Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Raleigh County Students Awarded Laptops




Wow! It was very exciting to be part of a historic event for Globaloria in WV. Last night, David Lowenstein and I were privileged to present laptops to the winners of the first Globaloria STEM Games Competition. Madison Meadows and Celia Laverty, students in Mrs. Tracy Halsey's game design course, were presented personal laptops as their reward for designing the winning game in the competition that was chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Being honored in front of the Raleigh County Board of Education allowed these students the opportunity to tell about their experiences with Globaloria as well as demonstrate their winning game to members of the board and others in attendance.

I look forward to co-presenting Malachi McCutcheon, a student in Greenbrier County with his laptop on September 14. Malachi's game "Math Runner" tied with Madison and Celia's game "WV Animal Rescue Squad" in this inagural competition.

2010-11 is going to be a great Globaloria year!

Yours in Education,

Monica Beane, NBCT

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sandy River Middle School Team on iCivics.org



"The Race to Justice", the winning game in the 1st Annual Globaloria Civics Games Competition is now featured on former Supreme Cour Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's iCivics.org. Click here to play.

Designed by Sandy River Middle School Team, The Fox Racers, this game teaches you about civic law in a fun game-play setting, where you have to race to the courthouse to argue your case.

The front page of the iCivics website reads,


Civics and the World Wide Workshop Foundation are proud to present The Race to Justice, a student-designed game about civil law. The Race to Justice is the Grand prize winner from the 1st Annual Globaloria Civics Games Competition. Game designers Kaitlyn and Billy are incoming 8th grade students from the Sandy River Middle School in Avondale, West Virginia. They came out on top in a field of 25 teams from middle and high schools across West Virginia who researched, designed and programmed their own original civics games, using the Globaloria platform and curriculum.
Congrats to our winners, and to all the competitors in a truly excellent field!


We second that congratulations! The bar is set mighty high for next years' Civics Games contestants. We can't wait to play them!

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Starting the new school year off "the Globaloria Way"


As the 2010-2011 school year begins this month, 50 Globaloria educators throughout the state of West Virginia are delivering their content standards and objectives in highly innovative and engaging ways that students across the nation have been waiting for.

Globaloria educators and their classrooms are equipped with flip cams, laptops, web voice and video conferencing capabilities, and skills that were sharpened at Globaloria’s July and August Summer Academies at the West Virginia Center for Professional Development. The trainings at WVCPD, which were lead by World Wide Workshop staff and Globaloria mentor educators, provided both beginner and returning Globaloria educators with on-going teacher professional development to engage students in harnessing Web 2.0 tools to research, report out on, and produce digital artifacts that demonstrate subject mastery.

More than twelve hundred students in 41 West Virginia schools will participate in Globaloria this year. They will be taught by 50 education leaders who teach a plethora of different subjects in a variety of different settings. The diverse Globaloria-WV educator community consists of professors who teach game design courses at community colleges, educators who lead classrooms at alternative education centers, and teachers in WV public middle schools and high schools who lead classes ranging from Math, Drafting, Language Arts, and Digital Imaging, to Social Studies, Music, Biology, Chemistry, and Earth Science.

These diverse classrooms have a common--but significant-- link. They are all made up of West Virginia students who will be creating blogs on the subjects they are learning about, conducting on-line research, making multi-media presentations on their findings, producing educational video games, and creating wikis to collaborate, share code and work in teams with other Globaloria students from around the state, just as their educators did this summer. They will do things "the Globaloria Way."

By David Lowenstein, State Director, Globaloria-WV