Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

Relaxing with a Game

21st Century Skills, gaming, professional development, Uncategorized

I have been traveling and training for the past two months and finally just needed a Friday afternoon mostly off to relax a bit before the last push next week. So, I opened up my current game: Roads of Rome 2. It is a time management game, my favorite kind, and I was looking forward to a bit of time creating settlements, negotiating with pirates, building roads and picking up crystals and other artifacts. But as I played I was thinking about gaming…something I’ve been doing a lot of this summer with the book group and the discussions I’ve been having with teachers and tech coaches. Two quick observations:

1. There are parts of this game that I still don’t completely understand. They have added a few extra types of buildings that help in some way that, at least to me, is not completely transparent. In some cases, I haven’t built them at all and it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the outcome of the level. It’s odd that I’m able to play a game fairly successfully without being an “expert.”

2. I also haven’t always had to upgrade the buildings in order to get the expert score. In fact, I suspect I got the high score because I DID NOT upgrade the buildings. It seems that one of the lessons of this game is learning how to prioritize your use of manpower and resources. When do you hire new people and when can three people do the work? Which buildings must be upgraded in order to succeed? Sometimes I get it right on the first try but often I replay the level, putting my knowledge from the previous tries to work. Which resources were in short supply? Did I get a lot of warnings about needing more workers? With time ticking away, there really can’t be any down time as you wait for more gold or for a worker to scurry home.

Can these lessons be applied to life? In the James Gee video from Edutopia that I shared with some teachers yesterday, Gee talks about how World of Warcraft teaches collaboration by forcing you to work with others who have different skill sets and expertise, certainly a very important real world lesson. The lessons above should also be part of a real life toolkit: being able to live with a little ambiguity and knowing how to use resources and people wisely are mentioned by many leadership experts as characteristics of successful leaders.

Am I rationalizing playing a game on Friday afternoon by trying to write something thoughtful? Sort of….but my audience yesterday was not made up of gamers and I could tell they were surprised by learning about some of the features of games and what kids (and grown ups) might be learning as they are playing or how games like Chore Wars could make houseclearning fun!

iPad Lesson: Creating a Food Web

21st Century Skills, Education, professional development, technology

I’ve been doing some training for teachers who will be using iPads in their classrooms this coming year.  I wanted to show them the power of mobile technologies so designed a lesson plan that I thought others might find interesting, particularly if you doing your own training.

Pretty simple idea: the content I used was the food web since it seems to be a ubiquitous standard in the biological sciences.  The teachers started with their own school campuses to locate and photograph the various parts of the food web that they could find.  If they couldn’t find certain ones, they were allowed to supplement with photos from the web.  They opened the photos in Skitch to do some annotations and then used an interactive whiteboard app to create a presentation.  The preferred app was educreations as it allowed the user to have multiple screens.  Considering the limited amount of time we were able to devote to the activity (just about an hour), the resulting products were pretty good.

This past week, I also had math teachers so I gave them the option of creating one related to triangles and other geometric shapes.  They were able to easily find photos in the school and combine them into great presentations.

I would love to hear about other ways you’ve incorporated hands on learning in your professional development…I’m convinced that if teachers can experience engagement with the devices, they will be more likely to use them in more powerful ways.

Learning As You Go

21st Century Skills, gaming

I am in the midst of playing several time management games and one thing they have in common is that they don’t come with any help files.  Unlike the board games I played as a kid, there are no directions printed on the lid. In her book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal points out that this is the big difference between digital and predigital games:

Many, if not most, computer and video games today are structured this way. Players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to play. This kind of ambiguous play is markedly different from historical, predigital games. Traditionally, we have needed instructions in order to play a game. But now we’re often invited to learn as we go. We explore the game space, and the computer code effectively constrains and guides us. We learn how to play by carefully observing what the game allows us to do and how it responds to our input. As a result, most gamers never read game manuals. In fact, it’s a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.

This observation resonated with me and reminded me of an experience I had with a group of non-gamers in graduate school.  I was charged with showing a group of educators a simulation, and I chose Food Force, a game developed by the World Food Programme.  I gave them the overview of the game, showed them how the various virtual aid workers would guide them and then let them go.

The biggest complaint at the end was that I did not give them enough information and background in order to play the game.  Essentially, they wanted me to take them through each section of the game and show them how to be successful before they ever started.  Learning as they went meant that they often “failed” and this was not something that doctoral students liked doing.  The mind set was that you either did it right the first time or you were a failure and I couldn’t help wondering how that translated into the way they worked with their students in their classrooms.

Learning as you go and learning as you fail are part of the lessons of digital games and I wonder how those lessons play out in the game of life?  Are gamers more observant in the real world?  Are they better able to navigate an unfamiliar landscape?

Teach Balance Rather Than Zero Tolerance

21st Century Skills, Education, New Media, teaching, technology

I ran across a new movement, advertised via social media, advocating “unplugging” during certain times of the day. Evidently, more and more people are choosing to disconnect for specified periods of time to see what it’s like to go without and then musing about it on the web, once they’ve reestablished connection. Most, amazingly enough, found productive things to do and were able to resist the urge to tell everyone else via the network.

I was reminded of two things: the “turn off the tv week” that I used to sponsor in the late great days before the Internet and the actions many schools are starting to take towards social media. These disconnect movements–whether done in the name of personal challenge, family togetherness or student safety–all seem to suggest that there is something suspect about our relationship to social media just as, in earlier generations, we worried about our television viewing. So I find it particularly ironic that the Good 30-Day Challenge folks who are unplugging at 8 PM do allow you to use your computer as a television.

Continue reading Teach Balance Rather Than Zero Tolerance →

Well, duh

21st Century Skills, technology

I will admit to envy….I would like an iPad. But since I still need a regular laptop, it seems hard to justify. I am saving up for a new Air and the iPad gets me almost half way there.

But I also find myself using my phone to complete a lot of work and being frustrated by the too small screen and keyboard. Then I had a flash. I had tablet: my Nook. But my narrow vision made me think of it only as an ereader.

It does just what I want. Easy emaii and web
access aand a few games. I am typing on it right now. Cool.

I remember using the same tunnel vision with my iPod touch, thinking of it only as a music and book player.

I am a happy tablet owner now! Time for a game of Angry Birds.