Powerful Learning Experience

As a Family and Consumer Sciences (the old home economics program) education teacher, I cover many areas including parenting. However, for about the first 17 years of my teaching career my only personal parenting experience was what I learned from a book or from babysitting younger children. Then, I became pregnant with my first child. The whole experience was a learning experience as "living through" usually is. I had a troubled pregnancy and ended up developing toxemia and having my first child 11 weeks early. With the stay in the NICU at Cabell Huntington Hospital, I learned so many things that I had no idea of concerning the development of the baby as well as problems that can occur. There are also so many programs available for children born early or with health/learning problems. Some of these programs in our area include the Right from the Start Program and the Birth to Three program.

While I spent 2 months with my little one in the NICU, I became aware that there weren't very many parents of my age in the unit. One of the nurses informed me that toxemia is mainly a condition that occurs in teen mothers and/or mothers who have abused drugs. With this experience, I now have the first-hand knowledge that I can share with my students in my parenting class. I also use my experience in the NICU to share the miracles that our modern technology and medical science can produce. Without these, my baby would not have survived.

Interview for Man High School Globaloria Student 2008-09

Homeworking and Blogging at the Marriott

As a homework assignment, we were required to find two blogs. After searching the web, I found two that I thought would be good resources.

One of these sites was the Reputation Defender. Even though it is a site that offers a service for a fee, the blog portion of the site has many good ideas. The blog involves issues relating to internet safety for children and students. I feel that it is a good blog in that it links various sites as well as links back to issues and topics from previous blogs on the site. There are also pictures embedded into the blogs.

The other site I found was the Beedigital Blog. I think this blog is a good one because it has various links as well as resources for the readers. There are also pictures, graphics and videos embedded within the site. The topics covered include flash programming tips, graphics, actionscipt and many other gaming creation and editing resources.

Both sites have current posts and also seem to be posted to pretty frequently, so I think they would be beneficial to the gaming classroom. They are also easy to navigate.

Game Playing at the Globaloria Academy

I played a few games on the Playing to Learn link. I really enjoyed the Free Rice game. I like the idea of donating rice and I think this will appeal to students. Also, it is a good learning experience for them because they are given the correct answer and as they continue playing the game, they are given these words again and again.

I also played Pirates of the Preamble. I agree with Larry's post that the game was limited in it's offerings. I did however like the graphics. I thought they were good.

Fall 2009

After a few months on sabbatical from the Globaloria program, Man High School is getting set to embark on our second attempt at conducting the gaming class. After facing many problems/challenges both personal and with technology accessibility conflicts, a break from the program was deemed necessary. However, I think the break has given me new perspective and a renewed determination to make this coming semester better for the students and myself. I really felt that my class could have done so much more with their ideas, but the limited time and access to computers "stunted" their games. So, even though I am still scared, nervous, and overwhelmed, I'm looking forward to the challenges I will face this coming semester with a new class and a little more knowledge of the game creation process.

Technology Workshop at RCTC

The WVBEA sponsored a Technology Workshop at the Randolph County Technical Center. Denise Stalnaker was the presenter/trainer. Loretta and I attended the workshop along with a couple of other teachers from our county. We participated in various activities which included Flash and Adobe Photoshop. We really enjoyed the presentation and I learned some things and got a refresher on some others. We started off with a Flash activity with some of Denise's students and they did a really good job of helping everyone. I felt like this workshop was really good for us to attend as Globaloria educators. Not only did it involve the Flash program, but there were also other technology tools and programs that will be useful in my class. I'm really glad that we were able to attend the class.

Plans for Blogging and Maintaining Wiki Pages for Now and Next Year

As a reminder to myself, I copied the open feedback portion of my progress report. I want to encourage myself to be sure to encourage my students to blog and maintain their team wiki pages!!

Open Feedback from March 31st Progress Report:
As a first year participant in the Globaloria program, I have faced many challenges in learning all the in’s and out’s. When I first was introduced to the wiki pages and blogs, I felt that they would be a really good classroom tool. As I have used them over this past year, I have found them to be so. However, it seems that this is a tool that I don’t use frequently enough. I myself am so busy with day-to-day details of teaching my own class in addition to trying to teach this brand new class as well as learn “how” to teach this class that I feel I neglect this portion of the program. This in turn leads my students to neglect it. This is not a conscious thing, but it happens. We all get so wound up in our gaming process that I forget to have them blog. So, I am going to use the forms that Maitreyi emailed to us for our last WebEx session to let my students see what they need to be doing and what their final evaluations will be based upon. I am going to give them a copy each week to keep in the class folders and have them check off each item that they are to complete and then review it on Fridays to make sure that they have done their weekly assignments. I think that with this new organizational tool that has been developed for us that I will do a better job of “recordkeeping” and hopefully this will lead them to be more responsible for updating their blogs and not relying on me to remind them. I also will have Loretta double check their blog entries to be sure they have posted and if not, remind them to do so. I plan to have them blog at least twice a week – once in class and once on their own time – until the end of the year. I want to try this to see how it works and then hopefully next year, this will be a common practice in the class for my students and myself.