Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Workshop Follow-up



I wanted to take some time to pull together a post-workshop post for the blog. I think we had a good workshop and I really saw some progress in some of our teachers. It is always exciting to see a group "dig in' and really start to understand the process and the technologies. I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved for making it a great learning experience.

The workshop focused on some key things for the group of existing educators including the Globaloria platform, using the wiki, collaborating virtually within the community, and a lot of time learning Flash.

Each school was able to go into their wiki and make edits and updates, some worked through their semester schedule, while others began to re-organize their wikis to improve the overall platform.

During the second day of the workshop, we had a great discussion about some of the issues that we face in the schools, like Getting Started, Recruiting Students, Grading Student Work, and transferring Globaloria skills and techniques into other curriculum areas or classes. Everyone participated in the discussion and a lot great ideas surfaced.

The final afternoon was one big Flash workshop. The educators produced a complete Flash movie before they left that evening and presented it during dinner. We were really able to see a lot of great ideas emerge and great learning happen.

Go here and check out what they produced. The video above is one that Bill did during the workshop. It isn't the final version, but pretty great anyway.

4 comments:

Jenny Bardwell said...

Yes, thanks to all for your time and efforts for the workshop. It was very valuable to see all the educators in person to get more of a sense of how they work through gaming obstacles.

I do think we need more help with Flash, someone to answer specific questions. Denise, how did you learn Flash last semester? You seem to have accomplished alot! Lee, are you available to come to Man and Capital to provided flash instruction? Who else can we call on at this point in time?

Lee Kraus said...

Jenny, I am glad that you found the workshop valuable.

I think that you and all the educators should focus on supporting the students for a week or two based on the Flash skills you learned in the workshop. Then as specific questions start to surface, we can start looking for specific reference material or workshops that will support or address those specific skill sets.

Do you have any specifics in mind right now? If we have two or three teachers who would like a lesson on a specific topic there are many ways we can address that need. We can create a tutorial, have a live, web-based session, or just work through it on this blog.

I would really encourage you to start trying to identify specifics within Flash that you need some support on.

Thanks for the comments! You are a really support to our program!

Jenny Bardwell said...

Good advice, Lee. Specific questions makes alot of sense at this point in the gaming design. I also have invited the HSTA students to talk to RTC students. We'll see what happens!

Lee Kraus said...

I have uploaded a second version of the Life's
Choices game, a swf file. I want it to have movement on the very first page, but the motion tweening won't work, so please help there.

I will have to take a look when I get a chance.

2)I can't seem to post the fla file of this swf, even though I uploaded it. You need this to help, correct?

You post an Fla like a hyperlink in the wiki. No need to have the swf, but it great to have both on the wiki.

3)Can I get back to the original fla file from a swf file?

No.

I mistakenly dind't save the fla of the first version and now want to go back to that fla file.

Sorry.

4) Is there a better way to show a link than just the url, like I did above for my project page?
Thanks!

You can anchor the URL to text using basic HTML. This would convert it to hypertext and then it would appear as a blue link instead of a long URL that actually can get cut off and not work if you are not careful.

Good luck Jenny I hope this helps.

Lee