For example in World of Warcraft, if you gather the necessary materials to sew together a nice Spellweave Robe, you’ll probably gain +1 onto your tailoring profession and then +96 Stamina, +89 Intellect and +52 Spirit if you decide to wear your new fancy robe. This is a system and vocabulary that is common to anyone who has ever played a role playing game.

Of course, I would love to give +10 motivation to my teenaged kids every once in awhile or could use +50 patience in my classroom at times. Somehow, even though gamers know + 1’s are virtual, the feeling of accomplishment and motivation to gain more +1’s  is real. I wonder how +1’s could be used in a classroom environment to stimulate the same type of motivation and sense of accomplishment and confidence students gain while gaming. How about +1 Problem Solving or +1 Including New Friends or +1  Laughing?

Plus One Me lets you send a +1 along with an explanation with a simple email to a deserving friend or student. So far, Plus One attributes fall into three general categories, mental, social and physical and include +1 humor, +1 backbone and +1 inspiring among many others.

By the way, I learned about this great site from Jane McGonigal’s new book “Reality is Broken.”

Terry Freedman is a tech integration guru who lives in England and today he released this free, 121 page book called The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book and it is in fact truly amazing. It’s loaded with practical ideas about the kinds of things you can do with Web 2.0 technology in your classroom. All the projects and their descriptions were provided by teachers themselves, are organized by subject and includes projects applicable to all age ranges.

 I really liked reading the comments and student reactions that are included with each project. “The blog is like work but more fun!”

On page 12 of the booklet there’s an interesting graph where teachers selected the benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies with their classes as well as a list of challenges which is worth a look. The list of links is itself an excellent resource. The book is free to share.

Here’s a link to Terry Freedman’s website.
Here’s a direct link to The Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book.

Here’s an innovative way to enhance your curriculum with standards based songs about elementary and high school topics http://iamlodge.com/beans/. The person who runs the site is Dr. Lodge McCammon who is a specialist in Curriculum and Contemporary Media at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. This site includes worksheets, activities and the songs themselves that can be played directly from your browser.

Topics and songs include Atoms and Elements, Order of Operations and Songs about the Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

According to the Teens, Video Games and Civics report by the The Pew Internet & American Life Project:

• 59% of gamers play games with other gamers in person (up from 51% in 2006)
• 24% of teens only play games alone, and the remaining three-quarters play games with others at least some of the time
• 47% of teens play online games with people they know in their offline lives; 27% of teens play online games with people they first met online; 23% of teens play with both
• 65% of game playing teens play with other people who are in the room with them; 27% play games with people who they connect with through the Internet; 82% play games alone

Related to this, PBS has just released another series of programs as a sequel to their very popular Growing Up Online series from 2008 called Digital Nation – Life on the Virtual Frontier. This series, released in February, 2010, explores what it means to be human in a 21st century digital world and considers topics such as learning, the future of education, literacy and the impact of video games.

This is one short interview from the Digital Nation series where IBM Vice President of Innovation Francoise LeGoues suggests that Warcraft gamers are definitely developing business skills that companies like hers want.

Kathy Schrock is recognized internationally as a tech integration guru and has been for a long time. Kathy continues to maintain the “Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators on Discovery Education” with lists of excellent online resources that support teachers in their classrooms. This list includes an extensive list of assessment ideas for everything web 2.0 including subject specific rubrics, web page rubrics, multimedia rubrics, rubric builders and of course web 2.0 rubrics.

Here’s how Kathy describes this list: Now that we are using the Internet in the classroom to support instruction, it is important the area of assessment be addressed. One usable method for teachers is to provide a rubric for student use and for both formative and summative assessment purposes. Another is to provide some type of graphic organizer. Below you will find a collection of assessment rubrics and graphic organizers that may be helpful to you as you design your own.

NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News, has teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to produce Science of the Olympic Winter Games, a 16-part video series that explores the science behind individual Olympic events, including Downhill and Aerial Skiing, Speed Skating and Figure Skating, Curling and Hockey, and Ski Jumping, Bobsledding and Snowboarding.

This project between the NSF and NBC Learn uses the global spotlight of the Olympics to make science more accessible and more interesting to students by showing how science helps athletes fulfill the Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius—Swifter, Higher, Stronger.

Visit the “Science of the Olympic Winter Games” website

TED.com, makes the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 500 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week.

The TED 2010 conference in Palm Springs and Long Beach California starts today. Here’s a link to the TED page that includes one of my favorite presentations by Sir Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. The side menu on this page includes other related presentations on “How We Learn.”

The speakers list for this round of TED talks includes Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the founders of KIPP a highly successful school program dedicated to supporting underserved communities, Bill Gates, Benoit Mandelbrot and Ken Robinson among many other world leading thinkers. I can’t wait to watch their presentations.