Week 7 Reflection

This week was a very busy week. My other class, Virtual Teaching and Learning (OLTAK) had trainings for the teachers enrolled in Givercraft. This made it difficult to make the twitter session. I tried to multi-task during the training and be logged into twitter, but to focus on the training was difficult when trying to process the topics that were occurring on twitter.  I told my teammates I was in a training and wouldn't be able to join them for Twitter.

During this week I finished adding books into the chests and made sure the houses were not broken and ready to go for Givercraft's first week. I noticed there was a house in the teleport station I made and none of my teammates had made it... so I'm not sure why it is there...?

I made a tutorial video for the teachers to watch. The video shows how to teleport to the station my team made. I gave a tour of the station and showed each house. I explained that it was built with disallow blocks so if students did happen to find this station, they wouldn't be able to break the house. I showed the teachers where to find the memories. While I was showing them the different houses, I noticed that the chests and books that I had created were different from when I left it. After reading my teams blogs it all came clear as to what happened. One of my teammates, had accidentally destroyed the chest while checking to make sure there were enough books for scenario 2. My teammate spent many hours fixing the problem and re-creating the books that were broken. I read this part on my partners blog and informed her, everything was ok. I went into the world to make sure everything was fine and built correctly. We are good to go for Scenario 2.

I also emailed Ali back to her question and explained how we should send the document she made directly to the teachers signed up in the course. We talked about if there were enough books... I explained in the tutorial video I had made, I showed the teachers how to make a memory book if they came to a chest that was empty.

My team and I plan on observing the chests to see if any of the books were used or are missing. We also plan on sending a survey to teachers, to ask if this tool was useful to them. We thought of observing the students wiki pages, but found it might be impossible to tell which memory the students made and which memory our team made. Ali has written some good questions to start thinking about on her blog for our evaluation survey.

I also saw this week that our other colleagues in the course are creating a link for teachers to go to if they need extra support during Givercraft and a place they can debrief afterwards. I think this is a great tool for teachers to have during the experience. Thomas has also created badges for students who are not the gamer type. One that is my favorite is the grammar badge. Which student has the best grammar on their wiki for that week. Genious! I'm excited for Givercraft to start again. Last semester was full of excitement new things to tweak and change for the nex time. I'm looking forward to seeing how the students build this time around.