilities for it use within the curriculum. This ethnographic approach relies on you, as the professional in the school, to observe and reflect on student imagination, initiative, interaction, engagement and learning.

The facilitators of this site, Jo Kay, Dean Groom, and Dr Bronwyn Stuckey share their thoughts, questions, and stories about Minecraft on this podcast.

The Minecraft Teacher, Joel Levin and Chad Sansing (who had been with us for an earlier show about Minecraft) joined the conversation as well.

Check out Joel’s videos on YouTube. Also, Ed Tech Crew did a great interview with Joel and Dean as well.

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #248 - Gaming Questions from Texas, Minecraft, and the "2011 Horizon Report K12 Edition" - 5.25.11

Gaming Questions from Texas and the 2011 Horizon Report K12 Edition


One of the more inspiring threads of our collective inquiry on Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) has been to explore how to bring gaming into our classrooms. (See some of our shows on gaming from the past 18 months.) With this episode,  we add to that list of shows.

This episode of TTT began with a study group on gaming that teachers Janelle Quintans Bence and Colleen Graveskull have been involved with in the North Star Writing Project (Texas). We first met Janelle in July 2007 in the National Writing Project's Tech Matters workshops.

Janelle and her colleagues in Texas are filled with questions as they plan to bring gaming into their classrooms this fall. She sent me some of them. What better way to jump back into gaming than with a bunch of questions -- the kind of questions teachers often ask when they consider adding games to their classes.

Here are the questions we've been brainstorming in our study group on gaming:
  1. How did you all begin including gaming curriculum in your classrooms?
  2. What are some of your biggest successes? Challenges?
  3. How much game playing goes on in your classroom? Do students only play in social action games? What does that conversation look like? What norms are set prior to this?
  4. I'm thinking about using the games students play on a regular basis as media for students to deconstruct and analyze in terms of influencing identity. Should I be playing all these games to get a better idea? Or will observing the students play suffice? What does a teacher do if he or she is not good at playing those video games?
  5. Designing games really requires deep content knowledge. How much experience with game design did you have prior to letting the students explore that avenue?
  6. Could you tell us about Scratch? What are the benefits of this program as compared to Game Star Mechanic?
  7. What kind of evaluation do you use around gaming? 
  8. Is it all informal discourse based assessment, or do you do something more formal? 
  9. Has your game playing been limited to computer games or have you also used standalone consuls? 
  10. How much time did you have to dedicate to help students understand how to utilize the game design tool before they began designing? Do you feel that this time has been detrimental to fulfilling your ability to satisfy state standards?
Joining us on this podcast to help us to explore these questions is Samantha Adams, the Director of Communications, at the New Media Consortium (NMC).  Samantha is one of the writers of of the recently released Horizon Report: 2011 K12 Edition, which has a section on gaming:
Game-based learning has gained considerable traction since 2003, when James Gee began to describe the impact of game play on cognitive development. Since then, research and interest in the potential of gaming on learning has exploded, as has the diversity of games themselves, with the emergence of serious games as a genre, the proliferation of gaming platforms, and the evolution of games on mobile devices. Developers and researchers are working in every area of game-based learning, including games that are goal-oriented; social game environments; non-digital games that are easy to construct and play; games developed expressly for education; and commercial games that lend themselves to refining team and group skills. Role-playing, collaborative problem solving, and other forms of simulated experiences are recognized for having broad applicability across a wide range of disciplines.
As the lead writer at the NMC, Samantha Adams was deeply involved in the research and writing of the report. We can't wait to see what she has to say about gaming and the other items in the report: Cloud Computing, Mobiles, Open Content, Learning Analytics, Personal Learning Environments.

Given the questions coming form the North Star Writing Project's study group on gaming, we also invited Chad Sansing, from the Central Virginia Writing Project. This June, at ISTE's Unplugged, Chad plans to "take a closer look at student writing and multi-media compositions created in response to game-based learning on Digital Is, the National Writing Project's new media archive and initiative."

And that's not all! Fortunately, we were smart enough to ask Chad who else he thought we might invite. Thanks to his connections, Janelle and her colleagues (and all of our listeners) get to hear about gaming from these three educators as well:

  • Joel Levin, a computer teacher at Manhattan's Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. Joel decided to start using the game Minecraft to teach an entire unit to his first- and second-grade students recently. (See an with Joel, "Educational building blocks: how Minecraft is used in classrooms," by Andrew Webster | Published about a month ago in ars technica.)

  • Melanie McBride, who also recommended...
    ...my partner, children's author and elementary teacher, Liam O'Donnell for this episode. He's currently using Minecraft with a spec ed class and taking an interesting approach (I'm biased of course). In addition to his experience as a teacher, he's been writing and advocating for games based learning for a very long time. As well he's written extensively about reluctant readers, boys and learning and many of his graphic novels are aimed at those readers - high action, lower vocab.http://liamodonnell.com

    As for myself: I'm currently on a leave of absence from high school teaching to write my book and research *situated* informal learning (the out of school kind) of gaming and virtual worlds. While I still locate myself peripherally to the games based learning in schools/education, I quite intentionally chose to focus on "informal" and "situated" learning contexts rather than school examples.  We're studying Minecraft for use with early childhood educators (post secondary) with small children. http://edgelab.ryerson.ca/2011/05/19/tinkering-with-minecraft-learning-from-the-edge/

  • Liam O'Donnell is on this podcast as well. Liam sent along this link:
    "Here's a post about my first week using Minecraft with my kids. It'll give you a sense of my teaching style and philosophy. http://liamodonnell.com/feedingchange/2011/05/messy-learning-with-minecraft/"
    For me, it was the perfect vehicle to build the literacy skills of seven grade 5 and 6 students who come to me for reading and writing support three days a week. For these students, motivation to read and write is a big challenge. Previously, we had done a writing unit around their Nintendo DSi’s, specifically Pokemon, where they had drawn maps of the game areas, profiled their favourite Pokemon and written strategy guides for specific Pokemon fights.  I knew they loved video games and after screening a few Minecraft videos on youtube, they were totally eager to play.

We think you'll find this to be a provocative podcast!  Janelle and her colleagues in Texas probably got some questions answered, and maybe they were inspired to ask a few new ones. Maybe you will be too!

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

Teachers Teaching Teachers #244 Juan Rubio and David Gagnon on Geo-locative Gaming, the ARIS Project. Also: Why Games? 4.20.11

We talked about games and new literacies on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

jrubioJuan Rubio from Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program joined us to talk about a project he is doing with students after school in the NYC Public Libraries to develop "a geo location based game using mobile technology to explore local history and global issues with middle school students from the Bronx.” davidgagnon

Also David Gagnon, who had finished an ARIS Global Game Jam, joined us. David is an instructional designer with the ENGAGE program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he consults with faculty about innovative teaching practices that leverage emerging media and an active member of the Games, Learning and Society Research community where he directs the mobile learning team and ARIS Project

It was inspiring! We hope enjoy the conversation.

We talked about games and new literacies on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.

jrubioJuan Rubio from Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program joined us to talk about a project he is doing with students after school in the NYC Public Libraries to develop "a geo location based game using mobile technology to explore local history and global issues with middle school students from the Bronx.” davidgagnon

Also David Gagnon, who had finished an ARIS Global Game Jam, joined us. David is an instructional designer with the ENGAGE program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he consults with faculty about innovative teaching practices that leverage emerging media and an active member of the Games, Learning and Society Research community where he directs the mobile learning team and ARIS Project

It was inspiring! We hope enjoy the conversation.

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

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