Using Video Games to Memorize Maps, Systems and Other Ordered Objects.

Students playing games on their iPads, instead of listening to directions or completing class work is a frequent complaint of teachers in 1:1 classrooms. It's not surprising that students choose a game over a lecture or worksheet, but their love of games can be leveraged to provide a platform for learning.

If you ever had a favorite video game, you can probably remember exactly what it looked like. You remember every turn and obstacle of Mario Kart's best race tracks; the rooms and equipment in GoldenEye; the shapes of the Tetris pieces; or the levels of Sonic the Hedgehog. Nobody told us to memorize these rooms and objects, but we did because it was a necessary and unavoidable part of improving and winning. (There's an entire field dedicated to applying game structure to learning, and I would encourage you to seek out experts and their research findings. Brian Houssand presented at the National Association for Gifted Children Conference in Denver (2012) and his presentation did a great job of summarizing the research.)

The digestive tract, the ancient Silk Road, order of mathematical operations, layout of the planets, and a timeline of European art history can all be turned into a map, course, or maze. In fact, students construct, memorize, play and replay these maps and courses until they've (inadvertently) memorized them.

FreeRiderHD

At the moment, my students' favorite game is FreeRiderHD and it's a relatively simple game in terms of controls, graphics and strategy. The player attempts to navigate a bicyclist through a course by controlling pitch. If your rider hits the ground at the wrong angle and they'll flip over. What's really cool about this game is that players can draw, save, play and share their own custom courses all from the iPad.

The best way to learn how to use this program is to visit the website and create your own map, but there are three features to make sure you understand. First, there are two kinds of drawing tools. One of the drawing tools allows you to draw track and forms the shape of your playing surface. The other drawing tool is for creating scenery and background. The players will see this background, but it won't alter gameplay. You (or hopefully, your students) will have to balance creating a playable track with one that conveys the concepts to learn. If it is a perfect representation of Parisian icons, but completely impassable, your students won't play it for very long. Alternatively, they won't learn much if it is merely a series of bumps with some Presidents' faces in the background. 

Of course, creating the track shouldn't be the only part of this project. Students should research what it should like and what should be included. If they are creating a race track that follows a molecule of oxygen through the respiratory tract, then they should do some research on what they will encounter. They should probably plan the course on a "storyboard" and explain what they've included and excluded and why.

Minecraft

If you've ever groaned because your students have never heard of Elvis or Casablanca, then you had better learn about Minecraft, because every person under the age of 20 knows exactly what it is. When it comes to Minecraft, everything you ever assumed about the current generation and their video games is wrong. The game has graphics on par with PacMan and about as much violence. It isn't a game of destruction, in fact, it is all about construction and that is why the game is such a powerful tool for learning.

Minecraft is essentially a giant, digital Lego set. You construct things using blocks of various materials and colors and the results are astounding.  Many of your students have accounts and this game can be played on multiple devices (computers, tablets, video game consoles). Ask them to create a model of Camp Green Lake from HOLES and they'll probably turn it in two days early. Give them the option to create a miniature map of Asia and they'll probably add buildings representing the architecture of the various nations. 

It is an amazing tool and it begs to be explored further!

FreeCiv

In my opinion, Sid Meier's Civilization is the greatest educational game ever created. No two games are ever the same, it can be played infinitely, and when students have started to master the game it means they have a firm understanding of geopolitics, economics, governments, and technological advances ranging from writing to jet propulsion. You can tell your students "the British Empire relied on its huge navy" as many times as you want, but give them Civilization and they'll learn for themselves why islands and other nations in close quarters often expand overseas, develop colonies, and sometimes displace other nations. They will also understand why it is so difficult to maintain control of people on the other side of the planet, why living in close proximity to other nations leads to more trade and why trade leads to rapid technological development.

Civilization II

FreeCiv

FreeCiv is not the same game because it isn't played in turns, and that is a major difference. However, it is the same in every other way, and you can construct your own maps and scenarios. Would you like your student to understand why the Union had an advantage over the Confederacy? Have them play the game on a difficult setting and they will struggle (pitifully) to defeat a more industrialized opponent. 

If you can afford Civilization (II is fantastic, even if the graphics aren't) then get it, but if you can't, FreeCiv is a decent alternative. In a future date I am going to blog about all of the awesome stuff you can do with Civilization!

Adjusting Assessment for the Age of Google

It's no secret that technology is changing the world, and this change includes education. However, I am frequently astounded at how little our methods of assessment have changed. Visit Yahoo Answers or a similar site and you will find students getting the answers to their essay questions and math problems. Is this cheating? Probably, but if it works, which it does, isn't it just a crowd-sourced calculator?

In previous posts I have alluded to my "Google Axiom," which states that if the question can be answered quickly by Google, one must evaluate whether it is worth teaching to mastery. The answer isn't always "no," because many skills are foundational. Students need to memorize math facts and how to spell many words. However, recognizing allegory in Steinbeck's novels or triggers to a civilization's collapse aren't foundational, unless you're writing a dissertation. It's more important that students are capable of explaining allegory or identifying contributing factors to the destruction of the Incan empire. If you're simply asking them to list three allegories or circle "Western diseases," you're wasting their time, because Google can answer that question for them and in the real world it will. In so many cases, our assessments can and should be designed so they can't be completed by a Google Search. This means using Project Based Learning. Coincidentally, Google can be used to find answers for how to best teach and assess. Want a project for fractions? Ask the Internet! 

Want students to learn about the political, cultural and physical geography of Africa? Have them use maps, graphs, charts and news articles to redraw borders using political, cultural, and physical features. Discuss how the random, haphazard division by colonial powers led to the instability and frequent clashes we see today. Explore some of the continents languages, cultures and political systems. Students can't Google: How do I divide up an entire continent? Please provide sources. This isn't just a better way to assess, it's a better way to learn!

There are many advantages to Project Based Learning, the least of which is the difficulty of "cheating." PBL allows students to express their knowledge and understanding in a medium of their choice; it allows them to express their ideas and creativity. In short, "Google-proofing" your assessment is best practice.

One final thought: What if the power goes out? Without gadgets and electricity, how will students know the atomic mass of uranium? This is a reasonable question, but the answer is pretty simple: if the power goes out for any sustained period of time and we return to the stone age, skills learned at summer camp (making fire with sticks, leather craft, etc.) are going to be far more important than atomic mass.

Obviously, this is all opinion. I would love to hear your thoughts on this! Please, comment below!

Quick, Easy and Educational Ways to Visit Websites with Students

You've found the perfect website to (explain mitosis / learn about adobe's amazing thermal properties / etc.). Unfortunately, when the students file into the computer lab or pick up their iPads they can't get the web address right. Here are some strategies and tools for eliminating this problem:

1) QR Codes: It seems like every blog post includes some reference to QR codes. They're fantastic and if you don't know how to use them, you can learn all about them here (#1 explains how to use them for accessing websites efficiently). Take note: you need a tablet, phone or some other device with a camera and the right software. Desktops, laptops, ultrabooks and other computers don't usually have the ability to scan a QR code. That brings us to...

2) URL Shorteners: If you've ever used Twitter to follow Naomi Harm or Edutopia, you've probably noticed that the links are really short and kind of unusual. They usually end in things like ".ly" instead of ".com." That's because Tweeters use a URL shortener to economize their 140 characters. The value of a URL shortener is that it turns www.website123.com/index/subindex/documents/doc19/ref=7%8# into a far more manageable goo.gl/ABC123. There are many different URL shorteners, but I prefer goo.gl, since I use GMail, Google Drive and many other parts of the Google suite. Simply copy the URL of whatever website you want your students to visit, paste it on the goo.gl page, hit "shorten url" and write it on the whiteboard for your students to copy. This is the perfect solution for when you visit the computer lab.

3) Learn to use a Search Engine: It's really important for students (and everybody) to learn how to use a search engine effectively. One of my favorite ways to reinforce the skill is to find a webpage that I want them to visit, put it up on the digital projector and have them use their own search engine skills to find it. You can adjust this activity to suit your students abilities. If they're advanced search engine users they already know to type in the title of the page, a line of text in quotation marks, or the publishing date. For novice students who need more support you can write "Site: USA TODAY"; "Article Title: Stocks Soar..."; "Date Published" and other useful information onto the board. Maybe your students are somewhere between advanced and novice. In that case, close read the webpage as a group and ask them to point out useful traits and information.

4) HTML to PDF Conversion: Sometimes you want students to access a fantastic (but online) chart, article or picture during a field trip or a nature walk, but there's no internet. Maybe you found a great webpage, but there are a million distracting ads. Perhaps you've found the perfect article for a professional development seminar, but don't want to make lots of paper copies. If any of those situations are familiar to you, then the HTML to PDF converter will be very helpful. These converters can be found with a simple internet search and they allow you to enter the web address of a site, hit convert, download as a PDF and share with students and colleagues. My favorite is http://pdfmyurl.com/ because it loads quickly and has a clean user interface. It takes less than a minute to complete this process and when you're finished students can mark up their documents anywhere using Notability.

Complex Texts and Technology

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and 1-to1 initiatives are, in my opinion, positive changes. However, it's sometimes difficult to know which way is up with these two major changes taking place concurrently.

One of the major changes of the CCSS is the move towards complex texts and literacy skills. Instead of having students read one leveled text after another, the students will read more difficult, high-quality texts. While this change receives the most attention from administrators and Language Arts teachers it is important to remember that reading and writing skills should be developed in all content areas.

When it comes to reading complex texts, technology can be a great ally to teachers and students. Today's post focuses on some free technologies that can be used to make reading fun (and assessment easy).

Notability: If you don't have this app, go and buy it. It is hands-down the best deal in educational apps. It's the Cadillac of note taking apps and it works seamlessly with Google Drive, Dropbox, PDFs and many other formats (regrettably, not Kindle). Anyways, it's awesome for close reading a text (there are tons of good PDFs out there and you can always make your own) and annotating because it allows students to do everything they would with paper. They can underline, highlight, add sticky notes, draw charts, and add pictures. Let's put those features into context.

This quarter we are reading Crispin: Cross of Lead and it's the story of a recently orphaned peasant in medieval England. It's a fantastic piece of historical fiction and explores the complicated (and completely unfair) social and political structure. One of the book's minor's characters, John Ball, was a real person and was executed for his role in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. To help students understand the connection between Crispin and the Peasant's Revolt, we read this PDF about the revolt. So, what did we do with these two texts and Notability?

• Text-to-text connections:  There were lots of connections to be made between Crispin  and the PDF. Students could photograph sections from the book that were connected and place those photographs right into the PDF. Sometimes there wasn't a single passage that connected to the PDF, and then they could add sticky notes and text boxes to explain the connections. 
• Shared our Ideas: Because Notability is such a well-connected app, students could share their annotations with me and with their classmates at a central location. In this case, it was a communal Google Drive folder.

What else could we do?

• Text-to-world connections: We've talked about the social, economic and political structure of Medieval England as it relates to Crispin. Students used information from the text to determine where various characters would fall on a a social pyramid. The PDF references many different people and groups and these too could be placed on a social hierarchy. These in turn could be compared to other social, political, and economic structures.
• Cause and Effect: There were several causes of the Peasants' Revolt, first and foremost was the mistreatment and oppression of peasants by the upper classes and nobility. The iniquity is central to Crispin's plot and the book is set four years before the revolt, so students could easily make cause-and-effect connections using the PDF to study effects and Crispin and the PDF to study causes.

Grid Lens: Grid Lens is an app that allows the user to construct a photo collage by adding photographs to various frames. This app can be used in a variety of ways. For example, graphing out the beginning, middle and end of a story. Photographing important text features, like thesis statements, titles, sub-headings, graphs, maps and pictures. It can also be used by students to highlight what they believe are the most important parts of a text. By using the zoom and screenshot or camera features, students can select the three, four, five, etc. most important paragraphs or sentences from a text. Then they can use Grid Shot to easily put the images together and share it with the teacher. Summarizing is an important skill, and being able to point out the most important parts of a text can be tedious, dull work. However, we all know that good readers look back on a text and ask, "what do I need to take away from this article." With Grid Shot they can put this all together and then email it to their teachers. It isn't glamorous, but it's an easy way for students to say, "this is what stood out to me."

Using Google Presentations as a Textbook

The most valuable aspect of a 1:1 program is the technologies ability to assist with differentiation. iPads and Chromebooks allow for a dynamic learning experience that can change and react to the student's needs. As time goes by this capability is going to become more sophisticated, but that's a topic for another time.

One of my favorite ways to customize the learning to student's various needs is to use Google Presentation (it's like Powerpoint) to create an interactive textbook. The interactivity isn't fancy; there aren't any ancient Roman artifacts  that can be manipulated in three-dimensions. What it does do is allow students to work at their own speed and, in most cases, learn in a variety of ways (read it, hear it, watch it, share it, etc.). Using Google Presentation means that students can access this material from any web-connected device and I can make changes to it depending on student needs. If students don't understand the difference between a subject and object it is very easy to add another page of examples, link to another website, embed a video, or post on a classroom discussion board.most importantly, it answers the easy questions (what's an adjective, etc.) and frees me up to work 1-on-1 and in small groups to improve the difficult things (voice, word choice, etc.).

Here are some examples. As you look through them you will notice there are some websites I link frequently. For instance, TodaysMeet.com gets used almost every week as a formative learning assessment. There are often links to Purdue's Online Writing Lab or other websites that might help reinforce a concept.

Unit 1: Science Fiction
Week 1 and 2: Complete Sentences
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1pD69ymQI_1ZkY2MIhJqPjF_MR6JuGGNmw-eSkDBMoK4/edit#slide=id.g10483fe87_0135
Week 3 and 4: Building Science Fiction
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1fYqDtkYk4RStqhLwoc4cd3Ftj6vzmpHFPTM91lCfCNE/edit#slide=id.g106c04f09_053

Week 5 & 6: We reviewed some concepts from 1-4, took a field trip on Friday, and got caught up on missing work. Look for Week 7 & 8 soon!

Week 7 & 8: Creating Your Science Fiction Story: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eUo7iEV4GOUPALrqN7dkFcwRKAwlV3_HogvaPbqUtl8/edit?usp=sharing

Unit 2: Business World
Slideshow 1: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1LZ-98WOJ-hvJ_TBp--7A6mF0zi-S8NrCIlv9eMLV3ec/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p

Unit 3: Medieval Europe
Etymology Project: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1NJGMrwT_H37qh8HwK4HVi_fVY4h9CxtPgxFAe13SQEY/edit#slide=id.g2b5f71dbf_111  

Similes and Metaphors: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1XSWLs89VyP49UFzrJhzyBF6RxZHl_FX_wo-zC9gnny4/edit#slide=id.g1c7b6216c_015 

Imagery: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/11W1l-j9s6AW4WlFPFBQdQNojuKC0j1ljO4MYI-ItlOc/edit#slide=id.g2c2e2072e_011

GapMinder and Interdisciplinary Learning: Language Arts, Social Studies, Science and Math

I teach Language Arts, but Social Studies is my favorite subject to teach. However, if I "ran the zoo" there would be no subjects, because in life we're always using skills from one subject in tandem with skills from another. For this reason, I am always looking for ways to bring other subjects into Language Arts.

Gapminder: Gapminder is an extremely user-friendly data visualization program. It gives the user world-wide data sets on everything from nuclear energy to life expectancy, and a very easy-to-use interface for representing and even animating the data. Want to see how population and carbon emissions have changed over time? Select those data sets from the drop down menu and press play. How you use it depends on what you're teaching and your students capabilities.

• Can You Explain That? Have students put one data set on the X-axis and another on the Y-axis. You could assign them a data set or let them choose their own. In either case, challenge them to provide an explanation for what they see. This could prompt a discussion about causality and correlation. Is there a relationship between the number of cars and the number of traffic fatalities? Why is it so high in some countries? Math, reasoning, writing and research skills are all marshaled with this activity.
• Where's the Data? In some cases, there's no data from a country. Why don't we know the average income of a North Korean?

Behavior Data and Google Forms

Data is an essential part of teaching, and we all have a grade book for keeping track of who is passing and failing. Many of us also collect data on behavior.  Paperwork and carbon-copy forms are the weak link in my behavioral management and behavior grades. That's why I use Google Forms! A Google form allows for faster, more accurate records and better access.

On a computer, using Google Drive, you can build a survey with questions that pertain to the behavior. That's a screen shot of mine. In my class students are given a green card for good behavior and a red card for bad behavior. They put what they think they were doing wrong on the card and then put it on a large graph with an "X" axis for Respect and a "Y" axis for Responsibility. Their name does not go on the card, but it does go into this Google Survey, along with their hour number.

This behavioral data can be accessed from anywhere. An IEP meeting, team meeting, parent/teacher conference, and at home. If your entire grade-level or school has a discipline system it could be shared across an entire school, with every teacher contributing and accessing data at a central location. The data can be used to determine when students are most likely to act up. Are they misbehaving because it's at the end of the day? Or are they misbehaving only in male teachers' classes? Why is this student so well behaved in Mr. J's class? Maybe Mr. J has figured out how to reach this student. There's a new kid coming to our school, who has an excellent behavior record and could be trusted to show this student around? These kinds of insights are invaluable.

This page has been added to the home screen of my iPad and bookmarked on my computer. It can be accessed and completed in about 15 seconds. When it comes time to do behavior grades, the spread sheet is opened up, ordered by Period Number and grades are handed out based on the data. If a parent calls to ask about their child's behavior grade I can tell them specifically what they did to earn the grade.

One note of caution: Google has very good security and with a good password your data should be safe, but there's no guarantee. If possible try to limit the personally identifiable information in your forms to avoid running afoul of  FERPA.

If you have any questions on exactly how to construct a Google Form or suggestions on what to do, please share them below as a "Comment."