Games can promote 21st century skills, such as multitasking, play, distributed cognition, networking, among others (see Jenkins white paper ). These “new media” literacy skills, social in nature, are based on traditional literacies such as writing. Today, self-sponsored writing and the universal authorship through digital network are  put writing as an essential skill to be developed and as an essential activity by which a huge amount of learning and reflection occurs. This is exactly what Taiga and its intensive writing  Quests are doing.  So if much of the learning in QA happens when kids write Quests, how can we get them to submit better Quests and then use the feedback they provide?

In the Taiga Water Quality Unit, the narrative follows the activities of different stakeholders in the park (loggers, indigenous community, fishing company), looking at the ways in which their practices may put the future of the park and its wildlife at risk.

Ranger Bartle asks the Questers, now positioned as Field Investigators, for help in figuring out why the fish population is declining in the park.  Through their series of missions, students propose a first solution to the problem and need to blame one of the groups inhabiting the park. With the help of a time machine, students can travel two years into the future to witness and experience the consequentiality of their previous decisions and submit a more nuanced solution that addresses the negative consequences of the first one.

After the completion of each of the five missions in Taiga, students write and submit a 50-100 word Quest. The writing of these Quests represent a crucial opportunity to help students enlist the scientific formalism underlying the narrative of Taiga. This process has been studied for several years, and we have used various strategies for supporting the inherent complexities of writing and the difficult process of drafting a scientific-like explanation.

During February-March 2010, one of our experienced teachers implemented Taiga with four sixth-grade classes.  Borrowing from the portfolio assessment literature, in particular the distinction between “working portfolio” and “presentation portfolio” and with insights from our other projects, we translated these ideas into the writing process in Taiga. We manipulated the Quest in terms of the distinction between the two kinds of portfolio and incorporated new Reflection Questions (RQs).  Two classes were told that they should respond to the goals of the Quests and to the new RQs, but that only the answers to the goals of the Quest would be reviewed by Ranger Bartle. For the other two classes the opposite instruction was given, i.e., the reflection questions would be looked at by Ranger Bartle.  We wanted to see if this would have an impact on the quality of  students’ initial submission to the Quest.

A second refinement we enacted was the incorporation of a wiki. Across the four classes and in an attempt to create a collaborative space to foster discussion among students around what was going on in Taiga, we replaced the individual field notebook with a group-based wiki.  In this wiki, students could organize the information collected from the NPCs (non-player characters) and discuss it within their groups. These two refinements reflect current trends in sociocultural approaches to assessment and collective oriented tools for fostering practices more akin to the ones occurring in real social networking spaces.

Even though this implementation had to deal with unexpected external difficulties that shortened the time that had been dedicated to Taiga in past implementations, we could see promising outcomes and future challenges related to the impact of focusing on the reflection questions and the incorporation of a collaborative oriented tool such as a wiki in the context of the rich narrative of Taiga.  It’s our hope that these changes may create  a broader learning environment that merges together the potentialities of both technologies.

We heard from some members who had recently implemented QA units. Teachers like Karen Mann (Kazzm) working in an Australian High School who, having completed the Plague Unit twice (both old and new) offered praise for the strengthened curriculum outcomes in the new version. We heard from Judy Tyler (judyler), having just completed the Taiga unit working with a Illinois middle school science class,  who shared her excitement about the learning gains made by students and the in-depth teaching and learning surrounding this unit.  Cheryl Hill (libbycat50) reported on how excited her elementary/primary students have been about their new co-questing.  Cheryl’s school in Australia is collaborating with Martha Eaton’s (meaton) whole grade 4 in a school in North Carolina to complete curriculum activities with remote buddies. The students have been emailing, blogging, videoconferencing and talking in preparation and even though the school year ends in a few weeks for the Aussie group, they have requested their teacher support them in further collaborations over the holiday break. We hope to hear from some of these teachers as guest bloggers right here in the very near future. They certainly have stories that you will want to hear.

In light of each of the teacher reports we discussed how integral teaching is to the success of QA and how important quality planning, preparation, scaffolding and feedback are to student engagement and learning gains.  The teachers mentioned here are masters of these skills but we need to know more about the ways teachers enhance the program. That’s why we have 2 research projects happening in the Mesa Verde and Plague units to see in more detail how and in what ways contexts and teaching impact the value of these units.  Special teacher connections will be held in December and January for these global projects so watch out for those announcements.

We also heard back from our new buoys who have been developing local teacher training programs.  Mary-Ellen Davis (soulstar) in Virginia Beach had run her first face-to-face training and a highly praised VSTE conference presentation while Jesus De Leon (MrD) and Janine McGrath (Mcgrath4th) were preparing to start their first blended teacher training program for Seminole County in Florida. This distributed leadership has become vital to QA’s scalability and we are eternally grateful to all our buoys about the globe who voluntarily give their time, expertise and high standards of professionalism to the program.

Some initial discussions also took place in the UK connection and later over twitter to develop strategies to attract more schools in the UK.  We are looking to the local expertise of colleagues Drew Buddie (wellfan) and Dale Jones (djones ) and the MirandaNet educational community to bring leading UK schools and districts into QA.

To know more about these events and the projects that QA teachers are currently engaging in, come join the Quest Atlantis Teaching Wiki where you too can take up a leadership role in our burgeoning community.

We host the Teacher Connections in 3 time zones traveling about the globe in QA’s Teacherville and over Skype.

The next Teacher Connections will happen Thursday January 7th in your timezone!

1. Asia-Pacific Teacher Connection 7.00pm – 8.30 pm Sydney **(09.00 am GMT, 9pm Auckland, 5pm Singapore, 5pm Perth, 5pm Kuala Lumpur, 5pm Beijing, 6pm Tokyo, 2.30pm New Delhi)
2. Europe and Africa Teacher Connection 18.00 GMT (London 8pm, 9pm Johannesburg, 9pm Zagreb, 10pm Ankara, 12pm noon Los Angeles, 3pm NYC, 7am Friday, Sydney)
3. Americas Teacher Connection 5.00 pm PDT/Los Angeles (01.00am GMT, 8pm NYC, 8pm Raleigh, 8pm Santiago, 5pm Vancouver, 12 midday Friday, Sydney)

Collaboration for Florida QA teachers

 In addition, a private wiki called Quest Atlantis Educators of Florida provides a secured area for QA Florida educators to collaborate in the alignment of the quests and missions of QA with the latest Florida State Standards. The final product is a current aligned lesson which can be uploaded to the individual teacher’s school or county website to be used by other QA teachers. Florida teachers are invited to request an invitation to join this wiki which is managed by Jesus R. De Leon, one of the Seminole County QA teachers.

Facebook as well as Linked-in groups are also being formed to promote the Quest Atlantis Educators of Florida initiative…if you are a Florida educator or administrator please join our groups to continue to spread the QA news!

Finally, a professional workshop called “3D Virtual Worlds in Education: A Look at the Virtual World Experience of Quest Atlantis as a pedagogical approach to impact 21st Century learners“ is to be presented at the Florida Association of Teacher Educators (FATE) Conference to be held at the Advanced Technology College, Daytona State College in Daytona Beach, on Friday and Saturday, October 9th and 10th . The theme of the conference is The ART of Teaching New Millennium Learners: Access, Resources and Technology and it will explore how teachers, teacher educators, district professional development facilitators, and others work together to make informed decisions which impact student learning in virtual schools and promote collegial dialogue among instructional professionals at all levels regarding distance education.

Video teaser for FATE conference presentation

Quest Atlantis educators presenting in the workshop will include Roxanne De Leon from Full Sail University, Deborah Gordon from St. Mary Magdalen School in Altamonte Springs, Florida and Jesus R. De Leon from Seminole County Public Schools.

It is obvious that the Central Florida Quest Atlantis educators are excited, eager and ready to make a difference with the education of our 21st Century learners!