NAGC Conference: Game Your Way Into Thinking Notes

This was one of my first sessions of the conference. I was still overwhelmed by how big this conference was and I did not take a lot of notes at this session due to trying to figure everything out.

With that being said this session was very good. I walked away with a few key projects and all of which I have plans to tweak and modify to make my own. All good ideas are always stolen from someone else right?

The name of the presentation was, “Game Your Way to Learning” by Robbi Makely and Dr. Candy McGregor. They were very good presenters.

Here is a link to their site for this presentation: http://nagc.wikispaces.com/

Choose the GAMES option for the session I attended

The two of them presented several projects. The one project that I really liked was using Google Earth to find strange items on Earth. They have already created everything for you as a teacher. I mean EVERYTHING. The clues, the templates, the FAQ’s, the rubric, etc. You don’t have to create single thing. I would suggest that you do go and actually go through the items yourself to understand how it works.

This project forces students to do research, analysis, and writing. They have to learn how to conduct research to find an answer. This is very important because how often do we give students the exact place to research. This eliminates spoon feeding our students. It also has a topic of interest as students are eager to find these weird and odd places on earth. Once they have identified the location through the clues and dig around a bit they then have to write about their research. We all know the writing of our youth needs work. This once again will give them practice all the while being on a topic of interest.

This session has intrigued my interest. I have begun exploring Google Earth and searching for blog and websites that have found weird places on earth. I plan on using this activity in my classroom starting after Thanksgiving Break. Over break I will be creating my own little system using all the wonderful resources that have been created. It is going to be awesome. I will be delivering one a week to break up the larger projects that we are working on. It will be good to still work on key skills, but mixing things up from the bigger tasks at hand. I will be sharing my project here on the blog once I have it up and running.

Here is one blog I found that had some cool images from earth: http://www.docmercury.com/ge/oddities-americas

Here is one more: Map Of Strange

If you know of others please let me know as I am searching far and wide to find more sources.

Last, I am slowly working on posting my notes and thoughts from all sessions I attended. Give me time as I filled an entire notepad full. I was in education nerd heaven!

Off to create a theme to my Google Earth Project Game……….