Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

This PDF may be helpful to those who want to use the “external links” feature of Blackboard .

To be honest, though, compared to del.icio.us the blackboard system is a joke.

Here’s my case for using del.icio.us, and here is my HOWTO guide to get started.

Enjoy!

This is a PDF for those interested in course documents in blackboard.

These HOWTO’s are part of my ongoing effort to share my technology professional development with the educational community

Thanks to Raj Boora who was lucky enough to find this great article (pdf) on digital games based learning. There are so many exceptional quotes from the article, and so many points I found myself saying “yea...that’s what I think...”

Update: Tony Forster was good enough to mention he has a review of this article on his blog.  He has really done a good job, and the review is worth a look!

PLEASE read this if you are even remotely interested in the topic of games in education.

I just got this great email, and thought I would share my answer here. In short, the researcher is looking for data about games in education at the primary and middle-school levels.

I understand you need data regarding how, when, where, why and who is using games in American Education - especially around primary and secondary school.

I am not aware of any large scale studies which have investigated this. I know of many small schools who are using games in an informal, non-rigorous way, however empirical data may be difficult to come by.

May I suggest you take a look at the following sites:

http://silversprite.blogspot.com/
http://davidmcdivitt.wordpress.com/
http://edtechlife.com/
http://www3.essdack.org/socialstudies/videogames.htm
http://www.marcprensky.com/
http://mrball.blogspot.com/
http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/
http://www.boora.ca/blog/

...and of course…

I’ve included some research sites, but it’s slim!

In my opinion, mainstream adoption of games in the classroom is very far away. You are seeing all the classic signs of a nascent movement, one which I hope grows into mainstream adoption by our public school system.

I believe once the current generation of older teachers have retired, and more technically fluent teachers come into the profession (Kuhn, anyone?), we will see a more emboldened use of technology, which will surely include games as effective teaching tools.

There is a tremendous of interest in the role of games and learning, but I think there are very basic types of questions which haven’t been answered - in fact it was only recently that Salen and Zimmerman released an utterly magnificent book entitled “Rules of Play” that gives us a vocabulary to talk about games, play, and culture. Even asking a simple question like “What is an educational game?” can bring a heated exchange of opinions.

So I encourage your research path, and I would be more than happy to answer any specific questions, but as for now, and please forgive my use of idioms…

This pond doesn’t have a lot of fish. 

From New Scientist Tech (warning: weird redirect thingy) comes this fantastic article (pdf here) about the tethered self.  This op-ed piece talks about some of the social aspects of things like myspace and facebook. A quote:

Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says “I am on my cell”, online”, “on instant messaging” or “on the web”, these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a ethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.

Today is a professional development day at hchs.  There are no students, and the faculty is busy in department meetings and taking technology professional development.

I started the day teaching naviance and then moved to blackboard. Later this afternoon, we are tackling smartboards.

It’s hard to describe how cool it is to watch seasoned teachers look at this stuff and say “Man, that is cool...how do you use this stuff?”

For me, part of getting games into the classroom is being part of the team.  Getting professional development done, helping faculty with other technology projects and supoporting facult in their use of technology is a great way to help build an affective relationship with technology.

It’s a good, busy, great day.