I’m sitting in JFK airport, just landed here, from Orlando. Next I’ll hop on another flight for Raleigh. I know! I’m sure that somewhere, at some level, it makes sense. I’ve wanted to try Jet Blue for a while, and it’s all true. The seats where more comfortable, with more room, and each seat had a TV display, which played TV. I mean it, Fox, NBC, CBS, History, at least five sports channels, and three pay movies ($5 with a card swipe there at the seat). That was nice. But it was TV. I watched an old episode of The West Wing on my computer instead. Here in the airport, Jet Blue does provide free WiFi.
Another slight problem was my security rating. SSSS! I don’t know what that means, but it raised some eye brows. I was checked twice in Orlando, and then had to be patted down again here in New York. Very weird. It’s my first time with Jet Blue, but they assured me that that wasn’t it. It could be that my neighbor is a pilot. Or it could be my signing of an antiwar petition has finally caught up with me. It was 1971.
It was a good conference yesterday! The turnout was small, but the audience was excellent. It was part technology teachers, part librarians, and part tech administrators. I got a lot of URLs to check out when I get back to Raleigh, many of them being some rather interesting Google Maps and Google Earth hacks. The keynote when well. I think I was in the zone. Then I participated in a panel discussion with Dan Schmit, from the University of Nebraska, and Ginny Jewell, Director of Technology Integration with Clarke County Schools in Georgia. The panel was about emerging technologies, and they have, in the past, given each speaker about fifteen minutes to present their ideas about what’s coming. They did it differently yesterday, identifying three themes and asking each of us to spend five minutes sharing our opinions and examples. The themes were publishing technologies, collaboration technologies, and video games and simulations.
I’ve written before about trying to identify the qualities of video games that make their play so compelling, and figuring out how to restructure classroom assignments so that the include these qualities. It’s occured to me, lately, that some of these qualities may already be there, that they may have been used before, it’s just that we weren’t thinking about their power with millennials. I mentioned this yesterday and shared that David Williamson Shaffer, in his book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, says that if we factor all of the obvious qualities down, we end up with Roles and Rules. Games are about playing roles within the context of rules.
Several years ago, a senior English teacher, at the Beacon School in New York, had just had her class read Othello. It was one of the regular readings for seniors and they usually wrote a review of the play when they had finished. In 2002, she got to thinking about the Shakespeare experience, and what today’s equivalent might be for going to the Globe Theatre for the Bard’s latest comedy. She immediately thought of going to the movies, and then asked herself about the information that she uses today to decide which movie she’s going to see this weekend. She immediately thought of the Quicktime web site, where you can see all of the movie trailers for currently running and upcoming movies. With that, she assigned her students to work in teams to create a movie trailer for the play, Othello.
Now what was truly brilliant about the assignment is that she did not explain to the students how they would be evaluated. No rubric was given. She simply said, “I have a Problem!”
“Each year, I have a terrible time getting my students interested in reading Othello.”
“This year, I want you to make movie trailers for me that I can show to next years seniors, that will get them excited about the play.”
Some of the work was amazing and I show it in some of my presentations. But it occurs to me now, that she was using Roles and Rules. Rather than a teacher, she had become a client. They were her consultants, script writers, directors, videographers, and editors. The rules were the abilities and constraints of their editing software, what they’d learned about the play, their goals, and deadlines. I suspect that students were motivated in this activity in much the same way that kids today are motivated by many of the more extended video games that they play.
What do you think?
As a child of the airline industry, your SSSS tag means an immediate thorough security screening. It is fairly common to have one or two a flight. You got “lucky” I guess. Probably your itinerary raised some eyebrows in some distant computer database somewhere.
Much as I hate to say it, don’t fight it at the airport. That isn’t the worst that can happen at a security screening, trust me.
Thanks for the inspiration. I last year I created an Intro to Video program for freshman/sophomores at my school that will feed my upper grade advanced video program. It was written to get students to produce videos with a core curriculum theme. All year, I have been struggling for an idea for math. I was going to have them produce a how-to video (boring!). Your post (and the work of the teacher) has inspired me to have my students produce a trailer for Algebra in order to get next years freshman “excited” about the year instead of the usual dread. Thanks!
Greetings again from Illinois!
I get tagged for the search every time too. Last year, when I was going back and forth to Dallas almost every weekend, one of the TSA screeners said it was because of my “unusually oversized laptop”.
Son of a gun. Size matters, just not the way all that SPAM says.
Yet another fascinating idea. I’ll share it with my Techies next week, thanks!
What’s the chance of getting a link to a sample of some of the work for that meeting?
I am a fan of the project based classrooms that move the teacher into the facilitator and the students into actually working and using the skills, knowledge and resources available to solve problems and work collaboratively. As far as video games – there is a great gaming department in Orlando (I wish I could remember the school). Anyway, Tracy was one of the students/teachers in the program and she created an awesome video game based on Florida history and a FL novel. It was fascinating to become part of the history. Next year you need to look up OTRONICON. Big educational gaming conference down here. I think you’d really enjoy it.
I was once tagged for security. I had 2 reasons- one for switching from United to Delta automatically flagged me (switched because there was a problem with the original flight) and the second they told me was because I had been on too many flights recently and was flagged. What was funny was I was not working for Discovery at that time and had only flown 3 times in the past 6 months!
Anyway, looking forward to the podcasts!
What a great example of the power of people in the creative process engaging with the text and each other for meaningful outcomes. Love hearing about such purposeful learning opportunities. The richness of engagement possible given the right kinds of encouragement is what the learning thrives on, regardless of our chronological age. The shift in focus from the teacher to the students is great. The issues with IT hardware and software, and all the technical aspects can be dampeners, but the processes of working through all that as well can be just as euphoric when it means the participants can celebrate something of shared success, at whatever final product level. The process itself is worth celebration. Thanks for sharing. Keen to see what that might look like in this case if you can provide some links.
I think that teacher with the Othello project showed great innovation and the concept of problem-based learning is terrific. I understand that she didn;t want to give a rubric to have the kids create formulaic projects, but even “clients” give their potential firms criterai and guidelines prior to embarking on a project.
I would think that students, who for most grades are the motivator and not the learning (although I certainly wish it were different) would demand to know “What do I need to do to get an “A”?)
you said : “I’ve written before about trying to identify the qualities of video games that make their play so compelling, and figuring out how to restructure classroom assignments so that the include these qualities.”
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Yes!! I am with you on this one and have been wondering about the same thing. It struck me one afternoon as I was listening to a podcast of one of my favorite radio shows, NPR’s “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” It occured to me that I would never listen to a podcast of one of my classes…how could I encourage learning AND be entertaining (something that Wait, Wait does a great job of).
I’ve brainstormed everything from making my classroom actually BE a show (complete with GarageBand theme music, audience applause, etc) to working games in to class (I did a Deal or No Deal parody and that worked well). But I like what you’re saying…”Identify the qualities”…once we have those qualities explicitly defined then we can creatively apply them in a variety of ways.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Brian Rhea
I think that this is a great way to get students excited about learning new things. I know that when I took my senior level high school exnglish class we read MacBeth. As many of you know, this was quite a boring task, but the teacher made it more exciting my allowing us to take scenes from MacBeth, change the script to modern day times, and then act the scene out. This made us really take what we were reading and make it real to us, because now we weren;t just reading it but rather we were the directors, actors, and camera people. There are still things I remember from that story, which is way more than I can say for just about every other story I read in high school.
I think one of the biggest challenges to teachers today is competing with computer games and gaming systems. I know that most of the students in my class would much rather be playing games then leraning, so we have to find fun ways like the one the teacher found above to get our students into learning.
Great story! Thanks for reminding me of what can make teaching and learning fun. (Sorry, but it is testing time in Texas!)
Smiles, Samantha