If you are familiar with the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship, then you might see how participating in a massive, multiplayer online game (MMO) could help students learn and practice the skills necessary to be a responsible digital citizen.
Digital etiquette (”netiquette”), digital communication, digital security…knowing how to be responsible in these areas is important when participating in an MMO. Plus, with the two that I am going to mention, it’s possible to get better at these skills while playing the game.
Unfortunately blocked for Tennessee schools, most likely because of the chat feature, Woogi World’s mission is:
In our safe and engaging virtual school at www.woogiworld.com, elementary-age children worldwide learn age-appropriate core educational content, essential 21st century skills, cyber safety and security, and responsible and ethical behavior that will yield academic success and the leaders of the future.
Another great online community is Secret Builders:
Not yet blocked for Tennessee schools, the vision of Secret Builders is:
Founded by a former teacher and developed by a core staff, the majority of who are parents themselves, our uncompromising vision for SecretBuilders is a positive, wholesome online outlet for children where they are actively engaged. Internet engagement is inevitable for this generation; turning into passive zombies is not. SecretBuilders will stimulate, educate and entertain through subtle immersion in cultural literacy.
Both games operate in similar fashion. Students choose or create a character that represents themselves, have a home or homepage within the community, and become citizens of the community. Both are academically focused, providing mini-games within that are core subject content focused. Both communities also provide opportunities to publish student writing. While the focus of Woogi World is more character-education driven, Secret Builders has more of a humanities drive. In the latter, students can interact with real-life science and humanities figures like Shakespeare and Albert Einstein, or can play games or go on quests with fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Both games are visually fantastic, engaging, and super safe for kids. For example, Secret Builders has a Citizen Patrol button, allowing players to quickly report any wrong-doing within the site, plus an online safety quiz, and a safe-chat feature.
My suggestions for using these games at school:
- Teach digital citizenship first. Make sure students understand netiquette, how to communicate, and internet safety rules. There are many resources available on these topics.
- Give an introduction to MMOs in general, and make sure students understand they are going to be the new kids in an already established digital community.
- Have students sign up with a teacher email. This way, you will be able to approve accounts and look up lost passwords. To avoid the whole “forgot my username/password” deal, provide pencils and slips of paper (preferably with spaces ready to fill in) for students to write down their account information.
- Create a Powerpoint, PDF, or even a handout that details some of the basic rules and gameplay directions so that you can review this with students; however, be sure they know how to locate the in-game FAQs or tutorials. Emphasize that if they want to figure out how to do something, they need to read the directions themselves.
Although I didn’t get far into Woogi World, their staff is very prompt with responding to inquiries, and I hope that perhaps my students will be able to use Woogi World in the future. One student decided to go ahead and get on it at home, with his grandma, and they came in to tell me that they really enjoyed playing it together. Secret Builders, likewise, is a good parent/child game. Also, this MMO has a feature called “One for All” which allows your students to help raise money for a good cause, or raise money for your school.
I’ve recently discovered this and wondered how in the world I have missed it. Journler has to be the coolest thing ever. I don’t know if I have ever mentioned it before in this blog, but I am an aspiring author, hoping to get some YA books published one day. How I have ever functioned working on my novel projects without this application is hard to even understand now, and I’ve only been using it for two days.
On the Journler website, they describe the program as:
Elegant, beautiful, powerful. Journler is a place for your thoughts and everything they touch.
Featuring iLife integration, audio and video entries, extensive document importing and instantaneous searching and filtering, not to mention Mail, iWeb and Address Book integration, a dash of blogging and AppleScript and Spotlight support.
Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. Scholars, teachers, students, professors, scientists, thinkers, the business minded and writers of every persuasion use it on a daily basis to connect the written word with the media most important to them.
Holy cow. One of the best features of Journler in my opinion is the Smart Folders. Create, color code, and set up folders that search for tags, content, titles, categories, etc. and any pages you write get automatically saved to the right folder or subfolder. So for instance, I can have pages instantly sorted to chapter folders, notes folders, character histories, etc. I will never have to sort through my documents folder again.
For teachers, this could be an extremely handy application. Sort reflections, lesson plans, pictures, videos. Create a journal of your school year. Have it all in one easily organized spread. Likewise, Journler could make a great family journal/digital photo album/video collection. It’s kind of like a word processor, a blog, iLife, and a wiki all rolled into one. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. I haven’t finished exploring all the features.
Discovered something new, and in a spur of the moment change of lesson plans decided to spend two lessons with Tutpup. I’m sending home notes afterwards, so students can continue the program at home.
So, what is Tutpup?
It’s a drill-the-skills sort of site with a twist: students practice math and spelling skills by competing with other players that can be anywhere in the world. So, in essence, you also have the potential for some social studies.
As a teacher, you sign up and create classes. Assigning the classes a code, students then sign up using the given class codes and in that way, student accounts are kept neatly by classes. To save time and tears (yes, tears…”I wanted PinkPony8 and it’s taken! waaaah!”) I went ahead and made accounts for students. Yeah, the number gets staggering, and it does take time on my part, but when a class time is 30 minutes, you can waste it all on setting up accounts. Plus…tears. Best to be avoided.
Student accounts are made by selecting a color, animal, and number–eg. PinkPony8 or BlueCrab246. Student names are not used.
Despite the competitive purpose of the site in which students are in essence “interacting,” there is no chat feature or any other way for students to communicate. This is simply a place to practice skills while competing against someone else.
Pros:
–Students get timed tests in addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, times tables, algebraic equations, and spelling.
–Range of difficulty allows for ages 5-14.
–Good graphics and sound, plus no ads.
–Keeps track of wins, special awards, and worldwide and country wide high scores.
–Kids have a blast playing it.
–It’s FREE!
Cons:
–Slow load times midday because I’m sure a lot of kids are using it.
–Spelling is difficult for American kids due to the accent of the word caller.
Other than that, it seems to be an overall attractive site for students. Besides the practice of skills, every player is marked with a country flag. When students challenge one another, they see the flag and country name of their opponent. Opportunities abound for including this in social studies–learning about the countries, keeping a map with opponent countries marked, discussing languages used in opponent countries, learning international flags, etc. Tutpup is in beta right now, but it is already top notch. Great for kids to play at school, Tutpup is an equally great game for home.
Yes, I know I sort of slipped into netspeak there, but I am just quoting one of my third grade students who exclaimed this in class today. It seemed like a netspeak moment.
What was the website he was on? Wonderville.
Now, it is not an interactive world to be confused with Whyville, but it is a highly interactive science website created by the Alberta Science Foundation in Canada. Yes, we’ve been borrowing a cup of sugar from the upstairs neighbors.
Wonderville has all four of my top four qualifications for a website to be used in the lab, and this really boils down to keeping everyone engaged and having fun, while competing with the quality of video games and websites students entertain themselves with outside of school. It has:
- Excellent graphics (flash environment)
- Music, sound effects, and characters that speak in interaction with the user
- Challenging and stimulating activities
- Overall, busy and interactive
Students have many different options, including science games, interactive activities, science videos, and more. The site also includes a wealth of teacher resources. The most popular game by far is Operation Light and Shadow, which is not wholly dissimilar to Valve Corporation’s puzzle game Portal. Students find themselves in a secret underground facility where an AI voice greets them with an air of menace: “Intruder alert! Access to this facility is for authorized personnel only! Ah, another child. Lost are we? I believe a friend of yours is here, too. If you want to escape this facility, you will have to face my security systems. I hope you know a lot about light and shadow. Good luck…you will need it.”
Ooo! Goosebumps! The objective is to continue through rooms, opening doors by defeating said security system, which entails redirecting beams of light to the right portals using a system of mirrors. It gets more complicated than that. Hints and notes left behind by the friend Marie give students clues when they are stuck. It’s very challenging and requires some major problem solving. We might spend another week just talking about strategy and light and shadow, focusing on this game and Wonderville (even though we really need to move on to Netsmartz). The past two weeks, we have spent some time on science websites to keep up the science fair hype, sneaking in some information fluency while we’re at it.
If you haven’t checked out Wonderville in the classroom or at home, it’s a fantastic science resource from the Alberta Science Foundation.
I tried to get a website unblocked through the state, but it was denied because of the chat feature. This was one of the main reasons that I wanted to have access to the site! The site is called Whyville. The link I provided was to the Wikipedia entry, as anyone in Tennessee would not be able to actually view the site at all. The entry can provide all the information about this science-driven interactive world.
One article about Whyville reported:
In Texas, Whyville recently received grants totaling $440,000 from the Texas Workforce Commission to build Whyville Biotech and Whyville Advanced Manufacturing Center.
The site’s designers created Whyville Biotech to teach kids how to develop vaccines against WhyPox, a flu-like epidemic that erupts each year. WhyPox causes kids’ avatars — their virtual characters — to break out with red spots on their faces. Last fall, during real-world flu season, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention virtually vaccinated 134,000 kids in Whyville.
Through the Texas grant, kids also will learn about drug design and discovery, as well as new techniques in computational biology, Bower said.
Eventually, Whyville citizens will build biotechnology companies in Whyville, Bower said.
“From a work-force standpoint, this is huge,” he said. “We have a ‘cool’ factor, but we’re also doing something very useful for these industries.”
Whyville features all kinds of simulations of real-world events. Residents recently dealt with Tropical Storm Alice and are learning about the effects of global warming. The J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles teaches kids about great works of art at its Whyville gallery.
But science is the main focus.
“You cannot learn science through textbooks,” Bower told a group of Texas educators at a conference in San Antonio last month. “It kills science.”
Kids go to Whyville to socialize, but they also participate in fun activities from science quizzes to writing articles for the Whyville Times, the town newspaper, Bower said.
“It’s a big, big world, and lots of things are going on,” said Yasmin Kafai, associate professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles. She received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study Whyville. Read more.
I understand the message I received from the Tennessee K12 Cooperative. It has a chat feature. Yes, I understand that, but there is something called moderation. Secondly, how in the world are we going to teach students to be good digital citizens if we block every website that allows them to actually apply what we’ve taught them?
Because so many students are using technology as it is part of almost every aspect of their lives, the role of technology in education should be to teach them digital citizenship, how to use technology appropriately, how to problem solve issues, and how to learn via digital sources. Our administrators need to encourage experimentation from teachers, allow types of technology that they are blocking, such as instant messaging programs, text messaging, blogging, chat rooms, message boards, and other means of digital communication. We cannot expect students to learn how to use these sorts of technology appropriately without guidance, therefore we need to incorporate their use into learning in the classroom and teach digital citizenship while students are actually getting practical application. The real life classroom must also become a digital community.
I’m going to apply for an authorized override, and explore the site some more. If I really find value in it, I think I’m going to challenge this whole blocked business.
To any parents reading, go and check out the site for yourself. Read the online safety procedures and recommendations that Whyville provides, and see if you can’t at least provide this engaging world of science for your own child at home.
