3D Game Lab: IRL Quest-Cooking 2

I had already been to the store for the necessary ingredients and started cooking before I came back to this quest... so I took the picture in the kitchen.

If you look closely, you may see the tip of a tail, which is the kitten being on the counters where he is NOT supposed to be.

The meal would be savvy saver: Although the ingredients were expensive since I buy mostly organic and unprocessed items, the turkey breast will make at least 4 meals. Tonight is turkey & rice. Tomorrow is cream of turkey corn rice soup with broccoli. Tuesday is turkey salad for lunch or leftover soup, with turkey salad for dinner.

And easy clean up, too!

3D Game Lab: IRL Quest-Cooking 1

Slow Cooker Thanksgiving Turkey

I chose this recipe because I had a turkey breast in the freezer that needed to be prepared. Unfortunately, I have to be very careful what I eat, so finding a plain way to prepare the turkey so it was useable in multiple meals throughout the week was necessary. I think I would have preferred something a bit more interesting, but that's not possible right now...
I also chose it because, originally, I was supposed to be working with another teacher on a project. I just never made it over to her house because of technology issues and lots of storms.

Tools And Gadgets
Crockpot with lid

Ingredient List
1 (5 1/2 pound) bone-in turkey breast, skin removed
1/2 teaspoon garlic pepper
1 (10.5 ounce) can turkey gravy
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon dried sage

3D Game Lab: Mechanics of Game Based Learning

How might a teacher apply even ONE characteristic of games and game environments (choice, progress bars, etc.) to a typical unit or module of instruction?

As I've gone forward with this, albeit with much frustration on my part, I have thought about how to gamify my classroom in a better fashion. I already do some choice in the classroom, but I think I am going to add more options via a project selection board. I will give the students options on how they can show me what they have learned, including the option to take a test.

I will do this at the start of each unit using a choice board model, and I think I can streamline a lot of the activities including taking a test using various online options. We'll see how this works: it might allow me to do what I love about teaching, which is encouraging the students to be engaged and exploratory while minimizing the amount of time students spend stuffed into chairs and taking notes while I lecture. I hate that version of the classroom even more than I hate all the paperwork that goes along with teaching.

(The above picture is a sample choice board for a math unit from http://daretodifferentiate.wikispaces.com)

4G iTouches

In December, we received 2 4G iTouches from another Donor's Choose grant. I'm so grateful for the people that continue to provide funding to allow my students access to technology! This time, most of the donors were local people or non-profits, which is a huge leap forward in my mind; as much as I love my friends who donate money to my classroom, seeing that there are community foundations donating to us is just fantastic. Our thanks to the Piedmont Community Foundation, and the other donors (most of whom choose to remain anonymous, which fine!) for the new technology we have to use.
We had also achieved open-access filtered wifi in our classroom provided by the school district for awhile... About 6 weeks. And then the district shut it down because people were using it to stream video which caused the system to crash. The administrative offices decided to limit access to the open filtered wifi system to outside of school hours. Of course, I don't know all of the decision making that went into the decision making, but it seems that if the issue were students & teachers streaming video, you could block it. You could have principals tell staff that this is not an appropriate use of the system.
It just seems counterproductive given budget issues not allowing for purchases of technology, and district policies that do not allow grant-purchased items (items that belong to the school only, and not to the district) to be on the network which prevents Internet access. In this day and age, with so many things depending on the cloud (some of which are FREE), it'd be nice to be able to use these tools with my students. Despite the income level, most of my students have a cell phone that can use apps, and are either Droid or iOS (more iTouches than iPhones), which have options to make reading & writing easier for my students.

Spring into Summer

I have just realized that there haven't been any posts since our February blizzard! And there was definitely technology going on to share... We blogged about different independent living topics, although many of my students treated it like torture. They didn't like blogging any better than they like writing with a pen, and several students chose not to do it at all.
We used The Sims 2 to "practice" independent living skills we were learning about... although we had some interesting issues with the Sim characters. The overriding desire for the Sims to be social led to some unique situations, and I think setting up each computer to host 4-5 Sims may have overtaxed the random event generator. We had lots of fighting going on between the Sims, and in one case, a team burned their house down.
A separate issue was convincing those watching this that the students were not just playing a video game, but instead actually learning... I'd like to do more things like this, but we continue to be hampered by a lack of available Internet connections on the grant-funded laptops.
I haven't been able to get any additional technology via a grant, though I tried to get some iTouches with hopes of using them as mini-word processors and book readers for the students. I'll have to look at that again later, perhaps. A lot of grants for individual teachers are being vetted on Facebook now, and your friends have to "vote" for your grant... And this only works if you have parents with Internet connections, Facebook, etc.

Snow, Snow, Go Away!

There isn't very much to report on the technology in the classroom front because, well, we haven't BEEN in the classroom! We had 3 feet of snow fall between February 5 & February 10. All of the snow put us out of the classroom from February 5 through February 15, with an additional snow day on February 3. We were back last week, but we had an hour delay each day due to the conditions of the roads and sidewalks.

I reorganized groups in all of the classes to accommodate new students added to the rosters. We have restarted having the students work on their amusement parks, but this time I am requiring them to follow just my rubric, and to work in the Sandbox mode of the software. This gives them unlimited money while eliminating most of the complaints from the peeps.

Another apparent issue is not remembering how to make the various roller coasters, and getting frustrated when the rules of physics kick in during the game (yes, Rollercoaster Tycoon follows the rules of physics for their rides!). I'm trying to fix this by making short tutorial videos on the different coasters which the students can then watch as often as necessary. I'm using CamStudio, which is an open source screen recording package. It is the same as Camtasia, but free.

We are all hoping that there will not be any more snow for the rest of this school year.

Disappointment

I have to say that I'm very disappointed in the quality of projects that my students turned in for the last quarter. With the exception of a few, there was very little effort or thought put into the final versions of the games. One group actually attempted to turn in a hand-drawn board that was done in pencil 10 minutes before the final version was due. Another group traced their board, but didn't bother to use a ruler. In all, I only received 5 games total, and none of them included the required typed directions.
I'm not sure what went wrong... I've tried dissecting the problem, and have decided that at least there was some confusion since they were doing both an amusement park in the RCT3 software, and a game board of their own design based on an amusement park they chose. Clearly, the RCT3 activity was more popular than the game board. I was also out of the classroom more than is typical for me between jury duty, some family issues, and LOTS of meetings. But, the students still had 9 weeks with lots and lots of notice about projects, lots of checkpoints where they were told what still needed to be accomplished.
I have decided to let them finish their RCT3 parks for the first part of this quarter, because none of them have anything to present. And, I'm trying to decide how (and if!) I want to let them do anything with The Sims. I'd love to have enough computers to let them each do their own project.