Data Data Everywhere – Excel now available January 18, 2008
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Wow, what a difference one year makes. Seems like last year I couldn’t GIVE an Excel spreadsheet away and now I’ve got requests for data streaming in like crazy.
I blew the dust off of an old script I had and decided to give the people what they asked for…the ability to download your student performance data directly into Excel. Look for the little Excel icons on reports in SOLO, GradeSpeed, and GradeSpeedPlus in the near future…
by clicking on the icon, you can save your data into Excel for your own analytical use.
ETL 2007 Conference Presentation & Handout December 4, 2007
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I wanted to make my PPT presentation & handouts available.
Bad Blog hits the road December 3, 2007
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In getting ready for our district’s presentation at this year’s Educational Technology conference in Roanoke this week, I realized it’d be a good time to post…collecting my thoughts on the message I’m going to deliver.
When I submitted the presentation proposal back in September, we had just begun blogging with earnest in the district. I went out on a limb and pitched a proposal titled Bad Blog!!! Housetraining your blog for the K-12 classroom. (As a kid I always enjoyed writing the title of the literature paper well in advance of the actual paper itself).
Well, three months down the road I’m glad to say that the blog has been adopted and is now a lovable member of the SPS family. But why was it that I had my reservations taking the stray home? I Googled the words ‘fear of blogs blogosphere’ and came back with a lot of great thinking on what it is that’s driving the love/hate relationship behind the read/write web.
A great summation can be found here from M. Gotta about a possible double standard of organizational K-12 blog adoption.
The tone and emotion levels however get quite passionate however, when the topic of blogs comes up.There does seem to be agreement that public-facing blogs can have real business value from the perspective of marketing, PR, customer intimacy and community-outreach. That perspective however does not seem to transfer broadly when the conversation shifts to possible internal adoption of blogs.In fact, it is not uncommon to hear a range of opinions that could be represented by the following statements:
- Risk-related: “We’re afraid of what people will say.”
- Productivity-related: “We don’t want people wasting their time.”
- Performance-related: “We don’t see the business value.”
Although he was addressing business blogging, I felt that these three questions were essentially the same that I have been asked often and have been asking myself about organizational blogging in the K-12 classroom. I thought it made a great map for visualizing where each of our integration initiatives fits into the larger questions.
For each one of our milestones, salient points, ‘lessons-learned’ , or rules of thumb that I want to highlight, I began thinking about which question or questions it addressed.
I’d like to invite other K-12 bloggers out there to read M.Gotta’s article, then reflect on your experiences. Those key experiences, examples, moments that you’re thinking about…where do those fit into the diagram above? Do you have concrete answers? Do you have links, posts, axioms, rules that you can stuff into those Venn slivers?
More information about the symposium session November 2, 2007
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035. Making History: Instructional Enrichment and a HandsOn World War II Simulation
The Suffolk Public Schools History Lab is offering a small group of teachers an opportunity to experience an immersive historical simulation designed to deepen your students understanding of the Second World War. Using the educational game, “Making History”, the History Lab team will take teachers back in time to 1941. Each group will become the leaders of Allied and Axis countries, reenacting the geopolitical struggle in a simulated Second World War.
By getting a chance to rewrite the story of history in a simulated world, students improve their ability to read the real stories of history that you are providing in your instruction. Interacting with the concepts and matters of a simulated world enriches students’ engagement with the real world for which you are preparing them. This session will not only provide teachers with direct experience of the Making History simulator, but also will inspire and challenge them to integrate simulation and gaming into their regular instruction.
Presenters:
Chris Baugh, Technology
Jimmy Quattlebaum, Technology
Location: Room B222
Target Audience: Grades 6-12
Social Studies and Technology Teachers
8:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Prep for Making History at the Symposium November 1, 2007
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Hello All,
Here it is November and I find myself blowing the dust off my blog…talk about hypocracy. We’ve finally got the SPS IT aircraft off the ground and up to cruising altitude, so I’m going to turn off the fasten seatbelts sign and start moving around the district again.
I’ll be heading up a session at the Nov. 6th symposium @ KFHS. The topic will be related to gaming in secondary education, specifically 20th century history. We’ll be running a small-group simulation which will require a HIGH level of participation and will last approx 2 hours. Just so that we won’t disappoint those who plan on attending, I wanted to mention briefly some of the details.
We will be playing a somewhat complex simulation on the computer, so if you comfortable with computer gaming and pick-up computer programs quickly, then you’ll feel right at home.
If you’re not so computer saavy but have a good deal of interest in 20th century history (‘history buffs’), then this session is for you.
Finally, if you’re interested in finding creative ways of sneaking project based learning back into the middle and high-school social-studies curriculum, this presentation may spark your curiosity.
I’m hoping that some of the participants would like to sponsor their own Making History event with their students after seeing how fun and enriching this conceptual activity can be.
Here’s the not-so required reading list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Turtledove
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_the_South
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Presence_of_Mine_Enemies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_%28novel%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_History_%28novel%29
“I majored in Gaming” Listen up says NY school… June 22, 2007
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11259040
All Things Considered, June 21, 2007 · The MacArthur Foundation board announced Thursday it will fund a $1.1 million grant for a brand new middle- and high school in New York. The curriculum revolves around teaching kids to make video games.
The MacArthur Foundation says video games and the dynamic systems they use will be key to information management in the future.
Ok, so now you know…I listen to NPR during the commute…at least until I get my Sirius. Another story piqued my interest, this time more in line with the HistoryLabs project I’ve been tinkering with. I was thrilled to hear some positive press on the inclusion of gaming-as-instructional-activity; as for the grant itself, I’d like to see how that goes.
I was practically jumping out of my seat with strong examples of how the connectedness of a gaming environment can match the connectedness of the modern world. I wished the journalist had used some better analogies to explain the connection between ‘real-life’ and video-games (Super-Mario & polar bears? weak…The Sims anybody?).
The real kicker here is that part of the rationale for this experiment is the idea that we need to teach children skills relevant to the 21st century (which implies we’re failing to do so now, no?)…a concept that’s quickly becoming apparent among many educational ‘thinkers’ and probably will serve as fodder for a whole new crop of doctoral theses before being taken seriously.
Within educational circles I think the insight is startling and groudbreaking only to the digital immigrant and defunct instructional practitioner…most instructional practitioners are in the know about this and are clamoring for more curricular time to be allocated for these kinds of activities. Research shows that students who engage in these activities develop a more intuitive grasp of the conceptual framework and can build stronger cognitive connections across the overall curriculum.
When building games or playing them critically/reflexively, the learners see the world differently (as a connected space, with rules, cause-effect, parameters that can be manipulated, etc.)…to know the subject is to take it apart and re-assemble it again with purpose…and with video games and simulations, now more than ever we can manage the ‘reality’ of our lesson’s objective embedded within these activities…and we can do it all within acceptable curricular time-frames and the constraints placed on educators by NCLB.
The dynamic teacher creates activities that capture the child’s natural curiosity and guide his or her natural learning. The goal is to enhance the child’s understanding of the surrounding world and his or her relationship to it.
Drawing from Piaget and Dewey, the dynamic teacher knows that “in order to know objects, the [child] must act upon them, and therefore, transform them: he must displace, correct, combine, take them apart, and reassemble them. From the most elementary sensorimotor actions . . . to the most sophisticated intellectual operations, . . . knowledge is constantly linked with actions or operations, that is, with transformations”. (Piaget, 1970; Rallis, 1995)http://books.google.com/books?id=seYCAAAACAAJ&dq=Dynamic+Teachers+++Leaders+of+Change
Chateau Suffolk ‘07 – A good vintage? Winemakers influencing educators… June 20, 2007
Posted by cbaugh in Education In News, Uncategorized.add a comment
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11151829
Officials at schools in California’s wine country are hoping a new emphasis on data collection will help them pinpoint ways to improve student performance on state-mandated tests.
On the daily drive into work (yep…still saving up for satellite radio in the new car) I noticed NPR’s Morning Edition has begun a series focusing on school improvement. The story’s catch was that the schools were using large amounts of ongoing performance data to improve performance at some poor-performing schools in California’s wine-growing valley. Beyond the Sonoma ‘label’, I had a hard time making the analogous leap from pours to scores. But, feeling the same way about bad data decision making that Miles does about Merlot, I had to weigh in on this one and give it a blurb on the blog.
I found the story compelling not because the approach was that revolutionary or that the situation was very extraordinary (we’re doing the same horticultural practices in our vineyard and wrestling with similar challenges to bottling a better student). What I took note of was the enthusiasm and disappointment the teachers experienced with data &despairing student performance. Of course, I’m sure the comments NPR chose to air were well-crafted….but the sentiments that made it to the air echo in the hallways and inboxes of alot of people I talk with.
What’s the takeway from the story? A redeveloped student performance metric? Tasting notes at graduation? College admissions sommeliers doing career pairings. “Hmm…Engineering is pretty heavy and robust…maybe we’ll place you with something that balances your acidity…how about BioChemistry?”
Making History – Lab Day (Video Footage) June 8, 2007
Posted by cbaugh in History Labs.1 comment so far
This week I had a chance to work with a group of middle school students in the STEM program; STEM is an acronym for something involving Science Technology Education for Middle school(? my best guess). Student that participate in STEM are chosen based on solid academics, good discipline and an interest in Science and Technology. Typical activities for STEM involve LEGO robot building and computer animation studios. Alongside the STEM students are the STEM mentors, so of our computer technicians who volunteer to work with the students throughout the year.
Today, I would be working with the group to play-test Making History in a small-lab setting. I set up our laptop lab with enough computers to have three teams of 2 to 3 players. I also had two projected screens displaying a fourth pair of games; the idea was to model how to set-up a multiplayer game by doing so between the tow projected computers. I had planned on doing some single-player mode first to give the teams some practice before jumping into a multiplayer scenario, but time was against us.
I quickly proceeded to give the students a quick overview of the activity and tried to give them some background to aid in roleplaying as country leaders. We happened to be doing the lab on June 5th, so I was able to lead off with the significance of June 6th, D-Day, and the American involvement in WWII. After setting the stage for what was happening in the scenario we chose to play, I challenged the teams to play as either Germany or the USA. One set of players would focus on launching the invasion of Fortress Europe, the other would defend the Fatherland. The enthusiasm level was high among both the students and their mentors as we fired up the laptops.
I had set up one set of laptops to host and the other set to join. Again, the lack of an easy way to connect (our wireless domain doesn’t allow the LAN games to been seen by one another) made start-up a bit challenging. I minimized each host game, ran ipconfig from the command prompt to get the IP address of each host, then read the IP address back to the players waiting to join, who typed it the information and connected up to the game. [ LESSON LEARNED: write those IP addresses down; later on the joining players experience dropped games and network loss, so having the IP written down sped up recovery. ] Once they were in the lobby, the teams had no trouble getting started, having only to be reminded that they were to play either Germany or one of the Allies.
I pulled out one of our DV cameras at the last minute and for the next hour ran around the room, trying to keep tabs on the user experience, provide player guidance and film all at the same time. I apologize in advance for the shaky camera work.After the event was over, I took about 10 minutes to ask the students some questions about their experience during the activity. Here’s some of the more poignant moments of the activity I captured on film.
Getting Started – Orientation
In this clip I’m explaining the basics of gameplay and defending on D-Day to a team playing Germany. Notice the amount of time you’ll need to allow for students to get the hang of the left-click/right-click actions. Students not accutomed to Real Time Strategy games may not be familiar with this button style.
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_orientation.wmv
Strategy
Here we pop in on two of the more aggressive teams playing the USA and the USSR. The USA team has overcome an initial setback in Normandy, but they devised a backup plan that seems to be working. The Soviet team, aside from taking the role to heart are in the midst of some massive combat.
Me: “So you guys are playing the Soviets?”
Soviet Team: “Nah, We ARE the Soviets”
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_strategy.wmv
Sneak Attack
This was a fun exchange to follow. The German team has stopped the Allied invasion at D-Day, but the American team launches a second attack through the Italian front, cracks the German defensive line and begins making plans to drive onto Berlin. Notice the discussion…
USA Player 1: “Don’t send them out”
USA Player 2 “We won the battle. We have to move on.”
USA Player 1 “You don’t have to send everybody though”
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_sneakattack.wmv
Who’s Winning?
As we got closer to wrapping up the activity, teams began asking what their score was and where they could find it. This is probably something that, after an initial run-through, I should spend more time explaining to players engaging in a serious simulation.
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_whoiswinning.wmv
Waiting for the Next Turn
In all the rush to get the host computers set-up, I neglected to set a turn timer on one scenario. Typically, I would set the turn timers around 5 to 7 minutes, so that each team is forced to move forward in the game. Without this limit, the game, played in simulated time-blocks of one-week, will wait until every player is ready before moving forward to the next week. The USA team was finishing their moves much more quickly than their enemy and began to grow anxious.
Notice their joy when the German player they’re fighting against loses network connectivity, allowing them to move forward to the next turn without waiting.
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_waitingforturn.wmv
Network Failure
Speaking of losing connections, the only issue we encountered throughout the hour of gameplay was lost network connections. One team lost connection at least three times, while every team lost a connection to their host at least once. I’m not sure if the issue was with the laptops, the wireless network or the demo copy of the software itself. I’ll probably run a test with laptop multiplayer vs. desktop for a stability test.
However, notice how quickly the student is able to get re-connected to the game. This gives me some confidence in students being able to negotiate some of the basic technical challenges they will encounter with multiplay games in the future.
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_networkfailure.wmv
Postgame Interview
http://www.spsk12.net/historylabs/movies/MHlab_60507_postgameinterview.wmv
Gathering Storm for Making History May 31, 2007
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Back from a long Memorial Day Weekend, I found a lot of housekeeping that needed doing around the office to get ready for the end of the year. I haven’t had a chance to head back into the high-school halls yet and see how the students are doing with the WWI simulation, but I have gathered a few more teachers in the interest pool…hopefully by Friday I can get another group of students in-game to gauge how much orientation time we need to allow for teachers & students, as well as see what comes of some more multiplayer interaction.
My boss has peeked in on the progress and seemed very enthusiastic; I think that if the pilot is a go, we can really do some true collaborative simulations. The one barrier to all of this is the multiplayer hosting of the game, which, as it current appears (based on the demo) is a direct ip-to-ip connection…not an easy way to create realiable multi-player simulations for now. I’m going to start researching using a product called Hamachi(sp?) to host a lobby-type setup. I imagine there’s a group of student who are proficient with TeamSpeak, so that’s also a possibilty, although I like the idea of using the chat-log for the majority of the in-game communication (it gets stored in the saved logs)…perhaps only nations in an alliance can be in the same Teamspeak room? When I mentioned this to the Director, he was open to the idea and gave me some good leads to work out. I can imagine entire summers spent with students running the simulation if we could get the MP server in place…a summer project for World History students.
In a wholly unrelated moment, I saw this article hit the IGN site on the 29th, a review for Making History http://pc.ign.com/articles/792/792354p1.html. After reading the review, I tend to agree that the two biggest drawbacks to the game are the lack of a multiplayer management system ( the author mentions this as having difficulty finding other players online) and the passive Artificial Intelligence that runs the other countries. So basically with no decent competition in single-player mode and no possible way of connecting with other players, I don’t see Making History leaping off the shelves…definitely a niche product. Oddly, rather than become discouraged from the flat-note the critic hits at the end of his riff, I think this gives me a clear indication of importance that multiple students playing simultaneous will have for any success with this product. I’ve got to start researching Hamachi & Teamspeak first thing in the A.M. READ MORE CRITICAL REVIEWS @ METACRITIC
So let’s say you’re going to play against nothing but computerized versions of Neville Chamberlin in single-player mode. It can still be enjoyable and open up some opportunities for enrichment.
randomthought:British Prime Minister Chamberlain is generally portrayed in a negative light in the media as an example of someone who is easily dissuaded from following what may be seen as the correct path and instead follows the most popular path, in contrast to Winston Churchill who is often portrayed as being brave and assertive in the face of adversity.
For example in the Seinfeld episode “The Pitch” Chamberlain is referenced when the main character Jerry and his friend George are in a restaurant discussing the aftermath of a vomiting incident on George’s girlfriend. Jerry says “vomiting is not a dealbreaker; if Hitler had vomited on Chamberlain, Chamberlain still would have given him Czechoslovakia” to which George glibly replies “Chamberlain, you could hold his head in the toilet and he’d still give you half of Europe”.
From my own game playing experience, I found the A.I to be murky, inconsistent and downright crazy. I played as Russia in 1939, biding my time for a quick strike into Germany while they were fighting the UK-French alliance. Taking the opportunity to prep my factories for massive production, rather than build an army, I fought a series of minor wars with Finland, Estonia, & Latvia, then gobbled up the Eastern half of Poland. When the time came, I launched an all out strike on Germany, who had not repeated the success of blitzkrieg and was slogging it out with UK & French forces in the Low Countries still. The combined assault on two-fronts crushed the Third Reich like a tomato in a vice. My strategy of building up my factory base, combined with a full-out research effort for medium tanks, created a wave of steel that couldn’t be beaten.
Now here’s where the simulation got ‘wonky’ with the AI and alliances. Although I had helped the UK-French alliance defeat Germany, I did not join their alliance and remained an independent. In my eagerness to swallow up all of Eastern Europe, I declared war on the tiny territory of Danzig, already surrounded in a sea of Soviet Red. As they were a democratic country, the other big-kid on the block, the USA, stepped in to protect their fellow democratic state and declared war on me, as did the UK-French alliance.
Realizing I couldn’t take on all 3 countries, I sent a Peace offering to the USA who, amazingly, accepted. I thought, “This can’t be right? Why would they do that? They’ve got tons of airpower right here in Europe and they’ve got Britain and France to back them up?” Then I realized the US was not part of the UK-French alliance, so I offered them an alliance with my country, which they also accepted.
“WHAAAAT???”
And, as the USA was my new ally, they gladly (befuddlingly) turned their armies against the British-Franco alliance. So now, I had gone from war against America and the UK alliance, both democratic powerhouses, to a American-Soviet alliance against a democratic British alliance…all over a tiny inconsequential speck of turf on the Baltic sea. At that point I realized I wasn’t just lucky, but something was seriously flawed with the diplomatic artificial intelligence…why on earth would another democracy, who just declared war on a foreign, hostile Communist country, suddenly join in an alliance with that same country to smash their former democratic friends?
Of course, if I was the quick-thinking teacher, I would probably ask the students to hypothesize why that would of happened…why it shouldn’t have happened…and maybe dream-up a narrative that could allow for something like a political reversal of that magnitude to happen.
HEADLINES…Socialist Party sweeps elections in the US!!! Growing dissatisfaction with the Roosevelt’s unspoken alliance with Europe and fears that it may drag the United States, pawn of European princes,into a global war have toppled the current administration.
President Norman Mattoon Thomas calls for Americans to stand up against the Old World monarchies and republics of England and France and join with the Soviets to return Europe to a state of permanent peace by ending forever European aggression.
Quote President Thomas, “Why should America conspire with imperialist colonizers to wage war on the entire world, when we have long known that our prosperity as a country has always relied upon trade, industry, commerce and peace.”
Some student may find some real enjoyment in authoring the rationale for these alternate histories by mining the facts of history and reassembling them into a new history, as I’ve attempted to do here.
D-Day…Demo Day for ‘Making History’ in the Classroom May 25, 2007
Posted by cbaugh in History Labs.add a comment
Today I start the first of what I feel will be several visits to one of our high-schools to pitch the simulation ‘Making History’ to our history teachers and their students. After meeting up with the school’s ITRT (Instructional Technology Resource Teacher or as I like to call them our Special Forces in the technology integration struggle) to give her a quick run-down on what to expect, I entered into the typical post-testing classroom…students engaged in what appeared to be a compare/contrast historical film analysis but could have easily been a laid-back day watching some great movies. The teacher called a few of his students that he felt would be great candidates for taking a test-drive with the game and we went into the mini-lab in the adjacent room. Within minutes the students were online and in-game…so far so good.
After a quick jog through the basics of the game and the purpose of the simulation activity, we began selecting which scenario to play. I pointed out the tutorial scenario to them, but, much like an instructional manual, we tossed it aside and went straight into the Day of Infamy…Dec. 7th, 1941. Oddly enough, both teams wanted to play Germany! It made me smile…sometimes, playing the bad-guy can be more fun. They each loaded up a stand-alone game as Germany and began cruising around the map.
At first, the teams needed a bit of orientation with the map & some of the icons on it; the high-quality of the map interface was impressive enough, but I think I needed to turn down the visual effects to speed up the scrolling and mouse-responsiveness, as a few times students lagged out into the Atlantic Ocean or delay-clicked on the wrong unit. After a 22 minute overview of the 5 basic components of the game (military action – production – diplomacy – culture/research – trade/economics) the students were ready to play head-to-head.
I set up one computer as the host and another as a player. Again, two girls (names escape me ATM) took the host computer while their friend, (a kid whose name starts with an A? Curse my lousy name-recall) took on the USSR. Team USSR went aggressive from the word GO, while the German girls decided to stay defensive and set up some global trade and research. With a few pointers from myself, they eventually went over to a full-scale defense that was breaking the USSR’s repeated assaults to pieces.
Sensing a quick victory, and overhearing my conversation with student A of USSR about his now weak position, the German girls sought to profit from this, offering peace in exchange for the western territories they had captured from the Soviets. I showed the girls how to make a peace offer to the Russians, but their computer-controlled ally Italy refused to accept it (I’d like to think it’s because the AI was smart enough to realize it was getting left out of the deal, but who knows). The German girls then wanted to break off their alliance with Italy to gain peace and land from the USSR. Doing just that enraged the Italian computer-player, who then retaliated with a full scale attack, along with the entire Balkan gang. Suddenly Germany was fighting a two-front war. Ironically the Soviets then rejected the peace-treaty that the Germans were now able to make sans-Mussolini. “How cool is that.”, I thought.
I took this opportunity to slip out of the class and get back to my office for another appointment, but I had a good feeling about how the session went. The only major trouble was that during all the back-and-forth diplomatic action, the chat function was excruciatingly slow for the host team Germany…the girls were laughing about how ridiculous the chat-box was lagging their text. “This is slower than my cellphone”, one said. I’m guessing that turning down the visual setting may help a bit, but I think that if I had the full-scale version of the game and not just a two-set evaluation pack, I could run the host on a separate server as an observer, freeing up the players computers to solely run the game as a client.
When I got back to my office, I already had two more requests in my inbox for a Making History demo from teachers…word travels fast!