Students are taking the quarterly student survey, so I thought I would use this time to post to my blog.

Well, the first winter storm blew in on Wednesday afternoon, knocking out power to our school and about 35,000 other local customers of AEP.

Because of that, we were closed on Thursday, but school reopened on Friday. Unfortunately, every computer in the school had to be shut down and the servers reset and then we did rolling boot ups at various parts of the school. Computer service was restored late Friday, so today we are catching up on business.

The end result of the interruption last week,  is that things don't always go as planned. I had originally planned to do the student surveys on Thursday. Then, thought that I'd get the student surveys done on Friday when we reopened. Now we're doing them today, but we're getting "server is busy signals" on the Surveymonkey site, which is preventing some of the students from loading the survey.  Hopefully, as the students who logged on first finish their surveys, others will be able to log on and we'll get them all done today.

When the computers were shut down on Friday, I had the game design students meet in their teams and start to continue their game ideas, and what direction each team will pursue. So, although we couldn't do the survey or mini game, all was not lost. 

My goal is to have the mini game done by the Christmas break so in January, we will be able to begin the game creation process. 

That's the plan. The kids are ready and anxious to get started and so I am. 

Sunday, we had to turn in interim grades, and I spent Monday in class reviewing with the students where in the process they were and what they were to have posted to be able to demonstrate to me their progress.

The following were some of the evaluation criteria:

•Was their learning log up to date?

•Was their basic animation completed, tested uploaded to their files page and subsequently placed in their projects page in the Other projects section?

•Were two game evaluations (one for a professionally designed game and one for a student designed game ) posted on the projects page under the Playing to learn section?

•Was their blog updated:

I explained again, how we, as instructors, are to say no to tests and how their work becomes transparent by making it public. I used the example from Bill about the 60 Minutes interview with James Cameron regarding his new movie, Avatar and the collaborative nature of the work in moviemaking.

I hope it continues to sink in—that there really is a rhyme and reason to the public posting of the work and the social nature of collaborating.

Students spent Monday and yesterday pretty much re-examining their work and postings up to this point and hopefully that will continue to be an ongoing thing. Once their buttons are completed and tested, they too are to be uploaded to their projects page.

Time will tell, it usually does.

I missed three days of work last week, but managed to come back Thursday and Friday. We're in the first real cold spell of the fall, and we had our first snow on Saturday. It's been cold all weekend. Winter may finally be on the horizon. 

Wen I came back on Thursda,y we set up our game teams, a total of four teams of 5 students each. We used a random method of team selection so that no group of students could stack their team, or exclude any student from their team. It seemed to work out pretty, each team has from my observation, talent and a range of students. I'm pretty happy about the make up of our teams. They are now meeting to decide on their names and their avatars, and we'll be setting up their wikis. 

Friday, I demonstrated how to program and design working buttons. The students are now working on their own buttons and are to post them on their wikis when they have completed them.