Here’s how it goes down.

The teacher, who already has a google docs account, creates a new form for each day. The five questions are entered into the form plus a question requiring them to put their name. Make sure you make this one a required question, or you’ll get some anonymous student responses(which might be what you want if you are just polling). Although there isn’t currently an option for adding pictures, you have the choice of 7 different response types. Text, paragraph text, multiple choice, choose from a list, scale, grid, and check boxes. While you can use any type that you want, I’ve found that using “select from options” makes it much easier to run a formula at the end to check since you know verbatim the possible answers that will be filling them spreadsheet. Once you have your questions, you simply display the address for the Google Form(to make life easier, use a URL shortener like goo.gl), and have the students repsond to the questions on their digital devices. A word of caution, however. Having an entire school of students accessing the school’s wifi during the same five minute period can be taxing on a school’s network infrastructure. Luckily, several vendors offer affordable solutions to IT managed Services, to help ease the load.

One of my favorite experience from getting my Master’s degree was one where a teacher assigned What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy (Gee) for reading, and Lord of the Rings Online for playing. Likely one of the best pairings in education history. I had never heard of either. For those unaware, Lord of the Rings Online(LOTRO), is a free-to-play massive multiplayer online game(MMO). It places you in the world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth with thousands of other players, and takes you along much of the plot line from the Lord of the Rings trilogy(with added book-related adventures). If you’ve read the books, then you can understand how easily one can be swept away by being fully immersed in an interactive world that brings to life to the pages you once only saw in your head as you read. It’s beautiful to say the least. I had goosebumps upon meeting Gandalf the first time.

All of this is great for someone looking to play a game, but where does this tie into education? The easy answer is, I teach Game Design to middle school students. How can they make games, without playing them right? I don’t want to jump into this, just yet though. I want to explore where this game might find a home in classrooms outside of mine, and what collaborations can be built.

English/Literature/Writing w/ technology integration

The first and easiest connection is literature classes. Having read the books in high school, the game has had me returning to them numerous times to read further about the places I was traveling to, or picking up back story on characters that I met. Just as the books pushed people to adopt the game when it came out, I feel the game works just as well to push people back to the books. When you have students doing both, you have the ingredients for driving epic conversations about plot lines, literary devices, character development, and so forth. On top of this, there is the ever increasing demand on students to create digital works. Enter roll playing, and video editing. With a script created ahead of time, and screen capture software installed, some very impressive videos can be created. If you plan on assigning these books to your kids this year, I highly suggest recommending to them to pick up  the game (free digital download), to accompany their reading. Do a youtube search for “lotro roll playing” to see many examples of this.

Math

If you are in this game for the combat that it contains (and most will be), you’ll encounter some ridiculously enticing opportunities to dig in with some math skills. When it comes to combat, what your character can do is completely dependent on their character’s stats. These stats are bestowed upon characters through choices in the race and classes they choose, equipment, armour, and consumables. As a character continues to proceed in levels, their gear will upgrade, they will acquire traits, etc, and these stats steadily increase, and ultimately decide how hard your character can hit, how much damage it can mitigate, what percentage chance they have of dealing additional damage, or missing completely. Depending on what type of roll you want your character to play, you’re going to have to be selective in how you advance these numbers. I think most players look at the numbers, and understand a correlation between higher numbers and better abilities(rightly so). Few have worked out the numbers like this person that went into some very deep details about how the numbers work. Some of this comes from a post in the lorebook about damage mechanics. Likely, most students will find after looking at this, that less chance goes into the numbers they are making on attacks than what they previously thought. Conversations that might follow would be “what stats would be most advantageous for you character, and why”? “What is the highest possible score your character could get on a hit”? Keep in mind, some classes of characters are better at certain tasks than others. Some are damage dealers(ranged and melee damage per second or DPS), while others are damage takers(referred to as tanks), still others are healers, and some are a mixture of several. The wonderful thing about this, is that most of these questions will happen naturally. “Why is my hunter not dealing as much damage as yours?” “How come I die so easily?”. Some students will even seek out the social areas of the game to find their answers, where a lot of these same questions are being asked and answered. Again, these questions are key to driving our conversations naturally. Very few students will ask questions after a lecture, at least mine are like this. However, when they understand that the tools they are learning about can improve something that they care about, questions come and learning happens.

Social Studies

I’m going to leave this section intentionally bare as I explore it further, however do note a few things. Tolkien was more than a writer, as he was also a philologist (language and history). That being so, much went into his creation of racial groups, societies, histories, and even languages. An exploration of these might be well worth your time as character plots are strongly driven by their history, surroundings, and events. Much could be explored.

Finally, I teach none of the above mentioned course, and yet through this game I can extend to them them all. More importantly, I can bring together these classes to bring topics to students that might not otherwise care to explore them. My roll as a teacher is defined on paper as being a Middle School Game Design teacher, and for those that have a similar role in their schools, I’m going to go a bit deeper into what I’ll be doing this year.

The Plan Thus Far…. or An Unexpected Journey, a Teacher’s Tale.

For the past two years, I’ve taught introductory Game Design classes as a means of teaching a bit of Java to 6th-8th Grade students. Honestly, it might be better explained as a class that tricks kids into learning math and science while they think they are playing games. We start with basics, like most. We’ll do SCRATCH for a couple weeks as I talk about the elements of programming, and some characteristics of “good” game design. Then we’ll launch off and begin following much of the Stanford CS106a course (freely available through iTunes U. In the past, while this is happening, I would assign kids the task of playing games while at home (not the hardest homework in the world), and would require regular journaling of their experiences. They’d sometimes have prompts asking for certain thoughts on the design of the game, and other times they’d have more liberties to write what they were experiencing. This year, they will be playing LOTRO, provided they have parent permission. (Age 13 restriction unless they have permission from parents). For those without access, there will be a weekly after-school club that plays. My reasons for choosing LOTRO, were because of the following. It’s free. It is massive. There is an active community that frequently writes, and interacts. And aside from it’s beauty, and other enjoyable characteristics, it assumes the role of teacher quite well. Something that students struggle with in game design, is that they don’t create the game to teach the player how to play(Most good games do this). The way that LOTRO walks you through each nuance is remarkable. The initial tutorial is worked smoothly into the initial game play. Visual cues are clean, helpful, and well integrated. And it doesn’t throw too much at you at once. For example, mail, horse riding, advanced skills, skirmishes, etc don’t become available until a few levels have passed, and after a person has mastered the basics of game play. Just really good, immediate feedback. Honestly, you would think that they have a staff of educators at Turbine helping to make this game. I want my students to play the game, and attempt to think about it from a developers mindset. Granted, my kids are years from making professional, but if they can start asking the right questions, then I’ve done my part.

One of the biggest selling points, beyond their mobility, is the abundance of apps that can be downloaded and installed. Want something for multiplication? Fractions? Videos on a plethora of math skills? English tests? They’re on the app store. And while they may do a great job at keeping the kids occupied with flashy graphics and needed skill and drill, these apps alone aren’t teaching a whole lot of 21^st Century Skills. If anything, it is playing more and more into the media consumption that they already do quite readily. Let’s not assume that learning on a digital tool equates to preparing students with skills needed for 21^st century jobs and learning. Instead I ask you to look a little further. Pay special attention to those apps that let students take a stab at content creation. They do exist, but are in the smaller, but growing category of education apps. I’d be willing to say that your best bet for finding some of the most beneficial apps out there will be found while looking outside the educational category. Take Evernote, wordpress, or cinch for example. These three apps are phenomenal when it comes to teaching routines that outline the scope of what it means to be 21^st century literate. Pair them up with some the ed apps that you’ve found to support your learning target, and now you have a way for students to digest, summarize, reflect, organize and share what they have learned.

Let’s take an example. A math teaching colleague of mine has found quite a few good math apps out there. She has them spend time on these apps as extra practice to support the learning targets that she’s covering in class. Not bad. Sometimes she even has running competitions for the highest score. So already, she’s using games to spark enthusiasm within her content. However, aside from the high score page at the end of the game, how does the teacher go about collecting data on what students really know? Even better, how do students go about self-reflecting to determine what they need to be focusing on to improve. Here is where the other apps come in. Encourage the students to screen capture frequently. Capture scores, difficult problems, etc. When they are finished, plug them into evernote and keep a running journal, complete with reflections on learning. These can be tagged, shared and stored for later. They should be answering questions like, “What is keeping you from leveling up? What are you most comfortable with? What skill would help you score higher?” This type of thinking should put them in tune with what they are doing, and allow them to see that the scores they are getting aren’t random, but are the result of their learning. Some students will be content with seeing an organized/tagged list of experiences through their growth in a concept, others might do better to podcast a bit on the skills (cinch), or even write more in depth (wordpress). Cinch and Wordpress might even offer a little more to other students that might want to check in on the progress of other students that are struggling with others. Developing a dialogue amongst students is a much further step in the right direction than a class-wide competition for the highest score.

That’s fine for math, but what if my content doesn’t require as much skill and drill?

Open up a backchannel to your class discussion using twitter. Social Media is here for a while, why not teach them importance of hashtags, tweets, and retweets. While you are at it, why not allow them to search some of the realtime results for a current even that is happening. Students can learn quite a bit from the citizen journalists of the world, and it will help them to develop a voice that be expressed through blogging, podcasting, and video blogging on YouTube.  Critical thinking about relevance of primary sources, reading and writing literacy, research skills, communications… these are skills that will compliment your learning targets in a way that will surely improve their learning over time, but it only comes with moving beyond skill and drill, and into the realm of true digital literacy. How are you harnessing digital learning through more than just educational apps? Let ‘er fly in the comments.

Mercury Browser

Of course the iPod Touch already has safari, but the useful of this app was too much to pass up. This browser packs the ability to save webpages for offline browsing(including pictures). Essentially a teacher could direct students to a ton of great content, and have them save it for later. From what I can tell, the app saves pages to the root, which I don’t think gets removed during the syncing process. I should mention that the free version will save text only. So even though not many publishers have iPod Touch formatted text books for middle school, students can still benefit from fresh content regardless of connectivity. There are also some pretty nice extras thrown in as well, such as full screen browsing and tabs.  Price: 99 cents. Not bad at all!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mercury-web-browser-fast-fullscreen/id331012646?mt=8 Free Version (iTunes Link)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-mercury-web-browser-pro-fast-fullscreen/id348701575?mt=8 Paid Version (iTunes Link)

The cart.

Almost regardless of the amount of units you plan on deploying, you are going to want to ensure you have a way to mass sync the devices. Syncing those guys would be an incredibly daunting task without some sort of hardware to connect them all at once. Heck, it’s a daunting task sometimes even with a cart. The cart we went with was is the Bretford PowerSync Cart. http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/product/TL357LL/B

You’re looking at about a $2200 pricetag, but considering it’s ability to charge 40 and sync 20, it will more than likely be worth it. A caveat… The specs recommend a macbook running at least OS X 10.4.10. We went ahead with the purchase with a PC and have run into a few problems. It works, but it’s a struggle. For example, the PC (running on about 4gig of ram and a relatively fast processor) bogs down at the site of 20 iPod Touches being plugged in at the same time. After a few trials, I was able to do it by plugging them into the cart one at a time and then syncing. It’s not ideal, but it will get you through if you absolutely don’t have a mac.

The cart features some storage in the bottom and two heavy locks for security.

Mics.

The current iPods model when we purchased were the third generation, and to get the most for our buck we purchased the 8 gigabyte versions. Something that should be noted is that these do NOT come with the earbuds with mics(apparently large sizes do). So if you’re purchasing some 8g iPods be sure to leave some cash for the mics. We were lucky to find some on monoprice.com for around $4 each. No telling how long the deal will last, or how much you’ll end up paying elsewhere. It was a deal for us, so we took it. http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10823&cs_id=1082303&p_id=5873&seq=1&format=2 Of course you don’t need these, but the voice recorder will mock you. Not to mention that there are a couple of good voice apps that we’ll be talking about later.

Chargers

No AC adapters came with our iPods. You get the usb cord, generic earbuds, and an odd piece of plastic. SO if you have students that lack a computer at home, be sure and purchase a few of these. They’re $30 through Apple. No telling whether a third party adapter will have compatibility issues, but if we find one that works well we’ll feature it.

Cases.

The backs of these do scratch up a bit, and you’ll probably want some extra protection for your investment. We’re having our students purchase these if they want them.

Bate Middle School iPod Touch Project 2010