Day 5 Afternoon

I have a lot of new ideas for content that I will incorporate this year - especially the research I did on the chemistry changes to ocean water. I ahve foudn alot of hands on activities to go along iwth these concepts as well as ways to work with them interactively on the web. Ultimately I hope that I will be able to incorporate the game as part of my curriculum - either as an introductory exploration, a tutorial for those who need help or maybe even as an assessment at the end of the unit. If the team feature gets working this would be a great way to have competitive reviews! In any case I have a lot of new ideas for my teaching this fall!

day5 morning

how has working with this vidoe game impracted your knowledge of science and math.

Well I have most definietly learned a lot from my reasearch on coral reefs!!! The video game has taught me alot about how the "world" works and all that you have to think about to make things happen. We take our physical world for granted so when you have to make things work in an artificial world you really have to start understanding how things actually work so that you can make things do what you want. I have also had a deja vu about programming languages with the use of hte if then statements - I might actually understand the programming language if I looked at it again.

day 4 shutdown

Didn't get as much done as we would have liked due ot crash issues with multigamer mode but sitll a productive day - got some issues solved and some ideas worked out. We won't have a finished product tomorrow but we have about 100000X what I had at the beginning of the week and it looks GREAT!!!! Two of my guys have the software needed at home ot keep working over the summer if they want and me may well get this closer to a finished product by the endof the summer!

I think these guys have learned a lot more about video game ideas and project development that I think will serve them well with future endeavors.

I am glad to have gotten to work with these guys and hope that I can keep in touch with each of them over the blogger in the future.

Day 4 Morning

How well do you do interacting with your students? What concerns do you have about interacting with your students?

I think this week I have done well interacting with my group. THey have been very receptive to direction and have been very open with thier ideas. The only concern I have had this week has been that maybe I'm not providing enough direction and that they are reluctant to ask questions.

WIth my own students and I sometimes have difficulty interacting with the very disengaged students. I am not sure how to get them to engage with the lesson and some of my students can get a bit ugly when challenged to do somethign they don't want to. I am fearful of conflict - especially physical conflict and am reluctant to push the envelope with students who present a negative attitude when asked to participate. However, I have found myself to be pretty good with MOST students - there are only a very few who I feel that have fallen into this latter category in the last 5 years of teaching. I will not write a student off but this semester was challenging to keep myself from just giving up on students that I just could not find any way to connect with.

I wish all my students could be as engaged and enthusiastic as my group has been this week - then the job would be easY!!!

Day 4 afternoon

How has the experience of working with studetns on designing a video game impacted how you communciate or relate to your students?

I think I have always had an effective way of communcating with my students, here and at school. The guys in my group have been really easy to work with - very excited, very motivated and hard workers. They have worked will together and acoomplished a lot this week. This has made my communcation and relations with them very easy. I think if they had been less cooperative I may have had more difficulty in communcating my ideas and needs to them.

I know that I have found myself listening more to what they think about things - obviously they are the experts - notme! I think that I need to do that more in my classroom teaching because I sometimes feel that my students ahve somehting to say but don't say it because they don't think I'll listen. This may be their own perception or a message I am inadvertently sending but either way I think this experience may help me to open up more to student ideas.

Day 3 shutdown

Pretty good day. Some frustrations wer ethat other students got into our game and changed things that my guys had worked hard to build. So we made progress but then we got set back. THe afternoon was not as productive because they were reluctant to put effort in if someone was going to get in and wreck it all. I think the password protection will help when it is fixed. THe coral reef is very tedious to build but Ben B. has made a lot of progress on his portion. Others worked on developing techniques for doing certain things like teleporting, dropping thigns from the sky and coordinating the movements of characters. We are going to try to get some scripts done tomorrow - the addition of sound pretty much side tracked everyone this afternoon but they needed a little fun!!!

Day 3 Afternoon

Describe your teaching.

Combinatorial is the only way I can describe my style. I try to use a variety of methods - lecture, demonstrations, labs, groups, hands on activities, field experiences, video, computer and anything else that I can find to engage and excite my students. I have found myself using WAY TOO MUCH lecture this past semester and not enjoying my teaching at all - and neither did my students! We teach in the block semester schedule with 4 classes periods of 90 minutes. We have worked hard this year on using the 10-10 or 20-20 strategy where we change activity every 10 or 20 minutes depending on the activity. THis has us doing short segments of lecture and interpsersing the activities, labs, etc. in short segment as a way of keeping student engagement high. I found this strategy difficult with my lower level students who have difficulty transitioning anyway - its great for the ADD who want to switch - but they have trouble settling back down into learn mode at each phase - this may be more of a classroom management problem but that is what frustrated me about this technique.

I wnat to work hard this summer on revamping my classes to be more combinatorial and more engaging.

Blog Addresses

Ben Bryant- benbryanthives
Ted Belles -teddybelleshifives
BenajminMills -bigboi
ROy Blemenfeld - bigboiroi111@aol.com
Augmon Price - augmonpricehifives
Sam Bartels - sambartelshifives

Day 3 morning

What interested you in video games as a form of teaching?

I wanted to find a way to engage those studetns who are disengaged from traditional learning sessions. I knew that most of todays students are "entertainment" oriented, in other words it has to be high color, high action, high stimulus in order to get and keep their attention. With this in mind I looked to my own son for some inspriation. He was an add child who hated to read and was often disengaged in school - but he could spend hours moving Laura Croft through mazes and solving mysteries! This brought me to believe that this would be an excellent way to get students to engage the content that I wanted to learn. That being said I hope that I will be able to make a game that truly validates this hypothesis.

Day 2 Shutdown

Great Day!!!1

we got lots of ideas for building the game and lots of cooperative engagement with the team. Team is working very well together. We learned a lot of useful things about virtuoso - things that did work and things that didn't. SAm has been amazing helping everyone get things accomplished working with Oliver to find ways ot do things that are not in the program so far.

I think the rest of the week will be very successful!!

Day 2 Lunch

How does technology you currently use enhance your students learning and your teaching? How do you know?

I think that the computer programs and tools that I am currently using help my students to see things outside their own world - expand their horizons and see things from other perspectives. Honestly I sometimes wonder if they are really are learning anything because I find that far too often my students can't recall the learning or produce their own thoughts on the topic no matter what I use. Sorry to be a downer on this but this particular topic has frustrated me all year. WIth mulitlevel learners this year I have struggled with how my students learn best and Have really not had any diffinitive answers on this question.

Day 2 morning

How do you think your students learn best?

I have seen my students learn in all modes - however, I think that the majority of studenst learn best when they can connect with the material either by physically being engaged with the content or have a significant connection to thier own lives. THis can take many forms in terms of physical engagement such as a laboratory experiment, a field experiment, models and manipulatives. Engagement of the content with the students lives can come in the form of how the content affects the person directly (physically - emotionally - spritually) or how it affects them economically. These are all ways that the student can engage the curriculum and when they are engaged they are learning.

shutdownpoweroff

WOW!!!!!!!

Lots of stuff going on. My kids were GREAT!!! very knowledgable and helpful. Everyone successfully downloaded and logged on. they were eventually able to play with thesoftware and get a feel for the things they could do.

THe software is alittle frustrating for those who knew the old software. IT seems liek there are more capabilities than the previous version. Its just going to take time to get up to speed on how to do things again. I'm ok becuase I didn't have much created in my game yet and have made some fundamental changes to my ideas so I'm sort of starting over again anyway. However, I doubt seriously if I will have anything much to show at the showcase in terms of the game but for testing in the fall and spring - most likely I can make those deadlines (worry???)

great facilities as usual. Contorlled choas!!!!! but a fun day.

Day 1 afternoon

How do you currently use technology in your classroom?

Primarily by utilizing power point demonstrations and lectures, computer photos, websites and united streaming movies. I will have my students use the computer to research topics - using web searches and data sites. My AP students have used web quests and international data sites to do research, write papers and develop demonstrations. Other technology that is available that I have wanted to utilize but not found the time yet are CBLs and probes that we have for water testing. OUr school utilizes the PLATO learnign system for remediation and practice. PLATO is an online learning system that uses visualizations, text and audio to teach subject matter. Many students find this system preferrable over the classroom setting and are often more successful using this system than they were taking the class in a traditional setting. Individual teachers can use the system with their whole class in the computer lab or assign modules for students to use for remediation.

Day 1 Morning

What are feelings about video games in general.
I personally find them difficult to use but I think that is a personal problem. I have a hard time thinking in the three D world and manipulating objects. But I think they can be very good for children who have problems focusing because it has a lot of interaction and action in general. My own son has been able to improve his attention skills and his eye hand motor coordination by playing video games. I am personally opposed to violent video games that desensitize (sp?) children to violence but there are many other types that are useful for the purposes stated above.

As learning tools?

As a learning tool I think they will be very useful because students today are very entertainment oriented and it may be far easier to engage them in learning with something that they are familiar with and that they find "entertaining". I guess its like trying to get kids to eat their vegetables - if you can sneak them in to the things they like they will at least get them in!