Archive | March, 2010

Tech Tools: Student Blogging

Posted on March 7, 2010 by in Content and Methods, Technology

Student blogging
Image by Ing­wii via Flickr

Let me just say up front that I know I’m &submit=Search" target="_blank">hardly the first per­son to address this topic, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, so much has already been writ­ten on the sub­ject of stu­dent blog­ging that I’m not going to spend time here talk­ing about the basic rea­sons or the how-​​tos of doing it. Oth­ers have done that bet­ter than I.

What I want to explore today are a few of my thoughts about why blog­ging is a par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful tool to give to gifted stu­dents. Gifted stu­dents have some unique needs that blog­ging can help teach­ers to address. Read More…

Tech Tools: Interactive Fiction

Posted on March 4, 2010 by in Content and Methods, Design, Technology

Screenshot of Zork in 1980
Image by the-​​tml via Flickr

Though it has taken me much longer than I planned to get back to this topic, I want to share with you today what I believe is an out­stand­ing and prob­a­bly very obscure tool that would be excel­lent for gifted students.

Think back a few years. No, fur­ther back. A lit­tle fur­ther. When home com­put­ers had mem­ory mea­sured in kilo­bytes, an 8-​​color mon­i­tor was high res­o­lu­tion, and disks were floppy.

The cutting-​​edge trend in com­puter enter­tain­ment was some­thing called a “text adven­ture game.” Zork is the clas­sic exam­ple of games in this genre, but there were dozens of them. They had no graph­ics and no need for a con­troller, because the entire means of inter­act­ing with the game was through text.

For those who have never played a text adven­ture, here is a typ­i­cal sequence of moves you might see in one of these games (this is part of the sam­ple tran­script that was in the instruc­tion man­ual for the orig­i­nal Zork): Read More…