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)

Recently I was leaving Indiana after a very fruitful time working in the Quest Atlantis team and I spied this t-shirt at the airport and just could not resist.

Tshirt bought at Indianapolis Airport

Those teachers who have trained online with me as will surely raise a giggle because some of our most fun professional development classes explore building in the 3D world where we partake of the joys of inworld cow tipping.

Part of what excites teachers, as they begin to learn all the facets of QA, is the opportunity they and their students have to construct, collaborate and develop.  While our cow tipping session is a bit of playful craziness it is emblematic of what QA offers and in more than just building in the virtual world. Teachers like their students are taking ownership and constructing more than simple 3D homes. Teacher teams have been forming to build in Free4All and this is proving to be a new and integral part of our teacher community development.

We also currently have teacher groups  working around the world on a Google Site for  Quest Writing to develop new quests to add to the worlds of QA. Quest are already being written in topics such as the social commitments, robotics, indigenous heritage and Modern languages – French and hopefully Spanish.

We are about to put together a proposal with a  small group of teachers to take  a disused world and re-purpose it as a student congress with several dedicated areas for such as Quester presentations, inworld machinima development, and Quester showcases.

Our successful monthly Teacher Connection meetings will restart on the first Thursday of each month and that makes September 3^rd our very next meeting. More notice of meeting times in your timezones will be coming to QA teachers through our email listserv, tweets and Quest Atlantis Teachers Facebook Group.

We have started building a wiki for teachers to develop a to map quests and missions to local outcomes and standards and to share out ideas for implementation.

If you are already a QA teacher, or keen to come join us soon in one of our online or face-to-face training programs, you are invited to join any and all of our teacher community activities and events. Many of these activities are just getting of the ground and they will become valuable and successful resources with the support of a critical mass of professionals like you!

~ Bron Stuckey

PS no cows were harmed in the training of Quest Atlantis teachers .

QA teachers from out of the audience

On the Tuesday, July 7th I was invited to be the ISTE guest speaker in Second Life to talk about Quest Atlantis.

The presentation came to life when 8 QA teachers in the audience came up to join me on stage and to describe their experience with QA and field questions about educational practices and learning for young students in our virtual world. More and more I bump into fantastic QA teachers who are sharing their experiences and drawing colleagues in to join us.

If you want to take a look at what teachers have to say about and how they are implementing Quest Atlantis take a look at our Visions of Quest Atlantis site. There you can see links to teacher blogs, slideshare presentations, youtube videos, wikis, flickr pics and tweets in a dynamic and ever growing collection.

~ Bron Stuckey