Motivation follow up

After listening this morning to other educators' thoughts on student motivation, I realize that I haven't used student recognition to my best advantage. My two action items I'm going to try this semester:

•  Make sure students know that others are reading their blog postings. Even one comment allows a student to know that his or her work is being noticed. I'm going to see if I can't get some sort of cross pollination going with Patrick and Matt's students. 
• I also like the idea that Matt had of showing off one student's work at the beginning of each class. Perhaps I ask that student to show it off in front of the class.
  
• At the end of the semester I'm going to have the students from both last semester and this current one do a presentation in conjunction with the Common Reading.

So many things to do, but all worth it because my students really are great.

So.... Hey guys, if you're reading this, I SEE you.

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The End of Week Two

It is Friday afternoon, and the ground floor of Knutti is a ghost town. I'm the last class of the day, wrapping things up at 1:10. In my office now, I find myself presented with a nice quiet time to reflect on the past week and catch up.

This is going to be a fun semester. My classes have a good mix of returning friends, and enough new ones to make it fresh but not overtax me with learning names. The second section of my Computer Mediated course is almost half football players. Never had that happen before...makes for a lively dynamic. If they learn about my world of technology, I may have to take the kids to a game to be immersed in theirs!

I'm getting a handle on my Game Design class. It was a rough start, especially with gmail refusing any account requests from Shepherd. But we struggled through, and have now (I hope) bridged the abyss between starting a new technology and actually studying/designing games. It takes a lot of thought to try and integrate Globaloria's content with my content, but the payoff will be worth it.

Went to the first Common Reading event, a showing of King Corn on Wednesday night. It told the disturbing story of the impact of corn on our food industry and our health. after the show I had to run to the grocery to pick up a few things. My youngest, Daisy, read the ingredients label of everything I put in the cart. A few of my game design students showed up; I had made it extra credit since we'll be designing games to educate on the topics covered in the Common Reading, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." It was such a good film that I think I may need to order a copy of the DVD.

This week finds me easing back into work, and with it blogging.  While I loath the thought of summer ending, there is something reassuring about getting back into a schedule. 

Globaloria training was yesterday and will run through today. We looked at the game design presentations of the five groups after dinner. I think it is so brave for educators whose background is nowhere near coding to take on Flash assignments. And in good humor too!

I had felt bad about not being able to dedicate any time to my group's project (that crazy MFA got in the way!) but I think we all pulled it together in the 11th hour. Matt's game coding was very impressive. I need to take and download the working doc and look under the covers.

I still need to figure out how to use the wiki for swf files that have external xml and media files though. Guess a call to Jeff is in order. For our presentation I just loaded my slideshow on my Shepherd server.

Today's lecture on animation made me drag up an old file I did a year or two ago. You can take a look at the animation.

Integrating Globaloria into my Curriculum

In the adoption of Globaloria for my game design class I have found myself at odds between two concepts: The advantages of using an integrated system that the students are familiar with, and the benefit of a more extended learning community with expanded content. I keep trying to figure out how the two would not be mutually exclusive.

SAKAI

Shepherd uses Sakai, an online learning tool that offers the following features/tools: Wiki, Calendar, Integrated Messaging, Podcasts, Grade Book, Drop Boxes, Resources, Tests & Quizzes and Site Statistics. Note: There are many more tools available, but these are the ones I use most often.

Sakai was universally adopted by the University last year. I was an early tester of the system, so some of my students have been using Sakai for two years. (We also tested Moodle.) Like any online environment, it has its strengths and weaknesses. I wish it had an attendance module for example, and some file formats are not readily posted. On the plus side, Sakai is easily navigable and modular. Each tool provided to the educator and student is designed specifically for a certain task. It doesn't try to make one tool do all things. I can add tools as needed, keeping the screen clean and uncluttered.

Sakai's Site Statistics tool gives me a good idea of how the students are actually using the site. I can look for example, at the usage from my Advertising and Imagery class.



You can see that they are looking at each others work, documenting/discussing things in the wiki, and posting/reading assignments with regular frequency.

GLOBALORIA

From my experience with Globaloria, I was very impressed with the overall content. The modules are broken up intelligently, and supporting resources are very well researched. The teachers utilizing the curriculum within my state of West Virginia are great, and have glowing reports on student responses. A disadvantage I found in my exposure was that by making the wiki contain everything, the usability has suffered somewhat. During a recent training session educators often had trouble finding they needed. With that said, the wiki format provides a huge advantage by allowing all learners on Globaloria to have access to each other. It also allows the Globaloria administrators to constantly update and improve content and have it distributed immediately.

WHAT NEXT?

So what do I do for my class? I'm leaning toward doing a hybrid of the two. The students could enter Sakai, and in a lesson module find the direct link to the Globaloria content. (This would bypass any navigational confusion.) Doing this would also allow me to integrate my own curriculum easily. Maybe this first semester they use Sakai's wiki tool, but use Blogger as specified by Globaloria. This does limit the ability of other learners to access their work, but as Shepherd is the first university-level participant this may not be such a huge problem for now.

Happily, the folks that run Globaloria are open to suggestions. This first time through will no doubt be challenging, but I'm hoping for the best of both worlds. No matter what the reults, students will find themselves immersed in a digital learning environment, with plenty of opportunity for collaboration.