Coolest Girl in School Draws Fire

The new video game, Coolest Girl in School, is drawing attention, because of some potentially-negative lessons it’s teaching its players.

The game is intended to teach teen girls about the difficult social situations that arise in high school. Detractors don’t like the fact that the game encourages some less-than-acceptable behavior. In fact, the game’s creator says that in Coolest Girl in School “teachers exist to be manipulated, a looming parent signals potential social death, new clothes are procured by stealing from the mall, and bribery is an exit strategy for sticky situations.”

There are those who claim that the game can help girls deal with difficult situations, even if some of the methods are unpalatable.

The game hasn’t been around for long, so the jury is still out.

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Big Brother Teacher is Watching

I like to joke with my students that I’m always watching them. . . in cyberspace. When they’re on my classroom website, I know it.

They change a misspelled word on a paper, I know what word they changed and when they did it — right down to the minute. “That’s pretty creepy,” they always say.

I was thinking about this today, after I spent a good portion of the first Monday morninng of my spring break logging into their private web pages to see what kind of work they had done on the rough draft of their research papers, which were due on their class websites the Friday night that we began our weeklong school holiday.

My vacation is underway, and I’m in cyberspace reading research papers. I considered it after a short while, wondering why I was doing this, rather than drinking coffee, while watching ESPN Sportscenter and munching on a cereal bar.

I decided that peeking into their school work, at least in this case, really is pretty creepy.

So, here I am bloggin instead. For some, there’s just no curing the insanity.

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NCAA Tourney Brackets in Ruin

Anyone else’s NCAA bracket land in the shredder after Friday’s record-setting day of upsets?

Four double-digit seeds won Friday night, including Siena. Okay, before we go any further, I want someone to tell me something about Siena — nickname, geographical location, school color, school population, anything?

All kidding aside, I’ll admit I knew a little about Siena, prior to the NCAA Tourney. Who would ever have thought this tiny liberal arts school with fewer than 3,000 undergraduate students could have defeated anyone, much less hammer a powerful big-conference school like Vanderbilt, which was a four seed.

Truth is, I had Siena (the Saints, by the way) in my bracket all along.

And if you belive this, I’ve got some wonderful old textbooks I want to sell you.

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Spring Break and March Madness

Although it seems like the work never ends (my students are posting research paper rough drafts to their private websites this week), we’re taking a respite from the daily rigors of class for spring break.

The timing couldn’t have come better for me — a voracious college basketball fan, who won’t be forced to take a personal day this year (shhhh) to watch opening-round NCAA Tournament games.

School may be out for a week, but the notes, and NCAA Tourney commentary, will continue.

Stay tuned. . .

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Integrating Assessment Tools

We have several online assessment programs that we use at my school. We use Study Island, which is more of a math games application, Compass Learning and Achievement Series.

If you have a web-based, virtual classroom, you should pin these programs to your menu, so your students come here first (remember, you always want students going to your site, no matter what the reason is). Best of all, kids really enjoy taking tests online.

In many cases, students’ scores improve, when using a program like Achievement Series, which allows you to create any kind of test item you wish and match it to state standards. This may seem strange, since all you’re doing is changing the test instrument, but students love working online and on computers so much that their concentration actually increases during online tests.

Of course, teachers love the fact that Achievement Series grades your tests and quizzes and breaks down the results by class, item and individual students.

So, whatever assessment tool you’re using, be sure to pin it to your menu, so your students get the feeling that they’re just completing one more activity at your website.

Continuity and learning. What could be better?

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Could Ramona Encourage Creation of the First Cyber Teacher?

So I ran into Ramona, the virtual person who likes to talk, over at KurzweilAi, and this robotic Chatty Kathy got me to thinking. What if we could incorporate something like Ramona into the classroom?

Hmm, a virtual me. I do love the idea of the virtual classroom, but I’m not sure I’m ready to disappear into cyberspace completely.

The concept is appealing, though. If you give Ramona a test run, you’ll see that as advanced as the technology is, her responses to your questions and answers are quite contrived. However, it does seem feasible, based on this creation, that there just may be a place for a teacher in the cyber classroom.

I don’t think Ramona will every be more than a cool, cyber-substitute, but I do like the concept of one more “person” in the classroom, even if she is programmed, to help me keep my students intrigued.

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Games Make Internet Learning Fun

Games in school? Absolutely!

If you want a successful web-based, Paperless Classroom, it’s critical that you add a Game Room.

In order to get your students to buy into all that you want to do online, they have to realize that there will be times that it won’t be all work.

I use my game room for down time. Kids finish activities at different times, so I tell them when they complete an assignment to visit the game room and pick the game of their choice. Of course, all the games have been carefully selected by me, and they are both fun and educational.

My classroom website’s game room is always evolving. Keep it updated, and always keep it fun!

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Blogging from Microsoft Word

I just got a fancy new laptop computer, complete with Microsoft Word 2007. This version comes with a neat Blog Post feature, in which you can publish your blog post, directly from Word to your blog. I’m not certain how convenient this is, so I decided to give it a try.

The application allows you to select the blog system you use and register your username and password. Being a bit skeptical, I decided to begin this blog post, publish it and see how it goes.

I was immediately impressed to see that the Blog Post feature automatically inserted the extra space, when an “enter” is hit. I have a graphic and link embedded into all of my Blogger posts, so I want to see if Word is smart enough to place all of my text in the proper place.

So, here goes. . .

UPDATE (a few minutes later): Okay, so either Word isn’t as smart as I had hoped, or I’m not as smart as I think I am. Probably a combination of both.

The extra space didn’t show between paragraphs on my post, and my embedded graphic and accompanying link was also missing.

If anyone is better at this than I am, please let me know in the comments section.

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Troubleshooting Microsoft Integration

My students do a lot of class assignments on Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint. Not that Microsoft needs any pub, but these are pretty cool applications, and user-friendly enough for young kids to use.

They don’t come without problems, though.

My students recently discovered a problem when sing Microsoft Word 2007 with our web-based Content Management System. Since our school uses an older version of Word, docs my students created at home on Word 2007 didn’t open properly at school. This was very frustrating for the kids, who are working very hard on their first major research project.

The answer is quite simple and took a brief lesson for the students, which I, of course, posted to our classroom blog.

Word 2007 allows the user to save documents in various formats, including ’97-2003. When this is selected, the document will open properly on older versions of Word.

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Blog Makes Fun Addition to Virtual Classroom

As a blogger, I’m always looking for ways to blog more often (I just love that the word, “blog,” can be used as so many different parts of speech).

Now, I’ve found a way to use the school blog efficiently in my virtual, paperless classroom, which gives me a chance to keep my students informed, while feeding my passion for blogging.

I recently began using my ePals blog as a virtual calendar, as well as a venue for important announcements and tips for my kids.

This isn’t ranting about education like I sometimes do here, but it is a nice outlet; plus, it gives me a fallback position, when they blurt the obligatory, “You never told us that,”everytime I say they should know something that they don’t.

Now, I just say, “Wait a minute, I’m sure I posted a blog on how to attach your work! Don’t you read my blog daily?” You should see the looks I get from that one.

Anyway, the school blog has become an integral piece of my web-based instruction. And it’s one more thing that adds a little fun to my day.

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