GameDesk

By Andrew Miller

GameDesk, an organization that’s developing a variety of game-based learning initiatives, is venturing into new terrain with the opening of a new school and the development of new digital tools, with millions of dollars in funding from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AT&T.

The PlayMaker School, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will open in Los Angeles on September 7, with 60 students in 6th grade, and will operate as a “school within a school” at New Roads, an independent middle school.

Like Quest to Learn, the game-based school in New York, PlayMaker will incorporate principles of game-based learning into the entire instructional model, but with an additional focus on making and discovering. The goal is to engage students in both high-tech and low-tech games and modular, instructional activities. Individual students will work with an “Adventure Map” that will guide them to choose their own path, allowing for students to control how they learn and when they learn it. These modules will be not only individual tasks, but will also include group work. In a unit on kinetic and potential energy, for example, students will watch videos, play games, create digital roller-coasters, and create real-life models.

With ongoing formative assessments tied not only to the Common Core, but also practical digital skills, collaboration, critical thinking, and social emotion learning principles, the focus is meant to go beyond traditional schooling goals. Instruction will focus on providing context for the content, whereby students understand the relevance of what they’re learning. Teachers will play the roles of questioners, facilitators, and reflective agents.

More information will soon be released about the specifics of the program.

SCALING UP

Lucien Vattel, the executive director of GameDesk, said he wants to scale the company’s tools and learning models to schools and other groups across the country. To that end, the company received $3.8 million from AT&T to fund two new initiatives: a learning laboratory called Learning Center, which will include a “classroom of the future” where new digital tools will be developed, tested, evaluated, and aligned with academic standards; and free access to an online portal of digital learning content, as well as support for teachers to learn how to integrate it.

“We see this as being a clearing house for all the best work in this space and we want the entire education community to contribute content to the site, from the professional developer, to the educator in Kansas, to the creative and tenacious parents and kids at home,” Vattel said.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

As part of the professional development for the PlayMaker School, GameDesk also initiated a collaborative called DreamLab focused on not only creating many of the GameDesk’s projects, but also how to implement and sustain them. Instead of simply creating and implementing, however, they design in collaboration with student and teachers, to ensure that real needs are being met well.

Although still in its infancy as a component of GameDesk’s work, DreamLab hopes to provide professional development for teachers on site. In addition, they hope to build a portal where teachers can collaborate on lesson design and share their ideas for implementing the games in the classroom. In the past months as they prepared for the new school opening, new teachers received intensive professional development, learned to design games, played games, and understood the pedagogical principles around using games for learning.

GAMES IN STEM

GameDesk is also creating and collaborating on games that target the Common Core standards. Mathmaker, which GameDesk created, is focused on having students take on the roles of engineers to learn math concepts. This game, as well as others, is directed at amplifying STEM curriculum, and is being piloting and used in large urban high schools.

GameDesk also uses another math-focused game called Motion Math In-Class, created by the team at Stanford University Learning, Design and Technology Program, which is part of its math curriculum. This interactive iPad app helps students learn fractions, proportions and percentages.

Another unique game is Dojo, which uses play and biometrics to work on emotion regulation (not to be confused with Class Dojo, which helps teachers with classroom management). So far, it has been used successfully with diverse populations and even youth within or exiting the juvenile justice system. Players experience real-life challenges that test their emotions, but also gives them strategies and feedback on how to overcome these challenges.

More to come, as GameDesk continues to grow.

Flickr:dno1967b

By Betsy Corcoran, EdSurge

Teachers who want to use technology in the classroom to its best potential typically face a problem dealing with computers that’s weirdly reminiscent of dealing with a roomful of bright but disruptive students: It can be too much of a good thing.

With sophisticated high-tech tools comes a deluge of data, and for a lot of teachers, finding the right resources at the right moment can be maddeningly difficult. What’s more, the most sophisticated programs, which deliver detailed reports about student progress, don’t share data–which means that teachers can wind up with multiple “data dashboards.”

So educational technology entrepreneurs are starting to offer up a bit of help for both of these programs, according to two reports in today’s EdSurge newsletter.

In Mountain View, a startup nonprofit organization, EdNovo, is doing early “alpha” tests of a Google-like search program for helping teachers find exactly the right digital content at the right time. And in San Francisco, a firm called EdElements just got a huge boost of financing to support its work in building a unified “data dashboard” that can combine data from different programs to help teachers avoid an air-traffic-control like problem as they try to mix and match the tools they use.

First EdNovo: with a team of almost a dozen educators and engineers, former Google executive Prasad Ram is building a free search engine he calls “Gooru” to retrieve digital content starting with math and science. So far, the team has tagged and organized 20,000 free resources on the web, along with 1,200 class plans and “classbooks,” which are effectively playlists for learning. The effort is still very much under construction. Some 300 educators, including teachers at Oakland International High School, Milpitas Unified School District and FlipSchool are providing the first feedback. But Gooru promises to deliver what educators have long dreamed of: an education-specific search engine that pulls up timely and usable material for teachers. Educators can request a chance to try out the program here. [Update: Gooru is now open to any user.]

There are also a wide range of more comprehensive teaching programs that many schools are using to create so called “blended learning” models: fusions of teacher-led and computer assisted instruction. (Heather Staker of the Innosight Institute offers more detailed definitions of blended learning here.)

A bevy of ed-tech programs are emerging to serve as this kind of teacher’s right-hand aide: for instance, Dreambox Learning helps K-3 students develop their math skills; Compass Learning offers a broad suite of K-12 programs.

In most cases, teachers trying these programs out want to mix and match their options like picking out a box of mixed chocolates. Why not some Dreambox for math and then a little Accelerated Reader for language arts?

But the nail-biting truth about mixing up these sophisticated learning programs is that each one has its own, carefully designed “data dashboard.” Use three programs and you’ll wind up staring at three data dashboards. What’s needed is a way to get the programs to talk and share data–or a way to build a single “data dashboard,” that can channel the reports from individual programs and portray a single, coherent report.

There are a handful of efforts to build such uber-dashboards.  Charter school program Rocketship Education has been growing its own, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is also fostering the development of common standards that could be used more broadly by any program. New York City’s school district has worked with a program called Desire2Learn to craft a dashboard.

And then there’s San Francisco EdElements, run by Anthony Kim. Kim is one of the country’s leading blended learning consultants. He’s worked with KIPP and IDEA schools to create blended learning programs in those schools. Along the way, his team has begun partnering with different ed-tech companies to wire up their programs to return data to a single dashboard–something Kim calls a “Hybrid Learning Management System.” So far, Kim’s team works with 15 different vendors.

Kim’s efforts got a boost this week by a $2.1 million equity investment by investors that include the NewSchools Venture Fund, Tugboat Ventures, venture capitalist, Wally Hawley, and the three founders of edtech incubator, ImagineK12.

It’ll be interesting to watch how these two intriguing ways could help teachers be more incommand of the explosion of emerging digital tools.

iCivics

The iCivics web-based game is one of the recipients of the Next Generation Learning Challenges grants.

Today, the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), an education technology grant program funded by the Gates Foundation, announced the 19 winners of its latest wave of project funding aimed at the K-12 level.

Last fall, the Gates Foundation announced its NGLC initiative, a multi-year project to help support programs that boost college preparedness and college completion. The first round of grants, announced earlier this year, were aimed at developing tools for higher education. While those grant recipients aim to address some of the factors that cause students to drop out of college, the recipients of the second round of grants, announced today, tackle the other end of the spectrum: the factors that make students ill-prepared for college.

This $7 million round of funding asked for proposals that use technology to address some of the Common Core materials and to help build both educational content and and assessment tools. The 19 recipients are mostly a blend of private companies and universities. The Louisiana Department of Education – the only public K-12 grant winner in this round – will use the funding to expand its virtual school algebra program. The iCivics program, another recipient, is an online civic education platform founded and led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and its civics and literacy curriculum will be will be further developed.

Although the grant program said that entrants should be able to demonstrate a history of results, there were several “proof of concept” endeavors among today’s winners, including a project by Classroom Inc to build out its Sports Network career simulation module, aimed at at-risk and below reading level students.

NGLC is taking a sweeping approach to addressing the problems around college completion rates in the U.S. by addressing issues at both the K-12 level and in college itself. It also has an interesting tact of supporting startups, established technology companies, universities, and K-12 schools.

There has been quite a bit of interest in the grant program, and this round had over 230 proposals. A third wave of grant opportunities will be announced later this year.

Submissions can come in the form of videos, emails, photos, or any other medium that suits the participant and are due on November 23, 2010. You can email your submissions to projects [at] goodmagazine [dot] com with the subject: GOOD / Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Education Contest.