About jwatson

Website: or email
Biography: I'm the Implementation Manager of Quest Atlantis at Indiana University, working since November 2008 to update the curricular focus of Units, Missions, and Quests, as well as create supplementary teaching materials and standards alignments for our instructional content. I have 20 years' experience working on content and curriculum in the public schools, with a bachelor's degree in elementary education, a master's degree in special education, and another twenty graduate hours in at-risk education. I helped to design, implement, and administer grants for an intensive summer school program on cultural immersion. Before coming to QA I worked at a Bloomington, Indiana-based non-profit educational technology production company, creating educational materials, digital metadata, and standards correlations for hundreds of video and online instructional assets for PBS and other education entities.

Posts by jwatson:

Bragging Rights: Sharing exemplary Quest responses

on Mar 8, 2010 in QA Community of Practice, Teacher Voices

Every school day in Quest Atlantis, hundreds of students submit responses to Quests, and teachers all over the world review those responses. And every workday, I receive several notifications from teachers who want to highlight an extraordinary response submitted by one of their students. I always get a little thrill when I read those nominations, because I know that these are efforts that make teachers proud… and a proud teacher is a happy teacher! There is no feeling on Earth to compare with seeing that spark … evidence that a student “gets it.” Being a former schoolteacher myself, I know that feeling. When one of my students turned in an assignment that knocked my socks off, I wanted to go door to door or shout it from the rooftops!

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Tags: Quests curriculum

Quest Atlantis Units: Your Standards Solution!

on Oct 15, 2009 in QA Community of Practice, Teacher Training

Quest Atlantis Units (Taiga, Plague, Ander City Statistics, Spacenik, etc.) are the curricular features that give teachers and students the biggest reward, in motivation, engagement, and learning. But they also require the biggest investment in time—often taking up to 12 days in the computer lab with more classroom and teacher prep time to support them. [...]