About 15 years ago when the Internet was not widely used in schools and our youngest son was about 10 years old he wrote a description of his ideal classroom.
He described a room full of computers where students could follow their own program by logging into lectures given by professors from universities around the world.
He also loved playing strategy games, writing MOO code, participating in communal Internet story writing sessions and playing chess via email.
He would have absolutely loved Susan Fisher’s Dream Classroom!
During the Global Education Conference http://www.globaleducationconference.com/ Susan Fisher, Talented and Gifted Department Coordinator, Ridgeview I.B. Charter School, Fulton County Schools, Atlanta Georgia shared with us how she uses 21C gaming to encourage global awareness and responsibility in her students in a session titled ‘Dream Classroom Model Encourages Student Role as Global Citizens’
The session description read:
Susan Fisher, at Ridgeview IB Charter School, has created a perfect flipped, inspired, gamified, differentiated and project based classroom. The flexibility of the Inspired Classroom, in conjunction with the Flipped model has allowed her to move away from the traditional linear, sequential, and lecture-based teacher model. With the availability of information and resources on the internet, the teacher no longer has to be the one-stop shop for information and learning. In a true flipped and Inspired Classroom, the teacher fills the role of the facilitator that sets up a series of activities that lead the students as they learn on their own. This year that flexibility has enabled her students to participate in the Urgent Evoke Game created by Jane McGonigal and the World Bank Institute to help students learn about their role as global citizens and future problem solvers. She has incorporated her own game site for the kids, Collabornation, around the games central themes; food security, energy, water security, disaster relief, poverty, pandemic, education, global conflict and human rights which align perfectly with her 7th grade world geography curriculum.
Susan has designed a program called Collabornation http://fishersu.wix.com/collabornation
for her students which incorporates games such as Evoke http://www.urgentevoke.com/
Links that Susan shared during the session included
Camtasia http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html
Evoke http://www.urgentevoke.com/
Edmodo http://www.edmodo.com/
Collabornation http://fishersu.wix.com/collabornation
A vimeo about Evoke http://vimeo.com/9723245
A screencast of a CNN segment about Evoke http://www.screencast.com/t/FnvbFTWMD
Susan Fisher’s Scoop.It E-Portfolio http://www.scoop.it/t/susanfisher1
Susan Fisher is @fishersu on Twitter
The recording of the session can be found at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.67BBD9AB93B6AB94176FA74CBE7AE1
Gifted Resources 