Global Collaboration

For the final project of Using Social Media in Education course we had the choice to gamify our classroom, or create a Global Collaboration project. Gamifying a classroom is a little tricky when you don't have a classroom. So I partnered up with Tabatha to create a Global Collaboration project; this worked nicely anyways because I have been placed in a 6th grade classroom for student teaching. Now, I know what you're thinking.. whats the big deal? Well the highest grade I have ever been is 3rd grade, I have a TON of potential lessons for 1st-3rd graders and ZERO for 6th. This project is geared toward older kids and provides me with a good range of ideas for older kiddos.

This Global Collaboration project is an adaption from the website called Flat Connections. At this website you are able to subscribe and become part of their network for each semester or school year. They provide a description of the projects they will be doing before you decide to subscribe, which is what we were looking into. To see the description of Digiteen follow this link.

The main focus of Digiteen is to teach online safety and good digital footprints. We added some projects and took some away to create a project that would hopefully fit into my future 6th grade classroom. This wouldn't be a kind of project you would drill for 4 weeks, instead I would plan it taking 2 hrs a week for 12 weeks. Having the time spread out is going to allow students to practice good habits in between and really adopt these skills to form good habits.

We planned 4 different supporting tasks with 1 final, authentic task.
The tasks include:

• Questionnaire of personal online habits. (google forms)
• Online Map Scavenger hunt. (tour builder)

• Blog posting on how to improve their online habits. 
• Use media clips and relate to real life with global pal. (skype)

Final task: Students will create a presentation for their classmates of what digital citizenship means to them and how they apply it everyday.

Watch the video for a tutorial on how to use tour builder!


We have been playing around with having students completing the map scavenger hunt and then they could create their own for the Epal. This would probably add a couple of weeks to the timeline.

This brings me to the logistics of finding a class to collaborate with, if you pay for the subscription through Flat Connections this process will be a lot smoother and you'll basically be matched with a school. If you don't want to pay I would suggest connecting with a school in your district and branch out from there. You can use a lot of different resources to branch out by using education twitter chats, teacher blogs, or any other virtual PLNs.

Please look further into this projects by checking out our google doc, and website.

Gaming

First of all I am not a gamer, I am the kind of person that moves my whole body to left when trying to make a left turn in Mario Kart - not on the Wii. I am terrible at any shoot em up bang bang games, I forget what the controls are and then I panic, and then I die. I am terrible!

That being said, I cannot imagine how gaming can help almost every kind of learner but after getting into the "flow" of gaming I started to buy in. Yes, I got into the flow while gaming, meaning I lost track of two precious hours playing a shoot em up bang bang game on my phone. Ok, so it isn't exactly a shoot em up bang bang game it was Kingdom Rush. I build towers and try to kill the bad guys before they get through all while earning points to make my towers bigger and better.

First, lets talk about the flow. The flow was created by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, its meaning is basically when you are doing something very focused and you loose track of time because you are just there in the moment with whatever you are working on. My normal flow is when I am executing moves at work or when I am cleaning/organizing at home. I could clean out my closet every week if it didn't end up taking me 2-3 hours each time. I am busy and can't afford to waste time on the flow like that. This time I experienced the flow while I was playing the game, I started playing when I got home from work and didn't stop until after the news was over. While in the flow I was often caught yelling at my phone, encouraging my men to kill the bad guys, and doing math aloud to figure out how many towers I could purchase. You can imagine the look I got from my roommates. My boyfriend compared my reactions to how I act at a football game (I am the family yeller). Since I was so into the game I obviously couldn't take the time to think about how gaming would effect education as a teacher and as my future students.

So lastly, how does this influence my teaching? Well, one thing is for sure, this game teaches problem solving. This is one of the 21st century skills every child must learn. It also teaches control, control of your emotions, and your actions. If you are playing this game in a school setting, or just not by yourself, you have to be able to sensor the words coming out of your mouth. The problem solving comes from the very beginning of the quest, you have to decide where the best spot to put a tower and then what kind of tower you want. Once you decide where you have your towers you can call in the enemies, start getting kills, and build up your money to build more towers or create a safer tower. Part two of the problem solving...what tower do you give extra armor? What happens if you give the wrong tower extra armor? These are decisions that have to be made quickly and have immediate repercussions.

I think I will continue to play the game to figure out exactly what concepts and methods I would be able to use to make a difference in the classroom. As I said earlier I am not really into the gaming world, so to be able to use this to aide a lesson or help teach a concept I would really need to engulf myself totally.

Google is a GREAT tool!

Shout out to my Cheerleading Coach from my high school days... She is currently a Education Technology Consultant for Heartland AEA out of the Des Moines area. She has great blog posting all time, seriously go visit her page here. This posting was about using the google drawing tool to create a quick scatter plot to track a student's progress. Many teachers need a quick and easy way to visualize and track where a student is, this gives them the ability to map each student's successes out for FREE!! How great? Since teachers already spend way too much of their own money on classroom materials anyways. Thanks Coach Dahl, always helpin' people out!

Social Media for 8 year olds?

First of all, I am currently taking a course under my Educational Technology minor entitled: Using Digital and Social Media in Education. We haven't gotten too far into yet we are just now creating our own personal learning networks (PLN), after looking around at what the different PLN's can look like in the virtual world. I've followed blogs, I have participated in a tweetchat, followed my classmates on twitter (who are basically all grad student's), and now have created my own blog to start my own, personal PLN.

I am all for using all the technology possible in the classroom, a classroom should have no virtual walls. I say connect with an elementary class in California so your students in Iowa can experience another part of the country, have your students tweet, post to a blog, and respond to one another all while teaching those important 21st century skills. Using social media in the classroom isn't scary, and yes, you do still have to teach your students the skills they need to be safe while using all forms of social media. To support my thinking I have found a great article written by Beth Holland on Edutopia, she looked into a classroom that used social media to master effective communication, exploration, and their online voice.

I've given you a small glimpse into me as an educator by sharing some of my views on using social media. Another part of this whole teacher thing I have found that I really enjoy is creating curriculum, I am very aware this will look a lot different when I actually have a classroom, students to teach, standards to meet, and 180 days. As of right now I'll go crazy creating a thematic units that are meaningful - well I think they are meaningful they haven't ever been tested beginning to end...That being said, I found another little article that explores how the trends of the 21st century are changing the way curriculum is being written. Tina Barseghian wrote about students not getting to study what they like until their third year of college, I am a college student I know this to be true, there are so many filler classes that you have to take to be a well rounded learner and soon to be educator for me, but man are those classes boring. I would much rather take a methods of teaching a subject course because that is what gets my skin crawling, its what gets me to go home and look further into the material. Not to mention the people I get to connect with because they share the same interests. She touches on the type of delivery we are now into, this can be taken different ways. 1. the ways we are delivering information to our students, or 2. the way they are delivering the information  they have learned. The best is option 2, it means you have or are close to reaching the highest level of thinking when it comes to the tech world. Below is the model we like to use in the ed tech department at UNI.