What Matters Most in School? -- Promotion for Oh, Really!

It is my goal to have thousands of students all over the world having fun and discussing the things that matter most this year in school. I’m doing that by giving away a free copy of my party game Oh, Really!--"The Lively Game of What Matters Most"-- and by highlighting my free classroom activities.

The free activities are available on Promethean Planet here:

• My Back to School version of Oh, Really!
• All activities based on Oh, Really! with versions for various subject areas
• All of my free games activities

Keep reading for details on how you can win a copy of the game.

To help with this promotion, I asked Bernie DeKoven to (sort of) play Oh, Really! with us and to share his thoughts on the game. In case you don’t know, Bernie wrote the book on games and fun (as well as the blog, articles and other books). He has decades of experience with games in the classroom.

And several years ago his review of my simple party game helped me take the next step in publication. As someone who has played Oh, Really! in various forms almost as long as I have, here’s what he has to say about my game and what’s most important in the classroom:

For me, a game like Oh, Really is an opportunity for people to have fun (which I personally rank the highest) talking to each other (next highest) about things they care about, listening to others about things other people care about, exercising reason, becoming aware of different, but equally valid perspectives.

All of these, from the fun part to the reasoning part to the learning to accept and understand differences, belong in the classroom as much as they belong in the courtroom and at least as much as they belong at the family dinner table.

None of these have immediate relevance to anything that is generally identified as a learning objective in anybody's curriculum. And yet the impact on the students, on the relationship between them, and between them and the teacher, and between them, the teacher, and the learning enterprise, is welcome and often profound. It sets the stage for learning and understanding and wanting to learn together.

Thanks Bernie for your support of Oh, Really! and for always sounding the call for positive classroom experiences that remind us what matters most in education!

The Giveaway
I asked Bernie to rank the five words from Oh, Really! below from most important to least important. If you want to be entered in a drawing for the game, please visit this link. There you will rank the five items that Bernie was given:

• Tradition
• Attitude
• Teachers
• Goals
• Laughter

From all entries that I receive by September 16, 2011 (whether they match Bernie’s rankings or not) I will draw a winner who will receive a copy of the game. (See below for restrictions and other information.)

Here are the cards from the game that I sent to Bernie. Rank them in order from most important to least important as you think he would:

Tradition Attitude Teachers Goals Laughter

Details on the giveaway:

• This is solely my promotion for the game, as the game’s creator. Neither Bernie DeKoven nor Find It Games (the publisher of Oh, Really!) is responsible for the selection of the winner or sending the prize.
• I will send one copy of the published party game Oh, Really! to the winner. (Depending on shipping costs we might work out a different arrangement if the winner is outside of the continental U.S., but I’ll make sure we come up with something equivalent in terms of cost.)
• I will select a random entry from all that I receive as described above shortly after September 16, 2011. The winner will be contacted and announced here on the blog after that time.

Back to School Game

I put up a flipchart for a back to school edition of Oh, Really! recently. It should make a fun activity for any teacher and class in the first days back. It has one slide relating to summer, one relating to the start of school and three for general discussion.

Teachers should consider creating their own words for this one to personalize it.

As always, find all my flipcharts here.

Free Music and Audio Tools for the Classroom

I have played and written a lot of music in my life that would not have been possible without technology. I'm not a great musician, but technology can fill in the gaps and make a rewarding experience for me and others.

Here are a few free tools I've been using lately that could be used for fun classroom activities. For one, imagine students turning short poems into songs or raps and then using them as their favorite ringtones. They can also make for great background music in videos and podcasts.

Audacity - I'm sure almost everyone has heard of this free audio recording tool. It's not perfect, but excellent for almost all recording needs in the classroom.

Gsnap - This is my best find of the summer. It offers many of the benefits of the famous (and pricey) Auto-Tune pitch correction software, but Gsnap is free. I'm not a vocalist, but this helps me make sketches of my songs that I'm not embarrassed to play for the people who can perform them correctly. It works with Audacity 1.3, so you have to download that version if you want to use the two together. Supposedly you can get it to do the robotic voice effects popular in many songs, but so far I have only achieved a more natural correction, which is all I need anyway.

And this one is unfortunately dead now...
Roc - This is the music creation tool at Aviary. It can be used to easily make basic beats and loops. Check out all of Aviary's tools for great graphics tools too. I didn't have much luck with Myna, the audio recording tool.

edWeb.net - Webinars and Discussion

Last spring I joined a community on edWeb.net that is focused on gaming and education. Several other communities focus on everything from technology integration to special education are available as well. I would link to some specific resources, but almost everything at the site requires registration. From what I have seen so far, it is well worth joining.

Discussions almost always bring up a resource that is new to me or a good question to consider. The webinars that I have watched have also been useful. I haven't been able to catch any of them live, but they are always accessible after the event. I play them in the background while doing other things.

Cultivating a Learning Environment

I love David Warlick's blog. In a recent post he lists six suggestions for cultivating a learning environment. I'm going to use these as a guide for any meeting I chair or any tech project that allows me some influence. I also hope to add to the list and have a list of my own specific examples by the end of this year.

Here are his suggestions taken from his post:

1. Fill your school(s) with learners. When interviewing prospective teachers, ask “Tell me about something that you have learned lately.” “How did you learn it?” “What are you seeking to learn more about right now that is not related to your teaching – and how?” Find out how proficient they are at network learning.
2. Be a public learner. Open your faculty meetings with something that you’ve just learned – and how you learned it. Include in the daily announcements some piece of interesting knowledge that is obviously new. “Did you know that a California power utility has just gotten permission to sell electricity from outer space? Make frequent mention of what you’ve learned from your Twitter stream, RSS reader, specific bloggers you read. This should not be limited to job specific topics.
3. Introduce new ideas that are not necessarily related to school. Share links to thought-provoking TED talks or other mini-lectures presented by interesting and smart people. Ask for reactions during faculty meetings, in the halls, or during casual conversations with employees and parents.
4. Make students’ outside-school-learning part of the conversation. Find out what their passions are and ask them what they’ve just learned about it. Suggest that they write something up about it for the school web site or annual research publication.
5. Make your school a curiosity lab. Plant around the school (especially in the library) intriguing questions that might provoke curiosity in learners (How many steps does a centipede have to take to travel a foot? Who was the youngest person to sail around the world?). Reward students who answer them and video their explanations of how they found the answers for the school’s web site. With the help of creative teachers, invent a mystery for your school and plant clues around the school. Require student-participants to research the clues they have discovered in order to find their way to the next clue.
6. Make all school stakeholders public learners. Ask members of your staff to write essays about their latest vacations or hobbies and publish them on the school web site or annual research publication. Ask teachers to devote one of their classroom bulletin boards to information about a personal passion of theirs, sharing their latest gained knowledge and achievements. Suggest that they produce TED style multimedia presentations about a topic they are especially interested in and post them on the school’s web site or perform them at PTA meetings. Learn about the hobbies and travels of the parents of your students and ask them to share what they are learning and how they are learning it through essays, videos, Skyped-in conversations, etc.

Other versions of this list can be found here and here.

Video Game Programming for the Classroom

Last spring I discovered Gamestar Mechanic through the Scholastic Level Up! materials. It's a promising resource for bringing the excitement of video game creation to the classroom. More things are in the works for this fall too.

As for the Level Up! resources, I wasn't too impressed with the superficial blending of video game creation and course content, so I created a short math lesson for 5th graders based on the site. I worked with two teachers and 12 students in my district testing out the project as part of my graduate program.

Overall, I can say the students really got excited about the program. It takes them awhile to work through the levels and acquire enough skills and resources to make a decent game. It might be a little difficult to justify that amount of class time, especially if there isn't some clear course content being learned as well. One of the teachers had the students do most of this at home--as if we could have stopped some of them! I wasn't completely successful with my own attempt to integrate math and programming, but it gave me some hope that it's possible.

From what I've been told, there will be a teacher community introduced this fall and from there, these issues can be addressed. I've been asked to submit my project in the next week as they prepare for the launch. Based on the enthusiasm for authentic learning that I see from this group's leaders, I am excited to watch where this will lead. Be sure to take a look at what's there now and keep coming back to check on developments.

I should add that I introduced this site to my kids at home. My daughter is going into 7th grade and my son will be in 6th. They both have a lot of fun creating the games and acquiring new sprites, tools and even the badges. There was much excitement when one of my son's games was featured and it generated some buzz in the associated, very safe online community.

Helping students at home

I remember about 12 years ago trying to use a chat room on my website to help a student with homework questions. That frustrating exercise was probably the only time I regretted having an eager learner in my class.

About seven years later a former student contacted me on Facebook and asked for help with some derivatives. We exchanged comments about each step back and forth on his status. It was just as difficult as the chat room, but at least he can refer to it still if he would want to. (Can you believe that somewhere disk space is devoted to all those Facebook comments?)

Well, now us math teachers have something that will suit our needs better. A colleague in one of my courses pointed out this site to me as one she uses when tutoring students over the internet.

Scribblar

So far I have only tested this with my wife to see how easy it is, but I really like the possibilities. Accounts are free. Yes, there's still the old fashioned chat room feature, but you can turn on audio and talk directly through your computer's microphone. Best of all, though, there's a "whiteboard" space where all participants can draw or write anything. You can even turn on a grid for graph paper.

I'm passing this on to the math department in my district. Please let me know if you find this useful for long distance tutoring.