 This session we are happy to introduce a wonderful session called Bringing Literature to Life in Open Simulator. Our speakers today are Mary Howard and Andrew Wheelock. Mary Howard is a sixth grade teacher at Grand Island's Veronica Connor Middle School. She is a recent finalist for the New York State Teacher of the Year in 2017. She has also won the New York SCATE Educator of the Year award. Her blog, Your Smart Articles, showcases her amazing ideas and collaborative spirit. Andrew Wheelock is a 20-year educator with a degree in elementary education. He is now a technology integrator who works with schools around the western New York area and is the project director of the Islands of Enlightenment. This is a self-hosted open sim virtual world that offers schools the opportunity to create and explore history, architecture, and language arts through virtual simulations. Welcome all. Let's begin the session and Andrew will begin with you. Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining us. It's always an honor to be at this conference because you see so many just great like-minded educators who are doing similar things. So I'm going to just introduce myself and then I'm going to introduce Mary who's really kind of the the mover and shaker of this whole project that we're going to talk about today and really let her dig deep into it. Just so you know, we started the what we call the Islands of Enlightenment project for grades 6 through 12 in western New York. And so we hosted ourselves and we have the various schools around western New York available to do the projects that we've created. So over the past three years, I've talked about many of these projects so I won't go too far into them but we did the understanding the Holocaust project which was kind of a recreation of the streets of Amsterdam where of course the secret annex in Anne Frank's diary was done. And then I brought Mary on board really for the Air of the King project and she was a really big help with sixth grade medieval history curriculum and we created kind of a quest-based learning adventure where kids travel through a medieval village and kind of quest up and participate in a kind of medieval King Arthur type adventure. So that was our second year and then the third year again I worked with Mary and we did kind of an architecture by design workshop where we toured the Frank Lloyd Wright Starwood Martin House and then had kids create their own builds. And in the meantime, Mary has really taken off with it and really started developing her own projects and lessons with her sixth grade students which has been really the ultimate goal for me was to try and get teachers to really take off and embrace the technology themselves and go with it. And so with that I'm going to turn it over to Mary and I'll have her kind of talk about some of the ways she took what I started and and just grew and it's amazing stuff. So Mary, take it away. Thank you. Sure thing. As Spiff mentioned, I'm a sixth grade teacher and have had just the due to Spiff's brilliance. Now he's so humble giving me credit but truly it was Spiff's vision and brilliance that allowed all of these projects to take place and he came to me saying, you know, what can we do here? And I've got this thing that you might be interested in. It's it's called open sim and I was like, huh? And had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into but certainly have no regrets at this point because as Spiff described, we've been on some pretty amazing adventures together with the students and I teach sixth grade social studies as well as English language arts. And the majority of our projects as we got started, we felt like themselves really well to social studies. So we were able to do middle ages projects in this quest based Air of the King project. It was pretty amazing and along the way my students became builders and I learned a little bit about building but I also learned a lot about how and how you can implement open sim with 11 year old children and how to overcome the different hurdles. And so as the years progressed, we decided Spiff and I decided to be really wonderful if we could integrate some literature into what we were doing with open sims. So I called him up one day and I said, I need a mansion and within a couple of days he had given me a mansion and so hopefully up on the screen here in a moment we'll take a look at this this mansion. I mean wouldn't that be awesome if we could just ask anybody, hey I need a mansion and sure enough they turn around and give you a mansion. But luckily Spiff has that power. So my students and I were reading a novel and the title of that novel was The Westing Game as hopefully you can see up here on the slide and I asked for this mansion because the mansion is sort of the key component in the story that we were reading by Ellen Raskin called The Westing Game. And I wanted the students to be able to use the open sim in like I said a literature fashion in some way. So what I came up with was kind of a scavenger hunt. Everybody knows students love scavenger hunts and so I wanted to be able to use the open sim and a scavenger hunt and this mansion and the Westing Game and the chicken dance. So I actually reached out to Helena Caena if you know her on Second Life, reached out to a friend of mine and asked her to do a little scripting for me and these three components came together in something that I'm going to share with you, a pretty marvelous experience that the students had. So moving on to the next slide here I'm going to take you through pretty much what the students were able to do. So you can see here this is the mansion and before the students came into the open sim we did a little okay we did a lot of front loading. We had to set up this scavenger hunt and we had to decorate this mansion for Halloween because the setting in our story is October, actually October 31st is where the story begins. So we had to get our mansion looking a little bit Halloween-ish and you can see here it's looking sort of dark. Let's move on to the next side here so we can talk about really the experience that the students had. So what I asked the students to do and what I embedded throughout the floors of the mansion was they had to search for these Westing dollars and if you can see closely on the slide on the left hand side there's a Westing dollar and those dollars are hidden throughout the mansion. So it got this group of about 20 students into the mansion exploring and looking around for these dollars and when they clicked on the dollar it would reveal some sort of question and it was definitely a content-based question. They had to answer something about the novel to demonstrate their understanding of what they're reading. So to start off they had to indicate who the friendly doorman was that greets them in the front of Westing mansion. So they click on the dollar they receive a clue and they also received a chat channel so that they couldn't really see what each other was responding with. I wanted to keep everything on a hidden channel because you know the students would glom on to each other and just get responses and answers from each other so they had to remember for its last 76 and to enter their answers onto this this channel that was built into it. So then on the next slide once they've answered a question what happens after that is if they do it correctly if they answer it correctly and it was kind of a neat experience again as an ELA teacher. I spend a lot of time reminding students to a spell things correctly and b that names are proper nouns and they begin with capital letters and that is important. I really like the fact that they get nothing and they get nowhere unless they do it right. I really appreciate that fact about open sim so unless they're typing the person's name and spelling it correctly and capitalizing those letters they can't get any answers so in this case they type in that answer and up pops a teleport so they had it right they get a teleport so they're demonstrating the knowledge of the content and at the same time they're getting excited because oh I got it right and there's that instant and immediate feedback that they get they know they got it right because there's a pop up and so they teleport somewhere awesome and so that is the next step so moving on to the next slide it sort of shows where they headed next and for me this was the absolute most wonderful part of this because it's what I call a fidgetle it's this combination of using a virtual environment but actually taking something physical and incorporating that so what you can see here on the screen is when they teleported it teleported them to a hidden location and I kind of staggered these hidden locations all around the island where this mansion is and if you can see up on the screen that's what I call a red lens reveal so I was able to take yellow text red text pink text kind of blend it all together and cover up blue text underneath that image that you're seeing on the screen was just actually created on a google slide and when I inserted that image it allowed the students to take a piece of red cellophane I actually got them like kind of cool looking um lenses that made them look like um I don't know investigators and they would hold that lens right up to the computer screen over the image they were looking at and it would reveal the blue text behind the pink red and yellow text and that blue text that shows up is actually a riddle question and it is a pretty amazing kind of old-fashioned piece of technology physical technology integrated with digital technology to create kind of a fidgetle experience and they love it I have a whole bunch of really cute pictures of the students holding those little red lens up to the screen so that they can read their secret message that they have on the on the little posters that they teleported to so this particular one that you're looking at you can't see the entire thing but it just tells it shows the words it's the last few words of the riddle to the far orient and then on the right hand side of the slide over here was a companion sheet that they had that went along with their scavenger hunt so they had to record each line of the riddle and then they had to go step by step station through station to all those western dollars answering the question based on the novel teleporting to their secret reveal experience receiving the riddle question writing it down and then going back again so they kept going back and forth back and forth and it is just so exciting to see how crazy excited the kids get about doing this so much better than you know just a skill and drill review or let's review the characters in the novel and you know who's this person or who's that person it's a really amazing way to use open sim and keep the kids engaged now if you're curious yeah go ahead sorry to interrupt I just wanted to say I came in and watched the kids do this activity and it was just amazing like just to see the enthusiasm and engagement and excitement so I just want to throw that out there yeah and we actually had a news crew on the day that Andrew came out and we were featured on a local um educational tv show any chance you could go back to that last slide where we were just yeah and one more thing if you're curious how I did that and how I created those images um there is a google a shortened url on the left hand side that you can access go.gl forward flash and let's see if I can toss it in the chat here um if you can't quite see it it's a link to a google slide um using the same method so if you're just kind of curious and you want to try that out there's a free slide that you can that you can use okay you can switch and so after they have this experience and they've collected all of the riddle lines they've eliminated every single character in the novel and this particular novel has over 16 characters and it's really a lot of knowledge that they have to have you know based on this novel it is no easy novel to teach again to 10 and 11 year old and so there's quite a heavy bit of content and memorization that goes along with the characters and how those characters contribute to the plot so once they're done with this riddle they have um they have a they have to solve what the the big riddle is they've collected all these lines and they have to come up with this answer and so once they find the answer at least they think they know what the answer is which by the way is the word compass they have to teleport to the roof of the westing mansion and again here's where the scripting came in my good friend was able to script me a chicken dance and they type in the word compass to the secret you know little compartment on the secret channel and sure enough it animates their avatar and they do the chicken dance and you know they're thrilled and they're excited and I know yes the chicken dance but we're talking 10 year olds and that is a really exciting thing to you know animate their avatar um they at this point when we're when we're doing these they don't have a vast uh level of knowledge when it comes to open sim we you know we've dabbled a little bit we've learned a little bit about putting our clothes on we're learning a little bit about you know building and maybe scripting if we're lucky but animating the avatar really isn't something they've seen yet so when they realize that they could just you know get up there and chicken dance it really is a highly motivating thing so you know the the chicken dance is the the end of the scavenger hunt it demonstrates that you know they've been successful and meanwhile the results in terms of you know their studying experience and preparing for the test they really speak for themselves they all did and this has been my third year doing it but they all do incredible on the test you know yet they're engaged and they're learning and I think it's just a really good example of how powerful the open sim can be for student learning especially when it comes to literature spiff I don't know if you want to interject anything here um just I like I said from the beginning it was just nice to see a teacher take off with that I think you know there's a huge learning curve in this technology so finding teachers that are willing to be fearless to take that on as a challenge that's really challenge number one so I just loved the way Mary embraced it and took it on and we had our we had our bumps and bruises along the way but we you know we're we persevered and it was to me for the benefit of the kids that it all came together and I think they really look forward to all of the the work that they do so that's great well I see lots of wonderful comments very excited especially about the chicken dance um but and I don't see any questions yet but I have one for you Mary and that is I am so curious how do the kids handle it when they don't get the teleport or the prize because well they thought they could not have to spell correctly or use correct grammar or whatever it is that they have to do that so many of educators say how can I get them to use proper grammar and proper spelling and they're just not paying any attention it's well they handle it like uh like most of the time when they can't do their login it won't let me it won't let me you know and me I kind of get this smug little smile and shrug my shoulders and it's it's sort of that ultimate I told you so moment because I like to see I like to see them build resilience and I do this sounds kind of mean but you know failing uh is okay and and having a minute you know a minor failure like that is a powerful learning experience for them and it builds resilience and then they'll figure it out and it is definitely a lesson that will stick with them they realize you know I gotta do it that's not gonna work otherwise and that you know they tend to get a little desperate because they see the person next to them is getting ahead of them or is is being successful and they want to be like that person and you sense this um you know ramping up of desperation until they they realize what it is that they've done wrong okay great yes uh that way they won't point to you and say my teacher is so mean she makes me spell correctly yes definitely like when the computer is the bad guy and not me exactly exactly all right okay well that was a wonderful presentation thank you so much Mary and Andrew uh as a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org following this session the next session will begin at 11 o'clock a.m in the os cc expo zone two region this is the hypergrid safari and it is not to be missed if you want a fun guided way of learning to hypergrid it's organized by therza ember and again it starts in looks like just a few moments uh if you aren't familiar with jumping from one open simulator to another grid this is the way to learn how to do it it's absolutely wonderful and amazing and the places that you actually get to are are amazing as well also during this next two hour break we encourage you to visit the oscc 17 poster expo in the oscc expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the oscc expo regions we will be restarting the keynote regions today at 12 p.m noon pacific so please make sure to visit other regions at that time oscc 17 sessions will begin again in the keynote regions at 1 p.m for the open simulator e-commerce panel as a reminder you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference dot open simulator dot org thank you again to our speakers and to all of you in the audience and have fun hyper safari gridding