It's been a little bit since I've posted on the spanish language online game I (and a few other folks in my PLN) have begun to design. Since this is a masters thesis project, there is a good deal of writing and research standing in the way of the actual design.

In this post I'd like to tackle the standards players will have to meet in order to "win". Since we are effectively backwards designing an experience that builds proficiency for beginners, we must design what "proficiency" goals might look like.

To "win", learners must become proficient at some finite tasks. The one's I've chosen are:

1.Each student will be able to comprehend a oral passage in Spanish by answering questions about it.
2.Each student will be able to re-tell a simple story by sequencing events in Spanish from memory.
3.Each student will be able to comprehend a written passage in Spanish by answering questions about it.
4.Each student will write a paragraph in Spanish.

These learning goals are communicative and reasonable for a beginner to attain.

Next, the smaller objectives (think levels in traditional video games) are based on the U.K.'s foreign language frameworks for oracy and literacy for year 6 (5th graders in the U.S.). In case you teach outside the U.K. (like me), here there are:

Oracy Standards - Year 6 Language for All
Source: DCSF 2005
O 6.1
-listen attentively, re-tell and discuss the main ideas of a story, song or passage
-students will be able to agree or disagree with statements made about a spoken passage.
O 6.2
-recite a short piece of narrative either from memory or by reading aloud from text.
-develop a sketch, role-play or presentation and perform to the class or an assembly.
O 6.3
-re-tell using familiar language a sequence of events from a spoken passage, containing complex sentences.
-understand and express reasons.
-understand the gist of spoken passages containing complex sentences eg descriptions, information, instructions.
O 6.4
-participate in simple conversations on familiar topics.
-describe incidents or tell stories from their own experience, in an audible voice.

Literacy - Year 6 Language for All
Source: DCSF 2005
L 6.1
-read and respond to eg an extract from a story, an email message or song.
-give true or false responses to statements about a written passage
-read descriptions of people in the school or class and identify who they are.
L 6.2
-read for enjoyment an e-mail message, short story or simple text from the internet.
-read and understand the gist of a familiar news story or simple magazine article.
L 6.3
-use punctuation to make a sentence to make sense
-listen carefully to a model, e.g. a video recording, recorded story or song, and re-constitute a sentence or paragraph using text cards.
L 6.4
-apply most words correctly
-construct a short text, e.g. create a powerpoint presentation to tell a short story or give a description.

A common problem in language programs in today's schools are that they lack sufficient practice time, relevancy, and results. Games do two things that solve these problems. They create challenging standards or objectives players must attain and they frequently assess whether or not players meet these objectives. In games with good narratives, these objectives and standards are building blocks towards an ultimate goal. Players are unable to achieve the larger goal at the beginning of the game, but because they want to win, they spend ample time to gain the required skills and knowledge.

The literacy and oracy standards listed above comprise the objectives learners must master to move on in the game.

Layered on top of these standards, we need to come up with a narrative. I've been a sucker for mysteries recently, especially since they create an essential information gap for the learners. Let me know what you think.

And please share with folks you think would be interested.

Image via flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/liferfe/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

My 4th and 5th grade students picked up the beat today on the earthquake in Chile. We told a story in class about the earthquake, watching a CNN student news segment on the event and scouring trending topics on twitter. The class objective was to create a news story that satisfies the questions Quien? (who), Que? (what), Donde? (where), Porque? (why) and Cuando? (when). We came up with the story together, and they will learn the story through TPRS next class period.

Since this comes from 4th and 5th graders, it should be a help to second language learners at a similar comprehension level.

Here are the stories with accompanying word clouds and voki speaking avatars.

4th Grade Class:
Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1725526/Terremoto_en_Chile
Voki (fyi, it's me reading on the voki because my students haven't had the chance to add their voices to the project yet.):

Get a Voki now!

En chile el sábado pasado, fue un terremoto. Casi 708 personas se mataron. La presidente Michelle Bacholet declaró un catástrofe. El terremoto fue mas fuerte que el terremoto en Haiti. Sin embargo, los edificios en Chile se construyen con materiales mas fuerte que los edificios en Haiti. Por eso, habría menos muertes en Chile que en Haiti. Este es el segundo terremoto grande del año 2010.

5th Grade
Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1725574/terremoto_5th
Voki:

Get a Voki now!

Fue un terremoto de magnitúd 8,8 en Concepción, Chile el sábado pasado. Hubo 700 muertes en Chile, y más que 200 milión personas se afectaron. Más que 500,000 casas fueron destruido. La presidente Michelle Bacholet declaró un estado de catástrofe. El terremoto en Chile fue más fuerte que el terremoto en Haiti. Sin embargo, los edificios se construyen con materiales mas fuertes que los edificios en Haiti. El terremoto en Chile era el terremoto más fuerte del año 2010.

As far as mashups or remixes, let me know what you all come up with. It'd be cool to get a group of stories or accounts up in one place for folks to read.

I'm going to create a comic tonight, but I have a few other items to attend to before starting that project. I would love to make a few skype classroom friends as a result of this project. My students also are interested in knowing what they can do to help, so if anyone has any suggestions please put those in the comments too. Mil gracias!

Photo:

Thanks to the folks (on twitter and elsewhere) who have expressed interest in collaborating on a foreign language challenge-based learning environment. While this isn't the final word on my thoughts for what direction a project could take, here are some of my initial understandings of where such a project could go.

As with other projects (usually web design), I tend to focus on what goals I'd like to see met with the product and, then move towards designing the narrative and the user experience. While this is probably the least exciting aspect of the endeavor, I think grounding ourselves in what we want players to be able to do is key.

Also, a bit of a disclaimer: since I teach K-8, elementary and middle school students are the target audience for the game. This doesn't mean that secondary, post-secondary and adult learners should be excluded, but rather that we should design the game to be modular enough to accommodate a range of learners with a range of expertise. I also teach Spanish, but I think we should build this game in such a way that it could accommodate any foreign language.

If the goals of L2 instruction are language acquisition and the ability to communicate meaning, the design of the game must take into account a range of learning considerations to be worthwhile.

Ellis (2005) synthesizes L2 research, which I think we can use to normalize what the game should offer the player.

1.) Learners need a "blueprint" of idiomatic expressions (sometimes called chunks) that they can use with high frequency in communication.

2.) Learners have to attempt to understand some sort of language input, i.e. the meaning of the foreign language.

3.) learners must also learn grammar and syntax, but not as ends to themselves.

4.) An implicit understanding of language is the goal, but an explicit teaching of some concepts may be necessary.

5.) The game has to be customizable to the "built in syllabus" of the learner.

6.) The game must offer an immersive environment where learners attempt to understand language input, but also somehow provide opportunities for gamers to communicate while not playing the game.

7.) Students have to have the opportunity to practice output, i.e. talk, write, act, etc.

8.) Input and output have to happen at the same time, just like authentic communication happens.

9.) We need to somehow create such modularity that the game can account for the individual differences of learners.

10.) The game must provide instant feedback and just-in-time instruction to the learner, that allows them to move above their challenge level when competency of a concept is achieved.

The game should be able accessible from any internet available device, with mobile scalability a must. The game should connect to the social web, and allow real-time communication between learners and mentors. I can see global "lan parties" where educators and learners can support one another in the progress of the game, as well as critical reflection of how the process is working to make them more competent L2 communicators. I would also like the ability to dump the game and it's databases offline, so students could download the game and play with a cheap, linux powered laptop at home without the internet (I teach in the city, where only 35% of all my 1,000 students have broadband access at home).

I'm a big fan of storytelling, as my 3rd-5th grade classes are almost exclusively conducted in TPRS and gouin series stories. I think it would be ideal if the game captured the fluency power storytelling provides. Here's a link to a prototype of something I've put together using jquery that uses a gouin series story to allow students to piece together their own sequence of events. Something like this would have a place in any game we could create. Ideally, users would be able to manipulate the items with their voice, but I have not taught myself speech recognition libraries yet.

The game will be Creative Commons licensed and carry an open source GPL license, so everything will be freely available to use and to mash-up into something new.

At this moment, the specific details of the narrative or game experience are less important to me, but will end up being the most interesting to discuss.

If you know anyone who would be interested in working on such a project, please let me know. Once we establish some commitment from participants, we can organize some groups around art, coding, language, narrative, gameplay, curriculum, research, etc. to make sure everyone in the community is able to reach their own full potential.

Leave your initial comments in the comment section below. I will work on putting a wiki and a sandbox for the game online soon.

Thanks for your interest!

Disclaimer: I haven't read through everything I'd like to yet about thoughts of the iPad in education, so if I rehash some ideas here it is unintential. I'll retroactively attribute any ideas I find later on.

So while today was pretty exciting, I'd like to delve a little deeper past initial reactions to the iPad (mostly technical), and move into the realm of learning. I think the unit has some upsides and downsides (No flash?). Of course, like the iPhone, we'll have no idea until developers start pushing out dedicated apps for the device that we haven't dreamed of yet). How anyone paid $600 for an iPhone on release without a functional app store is still beyond me.

There are indeed some severe hardware limitations, but those are far more succinctly summed up on twitter or here from Gizmodo. Andrew B. Watt's entry today also points to some of the teacher uses of the device (as well as student use).

There are two other pluses I see. One is applicable to inner city schools like mine where the broadband infrastructure or financial ability may not exist for complete access to the web. A school could conceivably create mobile learning environments if they could foot the $15 per month data plan for a classroom of students (a stretch, but perhaps deals could be struck with the providers). Hopefully verizon's data will be cheaper than att. The other benefit pertains to the tablet's lack of height (unlike a laptop). With the tablet in hand as backchannel and research tool, students couldn't (and wouldn't) hide behind their screen. Rather, more natural conversational conventions could be achieved from anywhere in the room, not just a desk. (Socratic circles here we come!).

My larger question addresses the difference between content creation and content consumption.

In my mind, the iPad's main promise is in more accessible information in different media formats (image, sound, video, text, etc.). However, the iPad (as it stands today) will block my kid's ability to create many of the things they currently create online.

The applications my students use the most are built on flash. Unless an app was built specifically for these (which I doubt there is much interest in now, but would be pretty cool), we would be stuck with laptops anyway. When I eventually getting around to teaching some of them to build flash games, their products will be inaccessible to the market. Maybe it would be different if I were a History teacher, where our projects would be less performance based.

I'm not worried about the keyboard, because I've seen my kids use touchscreens and think the experience could even be easier for them. I am worried about the lack of microphone and digital (and video) camera. Being able to edit sound and video (a la a simpler imovie or audacity) could score huge points for their brain time with new language concepts. Embedding these projects in their blogs could be a snap, but not possible due to hardware constraints. At least you can jailbreak an iphone 3G to record video, you can't affix a diy camera to the iPad.

So this boils down to the question. Does the move towards a device like the iPad, and all it's cloudness and sleekness, also indirectly create more use than creation?

The marriage of more powerful processors in smaller computers and great web apps have become like tool benches, where kids can do a load of things not dreamed possible 10 years ago on the internet (just look at xtranormal or animoto). These things aren't possible on the iPad. I'm afraid that the form factor and design speak more to factories than workshops.

The main thing I took away from the "1:1 school" I visited last week was that it takes a student centered institutional culture (more like a workshop) to make 1:1 really empowering and relevant for kids. In a school like mine (without that culture of student centered learning), I'm afraid a product like the iPad would only be used for teacher centered learning, much like laptops are being used there right now in most classes. Here, the iPad would work just fine in the factory like schools my kids attend now.

Just a thought to chew on.

Images courtesy of M J M(the workbench) and the http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjm/97000333/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/whsimages/998243013/ respectively.

Started new semester this week, and while I'm especially sad to see some of my old classes go, the emotion has been high at the start of the second term.

I always love the beginning of the first semester because there are so many unknowns, but everyone is so excited they can hardly contain it. I'll share my google voice number with them this week too, so I'm anxious to see the return rate on the new groups. Then we can get right to work creating some vokis (first project is always about self identity in Spanish) so they can get a handle on a 1:1 environment, which none of my 6th, 7th or 8th grade students have any experience with (mine is the only non computer lab classroom at my school that is completely student-centered with laptops).

My younger folks are going to make a storybird this week about mischievous Spanish vowels, and I hope to use xtranormal for the first time with a 4th grade class to retell a TPRS story we create next week. I'll let you know how it goes.

I also want to re-recommend BBC's fantastic interactive language series called "La vida loca"(the crazy life...no relation to that blasted Ricky Martin song).

Image courtesy of dcjohn via flickr (creative commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcjohn/23681519/ (sorry I forgot to post that last night when I posted the entry.

On a field trip today. Haven looked this forward to a school adventure since the Chicago planetarium in 3rd grade. Too bad I couldn't stream that on my Sony Walkman.

The tech team and I are visiting a school in St. Louis county that has a 1:1 classroom.

Here are my initial questions:

1.) do teachers motivate kids differently?
2.) is the academic culture of the building because of it?
3.) do teachers "police" student behavior online or do they teach online literacy and citizenship constructively?
4.) is this feasible (cost an instructional) for my school?
5.) do students seem more happy if they are working on things they enjoy?

Do folks out there on my pln have answers to these questions for schools they're at or schools they've seen? Like to see it in the comments.

I'll be on Twitter when I get there.

A colleague and I are facilitating a workshop for second year teachers about participating in a PLN as a young teacher.

Does anyone in my have any advice?

A few questions for guidance:

1.) What is the most important thing you have learned from your PLN in the last year?

2.) What is the most difficult thing about participating in a PLN?

3.) Why participate in a PLN?

4.) What tools are most useful to you as a networked teacher?

5.) Do you keep your "teacher" online identity and your personal online identity seperate? If so how and why?

6.) Name three people/blogs you find indispensable to follow for your content area or area of expertise.

Image via flickr by courosa http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/2922421696/

Although I've moved to a completely paperless classroom at grades 6th, 7th and 8th, K-5 are still more conventional foreign language classrooms (I typically lean towards TPRS storytelling and communicative-language methods).

The tools we use to develop language at these levels still tends to be technology-driven, but usually for assessment or practice (and less of student-created projects). Google voice has been a friend of mine, but I also would like to throw a favorable reference to BBC's interactive language program "La vida loca" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/mividaloca/). The story is wildly compelling (my third graders are obsessed with the plot, and talk about it in the hall way between other classes).

That all being said, my first grade lesson from today was decidedly low-tech, but was maybe the most fun I've had in a month or so.

Our focus was on food vocabulary in Spanish, so we created a kitchen of raw vegetables and fruits (the fake kind you can find in toy stores). Each student was blind-folded and had to pull a fruit or vegetable out of a bag. Using only their hands, or descriptions of the fruit using only Spanish (mostly colors), each students had to guess what the fruit was in Spanish. Halfway through the game, the they voted to blind-fold me so I could try. We then proceeded to bring in random adults into the room to try the exercise. They were so excited to prove to old people they know more Spanish than they do (and the adults were nice enough to oblige some extra naivete for effect.

As much as I love what technology has done for my classrooms, today was a really nice example of how engaging some of the things we've always done are, and how tactile and material connections with objects still are important (Andrew B. Watt had a similar fuzzy feeling a few days ago: http://andrewbwatt.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/quick-video/)

I feel the zest for technology makes me want to privilege a day like to less, when rather, I should privilege it more. I've been thinking really lofty as of late, but I forgot how good it sometimes feels to cherish the little things. I'll do more of that in twenty-ten.

photo via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncansample/4039992744/

I know it's lame to cross-post discussion board submissions from masters courses, but I've been so tied up with school that I haven't been able to write much else, let alone contribute anything to the resource discussion.

Here's my post in my class for this week about technology and instruction:

My use of technology has been posted in another place on this board, so for my own post I want to make the case that we move away from seeing technology as "tools we don't have" or "tools we do have" and towards a reconceptualization of how humans interact with connected and real-time knowledge. This means we have to see past computers, and see into the brain and the spaces we inhabit while we engage it.

Technology has shifted and will continue to shift sharply in coming years. If you think that a wide use of the internet through search engines is only 20 years young, and the internet itself is only 40, we have quite a tail on this innovation. However, our schools (especially in exploited communities) look similar to what they looked like at the dawn of the industrial revolution (hyperbole...but seriously).

Although these are fairly outdated by now, the partnership for 21st century skills established a Framework for what students should know and be able to do for the life required of them in the 21st century.

http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/route21/

While the skills haven't really been updated since their inception, they give a compelling vision for what my students would encounter if they were afforded the same educational opportunities as their counterparts in schools with 21st century vision. It's a veritable curricular apartheid that will lead to even more distinct labor segregation between service sector jobs and highly creative and strategic ones. The jobs that I know my students deserve will not be available to applicants lacking skills similar to these. Therefore, I think we are actually harming our kids while trying to help them perform, and we're "closing the achievement gap" on an education that existed 40 years ago. That's hard.

My school looks nothing like this vision, even though we have more access to technology than other public schools in the city. Technology is used to take and input data from standardized tests, present information to kids, or to play games. Any real time connection with other learners from around the world or creation of texts tat provide an authentic assessments of learning by students is completely (not surprisingly) absent. I'm in the middle of helping plan for the 10 year technology vision at my school. You bet that we'll heavily consider the innovations of the last 2 years, as well as the projected future, in our discussion.

I want to make the case then, much as Prensky does in his "doing new things in new ways", that we think of learning far more than we do about technology. If our focus was on learning, especially with 21st centuty skills, we might be more likely to leverage the technologies our students already have: cell phones (some with cameras and voice capabilities), nintendo dsis and sony psps, game consoles with internet browsers, bebo, myspace or facebook accounts, etc. Because our focus oftentimes isn't how we can engage our students in deeper learning experiences, we often focus on what we don't have instead of what we do have. Same goes for teachers, have a twitter or facebook account? Create another one for your teacher persona (mine is @mrsenorhill) You'll be amazed how rich your own learning will be once you connect to other teachers articulating similar or different thoughts as you do about learning. Have a blog? Create a teacher blog too (mine is elparquenuez.com). You'll impress yourself with how reflection and discourse will help your work with kids. Most teachers don't see the value in this constant "professional development" (also known as a professional learning network or PLN), even though they use the social internet to connect with families and friends everyday. Even for "digital immigrants" (a term I hate), this isn't a huge jump.

Therefore, since the methodological shift I speak of doesn't not require the actual tools we complain are so out of reach, we need to also start doing "new things in old ways" (absent in Prensky's thesis) in districts that haven't assigned resources to new technologies. This way, we could prove to the apparatus, little by little as we acquire necessary tools piece by piece on our own, that it's not a luxury to be connected via technologies, but rather a necessity and a right. That way, we make a priority on customization and innovation, and not efficiency or making what we do now more effective. In other words, we need to take risks. This is a grassroots effort led by teachers, not a small cadre of geeks or folks who "get technology".

Lastly, I want to recommend a blog titled "teach paperless" that ruminates on the cutting edge of the intersections of 21st (and beyond) century skills, engaging learning, and technology via the social internet. You can find it at http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/.

Photo posted by rick via flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/263214639/

I'm not a huge fan of chocolate, but I've been a huge fan of google voice in my Spanish classroom. Few of my students have internet at home, but almost all have access to a telephone of some kind. I can give them performance tasks to answer, texts to read for pronunciation practice, they can read their writing into the phone, or they can just plain call me for help. Best of all, their entire message is loaded on my computer. Former friends of gcast's free service will miss RSS functionality, but the user interface is easy enough to navigate. Each file can be downloaded in MP3 format, and then posted on their ELGG social network site. Once they've listened to their recording, they can use it with apps like voki to give performance to their writing. Pretty cool stuff, and a great extension to what I do in my classroom that leverages technology my students already have consistent access to.

I'd love to hear other perople's experience using google voice in the classroom. I'm sure there are tons of creative and engaging uses I haven't heard about yet. Share away.

Image courtesy of Rod_Gabriel on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8628950@N06/2770856499/