Who doesn't love a mystery?

I am dying to get a teacher that I work with to try Mystery Skype. The concept is simple but powerful. You link up with another class somewhere in the United States or in the World. You ask questions of the other class and provide clues about your own class until you can each guess where the other class is located. Poof! Fun, authentic, high-level application of geography skills.

I really can't emphasize what a great example this is of using technology in a way that transforms learning: Students will:

• develop excellent questioning and reasoning skills as they create questions to uncover clues about the mystery location
• practice communicating via 21st century tools (certainly Skype and can be expanded from there if the classes choose to stay in communication)
• learn about worlds beyond those of their classroom or school from those who actually live in those places rather than via textbooks or sanitized non-fiction readers
• have a chance to take on leadership roles as they prepare to answer questions about their own location

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Below are some ideas and instructions for getting going with Mystery Skype. I've pulled these together from lots of great blogs and teacher websites like the following:

Mrs. Yollis
Mrs. Pripp
6th Chat
Mystery State Skyping
Mr. Avery 
School Is Cool  (video)
Teaching Geography and Mystery Skype

I hope to keep adding to this post as I coerce teachers into, I mean, assist teachers with Mystery Skype. Please add your own comments, advice, warnings in the comments below. And if you have a blog or posting about Mystery Skype, please add your link. I'd love to be able to refer teachers to this post as a go-to spot for getting started with Mystery Skype.

STEP ONE Establishing Accounts:

To begin, if you don’t already have one, set up a Skype account for your class. It is free and easy! I found that when I was at school, I was blocked from setting up my account, but I could browse projects other teachers had posted. And I could set up my account easily from home.

BONUS STEP: It is not required, but it is recommended to have an educational Twitter account. If you don’t have one already, create one. Teachers often set up an account like “MrsDunbar” or “MrsD5th” You might find this a useful way to communicate with your Mystery Skype classes or with other professionals (you don’t have to follow the cast of Jersey Shore).

STEP TWO Connecting with other classrooms:

Sign up for Mystery Skype using one of the following links:

• Mystery State Project, 
• 6th Chat Mystery Skype (*this is not limited to 6th grade classes*)
• Or get on http://education.skype.com/ and search "mystery" to find even more classrooms ready to connect.
• Try out #mysteryskype on Twitter 

Or, make your own connections!

• If you know teachers in other regions, ask them if they’d be willing to Mystery Skype with you
• Ask colleagues, parents and students if they have contacts in other states, see if they want to Mystery Skype
• If you are on Twitter, you can also just tweet that you are looking for classrooms to Mystery Skype with

STEP THREE Preparation for the call:

The technology:
Find out what the procedures are for your school or school division. In my school division, teachers contact the Help Desk so that Skype can be unblocked for that day, time, and location. Our Help Desk will also provide a good web cam and microphone as well as hang around to make sure everything goes well. If you have a great tech department like ours, get them involved in the call too! They can give a clue or ask a question!

Your class:

• Be sure your students know about your our own region! Have different students research the geography, history, landmarks, weather and other aspects of our location that make your location unique. You want to make sure that your class can answer questions accurately.
• Brainstorm questions to ask the other class. Usually Mystery Skype projects use close ended questions. Help your class develop a list of Yes/No questions that will help them figure out the location of the other class.
• Give students roles for the time of the call. The links below have great ideas about how to do this.

The other class:
Try to communicate actively with the other class. Be sure that you are both clear about how the call is going to run, including if you are using Yes/No questions, who is going to go first, what roles your students have. Also be clear if the location will be revealed during the call or after the call. Don’t be afraid to say this is your first time, we educators need to take risks and support each other.

STEP FOUR Share how it went!

I am looking forward to sharing how the first Mystery Skype call goes. I have a couple of victims, I mean, teachers in mind that I am hoping are feeling brave enough to try this out. I will be sure to post here once that happens. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from more teachers how Mystery Skype enhances learning in their classrooms. You can share here too, or tweet about it, or write on your own blog, or share at a faculty meeting, or just share with the teacher across the hall!

Flattening your classroom and Flattening your own world

I have been having a great time reading Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay. This book is an excellent resource for anyone considering global projects or for any teacher who is just interested in expanding their own classroom view. The book itself models a collaborative global project in every way imaginable. Here are some of the ways it does this:

Photo by Clive Darr

• Whenever a classroom project example is given, or a powerful quote from a teacher or expert is provided, the authors encourage the reader to follow that person on Twitter. I have loved this. There is really no better example of how flat our world is than just clicking the "Follow" button under someone's name. You now can follow their thoughts, find out who they are following, and even mention them in your own Tweets. 
• Along with the book are 15 Flat Classroom Challenges. These challenges encourage you to set up RSS like Google Reader (check!), start a blog (check!), join a collaborative network like Google Teacher Academy or Apple Distinguished Educators (check!), from there the challenges get more, well, um, challenging. But I love this idea. To encourage readers to take on the challenge, the authors suggest tweeting as you complete the challenges or posting on the Flat Classroom Ning. This helps make it all feel more like a fun scavenger hunt instead of homework. I love this idea so much I am considering how to make it a part of some of the local professional development I do.
• There is a virtual book group! I was so glad I checked Twitter at the moment an announcement about the book club came across my stream. The book club meets once a week for an hour via Blackboard Collaborate. Ben and Neil from Engaging Educators moderate and either Vicki or Julie (the authors) are always there. This is a great opportunity to share your own reflections while reading the book as well as to ask questions of amazing teachers that have been living and breathing global collaboration for years now.
• More! QR codes that link to student projects, Flat Classroom Diaries that give you glimpses into the personal stories behind different global projects, and a professional development toolkit that I haven't checked out yet.

There are many, many aspects of this book that I am finding inspiring, stimulating and thought-provoking and I hope to blog more about these in the future. For now I'd like to say that I am so thrilled to see a professional learning tool that really models what it values. If we want teachers to start to use technology in transforming ways, we need to do more to model professional learning experiences that mirror what teachers can be doing with students. That is what is knocking me out about this book. By encouraging teachers to tweet, blog, connect, comment and engage with this book, the authors are really showing what learning in the 21st century looks like. To quote Vicki Davis during our last book club, "Learning is not about consuming, it is about contributing and creating." Kudos to Julie and her for writing a book that doesn't just talk about that idea, but lives it. 

What does family mean to you? What does it mean to your students?

Families depend on each other a lot. They show each other how to handle problems and they show support to each other when help is needed. They show how to set goals and they care for one another...

"A day my sisters had to depend on me was on Mother's Day a couple years ago." (read more)

" The person I really depend on is my brother. I just want him to be around when I need him. My mom I really don’t depend on because I know she is going to be here regardless. But my brother…I depend on him because he needs to be here when something happens. I mean my mom can protect me but not like my brothers can or dad." (read more)

"One time that my family depended on me was when my grandfather was very sick because of his diabetes." (read more)

Above are three responses from students about what family means to them. Their Language Arts teacher provided the opening sentences but then the students took it from there. They wrote about times they helped their families, times their families helped them and times their families let them down. Each essay told a new story and shed new light on the nature of families. But the essay also shared commonalities: how connected we are with our families, how our actions impact on families and how our families' action impact us. Read more of the students essays here.

But what we want to know now is:

How similar are families around the world?

We have issued ourselves a challenge. Can we find students from 10 different countries to share with us what their families mean to them? By May 1st?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/134974908/

Will your classroom be one of them?

We would love that! If you are interested, leave me a comment here, contact me on Twitter @edtechdunny, or just go ahead and join our wiki. We can send you more information about how to add your essays to our wiki. But basically, if you can type up your essays, we can add them to our site! Let's give our students a chance to learn about families everywhere and to see a world bigger than their own.

Dude, Can You Please Edit?

The last two years I have been lucky enough to work with a group of middle school Language Arts teachers that were interested in implementing a Digital Reading Writing Workshop in their classrooms. Inspired by Troy Hicks'  The Digital Writing Workshop, we met regularly and compared notes about how best to incorporate some of the ideas presented in the book into our classrooms.

One of the brilliant ideas that came out of these early morning gatherings was to use the wiki tool in Blackboard as a digital writing portfolio. This was one of those ideas that was so good, I was mad I hadn't thought of it! This colleague of mine, Teacher Wiki, set up individual wikis within her Blackboard courses for each student. Each student would then create a new page of the wiki for each new writing piece. That meant that each time they revised that page of their wiki, all revisions were saved. Furthermore, because the wikis were all public, all students in the class could read each other's writing and leave specific feedback about each piece. Further, furthermore, students could get ideas for their own writing based on what they read in each other's wikis. A simple and elegant way to help students track their own progress, publish their work for feedback and view examples from their classmates of great writing.

So, as you can tell, I was excited about the use of this tool to truly build a digital writing workshop. But what was even more exciting was the student writing and interactions that came out of this practice.

Teacher Wiki had one student who would type a few sentences and declare himself done. Using all her Teacher College Writing tricks, Teacher Wiki would cajole and needle and work hard to get the student to write more. However, Student Y would just not elaborate or even re-read what he had written. That is until, he got some feedback from his peers.

Dude, Can You Please Edit?

This was shouted across the room at him in a none-too-patient voice from a friend across the room. It was clear that when Student X went to give reluctant writer Student Y some feedback in his wiki, the piece was filled with too many errors. It was after this across-the-room exchange that reluctant writer Student Y quietly asked Teacher Wiki where the spell check function was in the wiki tool. Quietly, surreptitiously, reluctant writer Student Y went back and began to revise and edit his piece. That quick exchange with his peer made more of an impression on him than repeated attempts by his teacher. And I question whether or not the scenario would have unfolded the same way if the students had just exchanged papers. Instead, this is a perfect example of what can happen when students are encouraged to write from the beginning in a digital format.  Editing and revising is so much easier in the digital format but, more importantly, when adolescents get feedback from their peers, they are much more interested in revising than when they get the same feedback from their teacher.

Now, of course, Teacher Wiki works hard on teaching students how to give appropriate and helpful feedback to the writer. (I don't think "Dude, can you please edit" was one of her model examples). She gives students specific ideas about how to respond to other students' writing and highlights model responses. As the school year goes on, students get better and better at giving each other feedback. While they still often slip into casual chat talk, they do give advice about word choice and provide suggestions for adding detail.

When I interviewed students at the end of last year, one students was able to tell me both how he got his writing topic idea from reading other students' wikis ("When I read how that student wrote about breaking a vase, I remembered the time I broke a window."), and how he improved the piece based on feedback from a classmate ("They suggested I use the word 'shattered' when I described the window breaking. I had just said 'broke.'") This was great testimony to the importance of letting students read each other's work in a friendly and open way.

Example of a student adding transitions to her writing

The ability to track all the revisions on a writing piece, have students giving and recieving feedback from each other and creating a space for students to collect more ideas about what and how to write has made using the wiki tool in Blackboard a huge success for these Language Arts students. As more and more teachers experiment with this format, students will benefit. They will grow as writers and as learners.

We finally got to start using Quest Atlantis last week! If you have never heard of Quest Atlantis before, it is an immersive learning game. Students have avatars and enter a 3D world where they are assigned missions and quests. The missions and quests all are connected to real-world problems and have engaging story lines. Students must navigate the 3D world to find information and clues to solve a problem. Along the way they meet virtual characters who guide the students and provide information. There is also the opportunity to interact with the avatars of students from other schools. The basis of Quest Atlantis is the concept of transformative play. As the Quest Atlantis website explains:

Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and the player.

So, I was curious, how would my students react to this 3D space? Would they experience tranformational play? Would they enjoy exploring the virtual world more than they enjoying learning in a traditional classroom?

Honestly, I wasn't sure I would ever find out. The first hurdle to tackle was getting permission slips signed. Because Quest Atlantis is funded by Indiana University and used for research about emerging technologies and learning, students were required to have parental approval before logging into the Quest Atlantis world. Unfortunately, asking parents to sign a permission slip for a class assignment was not a top priority for these students. After a little cajoling from me and some tough talk from their principal, we finally had all the permission slips in. Whew, step one complete.

The first day playing went, well, great. The students were excited. They were laughing and talking and fully engaged for the 30 minutes we let them play. It was fascinating to watch their personalities emerge online. Some went right to finding out their mission and were running off here and there without really absorbing their task or the information given them. Others spent a tremendous amount of time getting their avatar just right. Still others tested the limits of the world and immediately dove off cliffs, swam in the water and tried to get into places they shouldn't. It was all behavior I would completely expect when giving adolescents a new toy. They were experimenting: some with recklessness, some with caution and some just took it as it came.

Day two we began by showing students how to know where in the 3D world they were. Quest Atlantis uses North, South, East, and West indicators for students to know where they currently are and to locate the places they needed to get to. I was pleased that students got the directional concepts but was fascinated to watch them play and realize that they didn't really understand how to apply these concepts. Since we were playing during their social studies class time, I loved that they were absorbing directionality in a whole new way and actually applying it in a way that was meaningful to them.

My other take-away from day two was that my students need help following directions! I guess I always knew that but assumed that they were having trouble following directions because they didn't really care about the assignments or weren't listening to the directions the first time. But watching them play Quest Atlantis, I realized they actually needed help reading carefully and doing tasks in the order assigned to them. Since many of my students have struggled to achieve in traditional schools, this observation wasn't a shocker, but it was still useful to observe it in the virtual world.

The next step with Quest Atlantis will be for the students to tackle content-related missions in the 3D world. Until then I'll be excited about the following things:

• The school administrator commented that she'd never seen Student X talk so much as she did when playing  Quest Atlantis that first day
• A student that was going to be absent for Day Two asked if she could play the game at home. (Yes!)

If playing Quest Atlantis means students are excited to learn and want to work on school work outside of school, I'm ready for more!

Running to get to math class

How often do you see a student running back from a bathroom break to get into math class faster?
Or kids eating their lunch in their math class so they can do more math?
Or calling a math competition the most important thing that's ever happened to them?

I've seen it all. And I'm here to tell you the source is an educational mathematics game called Dimension M.

The Backstory

A few years ago, my director came back from an educational technology conference extremely excited about a product she saw featured by a company then called Tabula Digita. She asked me to check it out and see where we might be able to implement it in our schools. So began a very rewarding journey about letting kids play games in schools.

I first downloaded their single player game and tried it out myself. My screen became a 3D virtual world where I was on a mission and needed to understand square roots in order to reach my destination. I was clumsy and made lots of mistakes but I found it gripping, as I was sure my students would.

Sure enough when I piloted the game with a few students, they loved it. They even asked questions about the math so that they could be more successful. It was convincing enough for our school system to buy a limited number of licenses and see where this gaming thing could take us.

Letting the kids play

Then the fun really began. One of our middle schools identified a group of students that were predicted to be on the borderline of passing their state math test. We agreed that two times a week a science teacher would take them to the computer lab and play Dimension M. (The math teachers were spending this time with students that had previously failed their state math exams).

To get the kids started, I would show the game once on a large screen, mostly just to go over logon protocol and a few basics and then I'd send them off to play. The feeling in the room was electrical. Kids were focused, kids were engaged, kids hands were flying up for help with the math the game was asking them. Yes, kids hands were flying up so that they could get help with math.

Remember, these are kids that do not consider math their favorite subject.

When the first game ended (the games can be set at 5, 10, 15, and 20 minutes), there was a universal exhale. And then an immediate request to play another game.

So, are they doing any math?

Walking around the room when kids first start playing Dimension M will show you that some students are clicking on any answer to "get back to the game." But after "playing" this way a couple of times, these students quickly realize, they are not on the leaderboard, they are not winning the game. That's when the teacher gets involved.

As the kids are playing, a teacher can circulate and quietly offer assistance on the math questions that are popping up. Teachers can pause and watch how students are answering and offer different solutions, scratch paper, tip sheets. If the students believe it is math they can do, they will start trying.

Which brings up another brilliant part of this program: Dimension M games can be differentiated for every kid that is playing. Two kids sitting side by side in the classroom and play toe to toe in the virtual game world can be getting completely different math questions. One can be working on fractions and percents while the other student is practicing estimation. And they can be facing off students in the virtual world that are in a whole different school and might be working algebra questions.

So, yes. They are doing math.

Convinced yet?

We also launched Dimension M for a program that supports students that for a variety of reasons are not being successful in their home schools. In the spring of last year, Dimension U (as Tabula Digita is now called) launched a national competition where students scores were tracked as they plays and each week the top ten scorers qualified to go to a live competition in New York City.

Between students' success in the game and the motivation and dedication of their math teacher, we had two students qualify to go to New York. This was a tremendous experience for both of these boys. Neither had experienced this kind of success before in school. And neither had ever traveled for a school competition.

It was great watching them practice as the competition got closer. And to see their shy smiles as you asked about the competition. And to watch them stand a little taller when you reminded them that no other students in our school division had qualified.

The competition itself was intense and neither student did as well as he wanted to, but the experience was powerful. Both kids talked about it as the best thing that had happened to them. One is still playing Dimension M in school and was able to show off his skills during a division-wide principals' meeting. In fact, he took on one of the principals and trounced him flat. Talk about empowering.

But not every kid is going to go to a live national competition. What about other students? One time when I was visiting a class that was playing Dimension M, I asked a girl if playing the game was helping her in math class.

"Oh, yes." She said.

"Well, how do you know?" I probed.

"I got the highest score on our last math test. And it was because I've been playing Dimension M."

What's next?

I'm thrilled that we doubled the number of classes using Dimension M this year and that Dimension U has begun to offer more web-based games (check them out!). But I would love to see our division embrace this gaming approach more widely and more consistently. If we can get math teachers to see how a game like this complements their daily instruction and offers motivation in a way the best manipulatives in world can't, I think we could see tremendous changes in math achievement.

If we have a tool that engages students, differentiates, builds confidence and is supported by research, let's use it as much as possible!

Cooking with Michael Jackson and Beyounce

Adding and multiplying fractions is every sixth graders' favorite thing to do, right? Well, not exactly. What about sixth graders that have repeated the grade? Nope. What about sixth graders still learning academic English? Definitely not fraction fans. Luckily, I did not start my lesson with them telling them we were going to be adding and multiplying fractions. Instead, I told them we were going to make a cooking show!

Now, I had them.

"Is it going to be on YouTube?"

"If you want it there."

"Really?"

"Yep, we just need to leave out your faces and names. What do you want to call it?"

"Cooking with Michael Jackson and Beyounce." I loved it.


Okay, we were ready to start.

The idea to make trail mix using different fraction amounts was not mine but rather from a curriculum guide for our school division. And honestly, I don't think these kids had ever even heard of trail mix before. The idea to do it as a cooking show, was mine. It seemed like a great way to bring in some instructional technology and increase engagement in math class. Technology and, well, food. Sure enough, when I brought out the mini-marshmallows, eyebrows went up and eyes crinkled with smiles.

"Are we going to eat it?"

"Yup."

Now I really had them.

Thank goodness I did, because it was tough going through the math. We reviewed fraction amounts. We looked at the measuring cups I'd brought in. We wrote out how we would need to calculate enough trail mix for the whole class. We guessed, recalculated, wrote out equations and relearned mathematic vocabulary. I repeated myself, a lot. The kids held their heads in their hands at times, sighed heavily at other times.

But finally, we got to the part the kids were waiting for, we started filming.

After a couple rehearsals I got out one of my favorite instructional technology tool, the simple-to-use-yet-powerful, Canon Power Shot. Kids that had recently been overheard in the halls shouting and loudly laughing, suddenly got very quiet and shy

and forgetful.

We went through three shots of the same scene. My one sweet (that day) little guy could not remember how to explain finding the common denominator. I stopped him.

"Do you want to write out what you are going to say?"

"Please." (He said please!!! He is going to write.. voluntarily!!!)

Success! Our next take was a keeper. And building on our success from that one, we wrote out more of our script. Before we knew it, we had finished and good thing because the bell was about to ring.

"Will it really be on YouTube?"

"By the end of the day" I promised.

And it was. Here is a link to it if I've gotten your curiosity up: Cooking with Michael Jackson and Beyounce. Do not expect perfection. Expect mistakes and misspoken words. I'm okay with that. It is not the product that I'm proud of.

I'm proud of Michael Jackson who showed more persistence with an academic task than I had ever seen before. I'm proud that he said the word denominator at least 35 times - probably more times than he had ever said before, total.

I'm proud of Beyounce who showed patience and restraint while Michael Jackson practiced. She was helpful and supportive and kind. She still mixed up subtraction and division, but she definitely had a better understanding of fractions than she did at the beginning of the lesson.

So, a camera and YouTube. That's what made a difference for these kids that day. The idea that something they would produce could be shared with the world. This public audience gave them a reason to relearn fractions. I gave them motivation to stay after a hard problem. Recording their voice for the world forced them to practice, rehearse, and, in turn, learn the concepts more differently.

Well, that and mini-marshmallows.