Are you and/or your students playing Evoke? Join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers - Wednesday, March 17
Recently, I’ve been thrilled to begin playing Evoke, and my 10th and 12th grade students have begun as well. I’m an English teacher at the East-West School of International Studies, Flushing Queens. I’m also a consultant for the New York City Writing Project (NYCWP) a local site of the National Writing Project, and I work with several other teachers in NYC using social media and a school-based social network (http://youthvoices.net).
In January, I was at an education conference with Suzie Boss shortly after she had interviewed Jane McGonigal for WorldChanging. It was her excited comments that led us to begin to follow her work and end up at Evoke.
This month seven of us in the NYCWP are introducing Evoke in our English, Art, and Technology classrooms. We are working together to become mentors for our students as they also play Evoke. We’re all very excited about it, so much so that this last Saturday morning we traveled though a cold, rainy wind storm in NYC to meet for three hours, just to play Evoke together, and talk about which parts our students would need more support on and which they could do on their own. It was a lot of fun on Saturday to share some of the stories of a couple of our students who have managed to push themselves onto the Leaders board already.
Our students and we have already learned a lot with Evoke. We love the project prompts and the overall structure of Evoke! Our ultimate goal this semester is to look at other games, and to have students build prototypes of games, as well as mess around with some game building. (Oh, and we’ll be planting gardens and volunteering for City Harvest too!)
One of the colleagues who I’m doing this work with, Susan Ettenheim and I also have been doing a weekly live webcast that is published as a podcast: http://edtechtalk.com/TeachersTeachingTeachers and http://teachersteachingteachers.org and iTunes. Over the past 5 years of doing this show every Wednesday night, we have built an committed, highly interested following of friends and colleagues. Our show is about keeping it real with teachers who take our conversations and interviews into their classrooms.
We would love to invite any teachers who are playing Evoke themselves and/or using it with their students to join us via Skype. We do these conversations on Skype. Please let us know if you want to join us on Wednesday, March 17 at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times.
Reply to this message and let us know your Skype name also add mine, PaulRAllisonNYC and SusanEttenheim to your Skype list. THANKS!
