OPLS blog

Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”

Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.

I hope it helps you too:

During a Will Richardson session at NECC 08, this blog, by 11 year-old Laura Stockman, was highlighted:

Laura started the blog in December 2007, after wanting to do something in honour of her grandfather who tragically died of brain cancer in 2005. He had been an inspiration to her over many years and so she decided, beginning Dec 1, to do 25 things that would make a difference each day leading up to Christmas. She decided to blog about what she had done in the hope that it would inspire others to do something similar.

It’s a wonderful example of how doing lots of small things locally can have a significant impact far beyond what was originally intended. Just take a look at the comments people are leaving and where they’re checking in from to see how widespread her readership now is.

Pedagogically, it’s also a great example of how a primary school student can reflect on her own learning on an on-going basis.

The blog reminds me of the key purpose of the IB community theme project, which encourages all members of the IB community to engage with some serious global issues, such as infectious diseases, the digital divide, peace & conflict etc, and actually do something about them - no matter how small that action might be. Two great examples are highlighted here:

“Make poverty history” a post by Sofia Thorell from a school in Norway describing all sorts of ways you can make a difference.

“Community and curriculum” a post by Randy McCord detailing how his economics students not only learned about development economics but actually experienced a much deeper understanding by putting it into action.

We now have over 2000 schools and 600,000 students. That’s a lot of small things adding up to a big difference. And as you’ll see from Laura’s blog and the examples outlined above, this difference can been sustained beyond the original “25 days”.

I was at NECC 08 recently and bumped into some interesting people. One of whom was Mark Wagner who presented on his PhD research into the use of massively multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs) in education.

According to the literature review for his thesis, MMORPGs offer significant possibilities for rich social interactions and learning.  They include:

• Engagement and motivation
• Context-embedded learning
• Inquiry-driven learning
• Socially negotiated learning
• Reflection and metacognition
• Social change

Mark set about testing these via the Delphi method and, from his discussions with a number of experts in the field of education, learning and gaming, he concluded that these benefits were possible but that a good body of evidence needed to be further developed.

He does, though, have a number of recommendations for educators and these are as follows:

• Use existing commercial MMORPGs with students, particularly in relation to developing 21st Century Learning Skills.
• Support MMORPG play with dedicated, structured and frequent debriefing.
• Use MMORPGs to motivate and engage students.
•  Use MMORPGs as a context for student learning, including social learning.
• But beware infrastructure needs and logistical challenges.

We went through a few examples that he recommends, which I have diigo-ed.  You can find them here.  Please take a look when you can.