I’ve just begun using a terrific new online game with my ELD students. We are collectively participating in the adventures of a cute little robot in Machinarium City.  I’ve written about the game and a motivational theory behind it here.

I asked my students to write a blog post about something they learned during our unit on ancient Egypt.  Several are worthy of public display and comment.  Please take a look at these excellent examples of sixth grade student writing.  I am incredibly proud of the work below

The Afterlife
Cleopatra: Killing for Success
Do You Know the Book of the Dead?
Deep in the Tombs of Egypt
Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep, and Nefertiti
Pharaoh’s Death and Afterlife
Geb, The Egyptian God of Earth
Ra! Mighty and Powerful God
They Called Him the Boy King
The Greatest Pharaoh, Ramses II
The Giant Nile River
The Great Egyptian Embalming Process
The Great Osiris

Another month has passed and my students are blogging more and more each week.  I’d like to highlight two postings from October that I feel are worthy of your review.  Please read a wonderful telling of the story of Matthew Henson, an Arctic explorer that made it all the way to the North Pole despite several personal challenges in life. This post was written by one of my best authors, Cyrus.

Hermes created this most excellent Animoto video on Matthew Henson. I think it does a wonderful job summing up the life of an amazing adventurer in 45 seconds.

OK students, time to learn to comment. Take a look at this and give me a two sentence or more comment about it. Alternately, you can comment on another student’s comment.

Welcome to our home on the Internet. We are a middle school (11-14 year olds) in a small, rural town in California and we are looking for contacts. If you would like to comment on a blog posted by my students (see links on the left) please do. We welcome and greatly appreciate your efforts to contact us. I’m trying to teach my students that they are part of a much larger world and you can help me do that by adding a comment wherever you feel like it. Thanks for taking the time to visit us.

It’s time to highlight what I think are two exceptional postings by my students last month. Ptolemy created an outstanding blog about Hammurabi for a history assignment and he did such a fabulous job that I wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to read.  Please feel free to comment, I know he will appreciate hearing from others.  Ptolemy’s Post.

Another student deserving credit wrote and created her first solo VoiceThread. Take a look at it below. Great work Cleopatra!

Thirty-one students broke down eight pages in the science text and made this Google doc in under 30 minutes. How lucky am I?

I’ve created several tutorials on how to use different Edublog features. Students can login to our Moodle and get the links to watch my video segments.  So far, I’ve posted tutorials on how to upload an avatar, how to add a new post, how to add links and images to a post, and how to edit a profile.

I’ve used a great online tool to record my tutorials. If you are not familiar with Jing, take a look and I bet you will be impressed.

I think we are ready to start blogging this week. Students will get their first assignment on Monday and will have until Sunday to finish it. I am very proud of my two classes of student bloggers.

They have absorbed a lot of information since the beginning of school. They can login to two different Moodle classrooms, post to forums and add links, create their own VoiceThreads, add and download files on drop.io, and now blog as well. It’s a great start to what will be a great year.

To visit our moderated student blogs, see the links on the left column.

Robyn and Rand Miller are the brothers that teamed up to develop one of the most successful game series of all time. Myst, and its spin-offs have earned the developers accolades for bringing rich textures, non-violent, story driven experiences to gamers for the past decade.

Playing Myst for the first time you are immediately drawn into the mystery of what happened to the explorer Artus, played by Rand in video interludes.  You are challenged to solve several interactive puzzles given clues found around the island.  Observational skills and logical thinking are rewarded. Your actions during play will determine how the game eventually ends for there is no time limit.

Today Robyn has moved on from the game business to pursue his other interests in music and design. Rand is still involved in the game industry, working at the company he and his brother co-founded. He went on to create a spinoff of Myst known as Uru Live. The online MMOG suffered from financial problems which led to its current state of paralysis.  A rebranded version was to be released last year, but further financial setbacks have all but scuttled the plans. Miller and his team at Cyan recently announced that Myst Online’s source code would be released in hopes that devoted fans will allow the story to continue.  Myst does however live on thanks to a new iPhone app released this summer.

Although not initially marketed as an educational game when it was first released, it was universally hailed by teachers, parents, and players for its focus on storytelling and problem solving.  No one dies in Myst and there are no bloodthirsty aliens lurking in the shadows waiting to take your soul. You are immersed into a beautiful world unlike any you have seen before and you must figure out what is going on. I’ve always thought this would make a great language arts and science lesson but have never before had the opportunity to try it.

Last year I discovered one such teacher that has taken one of the Myst games known as Myst 3 Exile to use in his classroom to teach creative witting. Tim Rylands has become famous for teaching with Myst, even earning a visit from Rand Miller to his classroom. This year I have an opportunity to spend some time with one of my classes of 6th graders playing Myst.  I will be attempting to teach narrative writing to 31 ELD students next semester. There will be much scaffolding, vocabulary building, and language and content objectives yet to be written, but being a fan of Myst, I am up for the challenge.

I look forward to hearing from anyone with ideas on the subject.