More on badges and gaming – Course 4, Week 5

Yes, that’s supposed to be me. Yes, I made it but I also hate it.

As mentioned in a previous post, I think that achievements and badges might be perfect for things like typing, flashcards, vocab drills, math drills – but all of those types of learning experience, as essential as they may be, are limited in their reach of the more abstract strata of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Without wanting to sound like a typically alarmist old person, I’m worried about the over-application of simple mechanisms like badges without relevance to the tasks they’re connected to, and I don’t like the possibility that students playing games or collecting badges could somehow come to be seen as a substitute for the more subtle, creative or collaborative skills which today’s students should be practicing.

Badges can be powerful and motivating, but they can also be a new version of busy-work worksheets. Achievement has to be meaningful in the context of the task, and ideally provide a reward that means something within the context of that task (something like how in Super Metroid most of the things you “collect” are all weapons and powers that enable you to then proceed to new areas) – confirming progress towards a goal is fine, but it isn’t any more an indicator of authentic learning than adding up scores on multiple-choice practice drills.

At a previous school, part of my ESL teaching duties involved supervising the implementation of a “learning acceleration program” that the school had invested in. This involved watching as the students sat, put on headphones, and played phonics drill games for 30 minutes a day. Whatever the value of this might have been for the students, it was not a fulfilling experience for me as a teacher.

I didn’t get to chat with the students about their lives. We didn’t explore anything, make anything, or do anything at all together. I really didn’t need to be there at all. I wasn’t teaching. I am not suggesting that programs like that are not useful – I’m using similar tools to learn Japanese, after all – but I do know that they aren’t at all part of what really excites me about teaching and learning.

Gaming – Course 4, Week 4

http://hwwonderland.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/its-dangerous-11.gif

I love video games. I think I’ve learned a lot from them. I think everyone could learn a lot from them. I learned around 1984 from Zork I that video games can engage your imagination as powerfully as fiction, and that success often depends on trying every combination of items and verbs you can think of, no matter how improbable. From Zelda and Metroid I learned that progress is all about exploring every avenue, then returning to where you’ve been before when you’re more experienced. From Harvest Moon I learned the importance of saving money and keeping up with daily chores (I didn’t say I practice what I’ve learned). I could go on all day. I think video games have shaped my life as powerfully as literature or poetry has, which is to say that I can’t imagine life without them.

Harvest Moon. Chore time. It’s always chore time. Source: http://ui02.gamefaqs.com/1089/gfs_26262_2_2.jpg

As a teacher, while actual game-playing hasn’t been a huge part of what we work on in class, I think I’ve tried to incorporate a sense of play and game-like fun into projects wherever possible. One of my favorite projects in G6 involves inventing a fictional civilization, which involves the type of world-building that game designers need to excel at, from alphabets to temple architecture. Some students made models of their civilizations in SketchUp or Minecraft, and I want to push even further in this sort of direction with projects next year. On a smaller scale, I am constantly using examples from games to make points about history, architecture etc…. earlier today I discussed the history of the Hagia Sophia while we watched this video.

Assassin’s Creed – like a history textbook, only with lots of stabbing. Source: http://gamernation.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/assass.jpg

When it comes to the subject of “gamification”, “badges”, etc. in education, however, I get a little more cautious. I think that certain skill areas, like touch-typing, airplane piloting and mole-whacking, are probably better served by practice through games than any other instructional technique. I’m trying to learn more Japanese kanji, and the site I’ve been practicing on lately has a lot of badges and statistics and timed events. I’m not sure they’re helping me learn, but they certainly aren’t hurting.

source: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6015/6010771532_c04dd5526b_z.jpg

However, I’m worried about the rush to talk about things like badges and achievements and “game-based learning”. Most gaming activities, however much I might love them, are what I would call formative work, and in many cases Bloom would probably barely even deign to taxonomize them. More meaningful work in a game environment would definitely be possible in something like Minecraft, or SimCity, or some simulated situation that allowed for creativity rather than jumping through virtual hoops. I’m worried, though, that this isn’t what a lot of people are trying to sell as “game-based learning”, and that what they’re envisioning is just an electronic version of worksheets. But maybe this isn’t being fair to the game-based learning crowd – maybe I’ve set up an idea of badges and achievements in my head that isn’t true to what people are actually trying to move towards. I’ll have to do some more research. And play some more games.

Nyan. Source: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/182/5/6/minecraft__nyan_cat_by_legoguy816-d3knvk1.png

Taming Bucephalus – Course 4, Week 3

A challenge-based project, Ancient Macedon-style. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/The_taming_of_Bucephalus_by_Andre_Castaigne_%281898-1899%29.jpg

“But you didn’t teach us anything yet!” This was kind of hard for me to hear. A student said it to me the other day as we started a project.

I might not be the best at small talk, but in the right setting I have a lot to say. School is one of those settings. Regardless of the subject (except maybe for calculus), I think I could stand in front of almost any class and grandiloquently pontificate ad infinitum. Just this morning, after I read the daily announcements, my G6 homeroom students got a 10-minute lecture on subjects including Facebook’s future, Chinese internet censorship, Seward’s Folly, the Louisiana Purchase, and Japanese Manchuria. I’m not sure what the students thought, but I know I was slightly sad when the bell rang.

Yet despite my clear aptitude for pedantic lecturing, I love project-based learning and am overjoyed to have it at the heart of what I do – even if it occasionally results in comments like the one above. First off, I love it because it fits with how I remember learning best as a student myself. In elementary school, whenever we got to choose a person to do a report on, I chose either Alexander the Great or Alexander Graham Bell. I chose them because we had the same first name. Stupid reason, but the results speak for themselves. I probably remember more minor biographical details about those two Alexanders than all the rest of what I remember learning in elementary school combined. Do I remember my 4th-grade teacher’s name? No (well, not at the moment, I’m sure it’ll come to me). Do I remember Alexander the Great’s horse’s name? HECK YES.

My childish obsession with my own first name aside, there are many other reasons why I love project-based learning. It fits with what I know about how people learn meaningfully in any context, it fits with what I know about motivation, it fits with what I know about personal growth, authentic experience, relevance, real-world connections, just-in-time learning, and a dozen other facets of what I think I know about how people learn. Obviously I don’t think a project-based model fits every type of learning. I didn’t learn to type on a keyboard or drive a car, for example, through brainstorming or reflecting. But I do think that it fits almost every type of learning that has as its aims the more effulgent Blooming of the human mind.

Where do I stand on challenge-based learning? I feel pretty much the same way about it as I do about project-based learning (of which I think it’s an interesting subset or provocative reframing, if slightly questionable because of “branding” issues). It’s great. It’s a great model, and it leads to exciting results. I’m not going to say that I think every project needs to be an interdisciplinary global collaboration that solves major world problems (because what room does that leave for studying Alexander the Great’s horse?), but surely it’s good if some of them are.

And what’s the role of technology in all of this? It’s how we formulate, plan, embellish, share and reflect on every one of these projects or challenges. It’s not indispensable (I suppose Homer finished some pretty awesome projects using just his head), but it is invaluable.

Course 4, Week 2, Non Sequiteur

These tools are a visual metaphor for tech tools. I’m sorry. source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrhode/4632887921/

This week I ought to find myself asking myself the question “How can teachers and schools ensure that students are meeting technology standards in their school within an integrated model?”, but I think my answer to this would be uncomfortably close to my thoughts from last week, so instead I’ll discuss something else, completely unrelated, that I’ve been thinking about this week, namely:

Do teachers find that they develop and stick with a consistent “flow” of specific technology tools from project to project? What are they, and what are the pros and cons of developing this sort of flow?

For example, for me the last few projects I’ve done have fallen into a similar and sequential pattern of tech tools:

Prior knowledge / introduction: Wallwisher

Basic background information: watching video clips

Gathering research sources: Diigo

Assembling research: Google Docs

Designing the project: Keynote / PowerPoint (I’m not going to pretend – we do a lot of slideshows in Humanities)

Editing / adding music etc.: iMovie

Sharing and reflecting on finished project: Blog

This seems to be a natural progression of tools that fit each step for me, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve done multiple projects in Grade 8 in particular this year that used almost the exact same progression. So my question is: Is it helpful for students’ proficiency and comfort level to do more than one project that use almost the same mix of technology tools in any one semester, or is it boring? What sequence of tools have you developed or fallen into using, and what pros/cons have you seen in using this sort of mix of tools?

Who’s Holding the Net? or Course 4, Week 1

on line net work. source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ezee123/117560929/sizes/o/in/photostream/

I’ve recently been wondering to myself, “Self, whose job is it to teach the NETS standards to students and how do we ensure they are being met in an integrated model?”

This is something that’s come up more than once over the course of the COETAIL program, and my answer to this is usually a rather straightforward (yet, I hope, not simplistic) one: If a teacher is working within a project-based, constructivist framework and is responsibly trying to inculcate students with effective skills for high-level achievement in any content area, then I think that almost all of the NETS standards would more or less automatically be addressed.

For example, if a teacher had already designed a successful, up-to-date Middle Years Program Humanities project on Climate Change, even if the NETS standards weren’t explicitly consulted during planning, you would hopefully be able to later go down the list of standards and note that the majority of them are more or less automatically part of the project. Any project on Climate Change that didn’t involve, say, students being able to “locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media.” (standard 3B) probably wouldn’t meet either the teacher’s own curricular expectations or the MYP objectives for Humanities.

This isn’t to say that all of the NETS standards are automatically met by every well-designed project, and I do think that all schools should have Technology Coaches or similar people who encourage teachers to more explicitly address them during the planning process rather than (as in my example above) shoehorning things to fit them afterward – my point is just that I don’t think adapting a particular project to address the majority of these standards should have to be a difficult task or require re-planning everything from scratch specifically to address these standards. Most of the standards seem like building blocks of good projects to me regardless of the technology angle.

As always with discussions about potentially horizontally-integrated pedagogical initiatives, I can’t speak for everybody. Teachers of certain subjects might have more difficulty seeing natural links between their projects and technology objectives like the NETS. I think I’m lucky because MYP Humanities might have more self-evidently clear connections to responsible technology use than some subjects. Humanities’ constant focus on research, evaluating sources, gathering and presenting statistical and geographic data – all of these things make it a pretty easy subject to adapt to take advantage of changing technology. I’m doubly lucky because the MYP’s most recent publications explicitly include a section giving guidance for teachers on how to approach meeting technology expectations within subject courses, for example:

The use of ICT extends to all teaching and learning in every subject across the curriculum. The effective use of ICT is an approaches to learning (ATL) skill. Schools must ensure that a whole-school approach is in place to allow students to develop information technology literacy and become competent users of computers.

(MYP Humanities Guide, published Feb. 2012, p. 53)

Successfully meeting technology standards within subject-area curricula is a bit like ESL/EAL in my mind – just as I feel that it’s every teacher’s responsibility to address different levels of English-language proficiency in the classroom, but that at the same time schools should have dedicated coaches or support teachers to guide classroom teachers as they deal with EAL issues, I think technology use should be a natural and integrated component of each subject but that teachers should be able to call on the expertise and support of dedicated coaches or coordinators.

Course 3 Project

 

Project

Unit Plan & Rubric

My group made an assignment based on the idea of moving from persuasive writing to persuasive multimedia / audiovisual presentations. Our original discussion centered on moviemaking techniques, but the example project is a slideshow due to time constraints. The main idea is the same – a project that attempts to take the main ideas of the traditional “persuasive writing” project into another media format. Persuasive slides need to use text, color, images and other elements to make an impression on the viewer, and teachers and students probably both need to keep in mind that persuasive techniques for multimedia presentations, movies, etc. can be taught as explicitly as writing techniques – and might even be more important skills for the future.

Remixing

I think a lot of the projects we do in MS Humanities involve remixing, reworking and parodying existing materials. Students are really good at quickly copying things and putting their own spin on it – in a good way. To use a relatively low-tech example, here’s a G6 student’s imitation National Geographic article for our Invent A Long-Lost Civilization project. Notice the conscious change of the title so as not to infringe on National Geographic’s copyright, and the pride and care which was put into the fake ads at the start and end of the “magazine”:

This sort of thing comes very naturally to students. It’s fun to put your own twist on something that you’ve seen before. It’s easy to turn these things (songs, images, videos) to your own purposes. It’s how we express ourselves creatively and how we show we’re learning to take on creative leaps of our own. One of the most interesting content bleed-throughs I’ve seen happened last year in G7 Humanities, when we spent a few between-units days on digital citizenship and fair use, then tackled the Renaissance. As the unit went on it became clear that the Renaissance’s lessons about artistic creativity, apprenticeship, and the concept of the lone genius had gotten all mixed up with ideas about remixes and fair use in several students’ minds. I liked this. So, for example, in the words of a 7th grader, in her essay on whether it’s possible for one genius to change the world:

“…I gave you some examples of the geniuses and showed some evidence that one person can’t change the world. I have another reason, which is that everything is a remix. We watched this video about everything is a remix. For example Michelangelo is mostly known as the man that made the statue of David. A lot of people made the same statue before. Although Michelangelo’s statue was the most famous. I think he couldn’t make this statue without the people that made the same statue before.”

I agree!