From the desk of Mr. Walters

Okay, so I don't know Charlotte Danielson , and I cannot seriously make conjecture on her leisure activities, particularly in the realm of video games. With that out of the way, I wanted to explore some of the ways in which the use of simulations, games, gamification and game design relates to and can exemplify the four domains of Danielson's Framework for Teaching and learning . Today, I'd like to begin with Domain 2, Classroom Environment. In future posts on this topic, I plan to explore the other domains. For those of you who are being evaluated using the Danielson framework and who also happen to be doing gamification (with or without Classcraft), feel free to steal liberally from the language in this post for your professional "evidence folder". Gamification, Levelling up my Classroom environment with Classcraft I've been using Classcraft off and on since last year, but I'm just now really starting to get into a groove with this thing. ...

Collaboration, it's one of the 21st century skills. There's pretty much unanimous agreement among policy-makers, academic thinkers, and business leaders that collaboration must be a crucial part of our classrooms. Incidentally, there is almost unanimous agreement among teachers and students that group work is painful, cumbersome, annoying, and largely counter-productive. Even popular reality  shows rely on group assignments to weed out contestants and create unnecessary drama. Why is something that is so important and crucial to our survival, so painful and dreadful? How can we make it more awesome? What do we do with collaboration? Part 1: Why you hate group work. Before our winter holiday break, I informally polled students in my classes. In all of my sections but one, 100% of my students noted that they hate doing group work. In one class two students said that they love group assignments because they can usually con their group mates into doing all of the work. Wh...

As teacher-professionals, we have many communities in our own Personal Learning Networks or PLN's. We can use hashtags in twitter, for example, to float ideas, ask questions, and share best practices in our field. Our students don't often have the same luxury. This is a valuable 21st century skill that tools such as Edmodo only go so far to address. I've recently opened up some Independent studies to my students, and I want them to experience community on a large scale around their project of choice. I want them to be able to share their work, their frustrations, and their ideas with a community beyond the walls of my school. I've put together two groups so far (more to follow) in Edmodo , and I'm opening them up for others to join. I've shared them with the "Computer Technology" community on Edmodo, and I hope to have more teachers and students join our groups. I'd also like to eventually create groups for other projects my stud...

In preparation for an upcoming conference ( Tech.it.u ), I was asked to watch this and comment on this question: "What legacy do you think your students can create to make a contribution for other students or the community?" Wow! I'm so pumped after watching this video. I "heart" TED talks as it is, but I was blow away by how much this resonated with what is happening in my experience right now. At Spring Grove Middle School we've been ramping up to replace our cross curricular project with a service-learning initiative. I teach a CIT course to seventh and eighth- grade students that focuses on what Vicky Davis, the "Coolcat Teacher" refers to as Technology Fluency . To accomplish this I typically develop various Project Based Learning units that compose the entire nine weeks I have students for. Recently, in light of our looming service learning initiative and the disengagement of about 7-10 % of my students with my current project, I decided ...

Okay, I'd like to give y'all a chance to learn from my successes and failures over the last two weeks, so here goes. If you want students to use Diigo for class and your school doesn't have / support student email, sign up for an educator account . FAQ Get your students' info.  Use a google form with fields set up in this order: name, email, username, password. Download the resulting spreadsheet as a csv.  It should look like this . (Diigo's sample csv doesn't load) Hints for Success: Make sure to have students add school initials to their usernames; there are a lot of Diigo users out there. Create a class group and upload your users.

Collaboration: Okay, let's face it.  The world is moving toward more and more online collaboration.  We need to prep our students for this.  One project I currently have simmering on the back burner is a "design team" project where student groups would "meet" online with clients to discuss the design of everything from logos to web sites.  The ideal tool for such an undertaking is Acrobat.com: Acrobat.com This tool is ideal for real-time online meeting, sketching ideas on the whiteboard, uploading sample files and presentations, and even sharing screens.  It's even free.  The problem is, it doesn't work on our student workstations...  It's fine on my workstation and most of my colleagues.  My students, on the other hand, always get "invalid ticket" errors.  I swear this is deep freeze, but I can't get anyone to believe me. Here are some other possibilities that may not already be on your radar because they haven't been mentioned i...