K-12 Virtual Worlds
Teaching and Learning in K-12 Virtual Worlds
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Recent Posts

  • Bringing The Classroom Into The 21st Century
  • Educational Virtual Worlds
  • Gifted Education: The Importance of Creativity
  • Digital Storytelling: Sharing, Assessing, Creating
  • The Educational Process – Continued

The Four Principles Of The WiloStar3D Creativity Theory

Virtual Worlds Teacher Creative Learning

As discussed last week, ICAN! is based upon the idea of creating successful collaborative teams and individual virtual world projects that are meaningful to someone inside AND outside the 3D classroom.

The First Principle: The Ignite Component

This component emphasizes imaginative brainstorming and visualizing what can be. Students light and ignite the fires of creative ideas and thoughts to get projects off the ground. The modern workplace demands proficiency in these skills, yet historically students have been taught to simply extract knowledge from texts and answer questions. The creative aspect has disappeared from the process, especially in distance learning settings.

Creative thinking involves creating something new or original. It involves the skills of flexibility, originality, elaboration, brainstorming, modification, and imagery. The aim of creative thinking is to stimulate curiosity and promote new thinking. The use of strong imagery, keywords and topic interlinking supports visual, linguistic, logical and auditory learning.

The Second Principle: The Create Component

This component makes learning a creative, purposeful activity. Students have to define the project (problem domain) and focus their efforts on application of ideas to a specific context. Conducting their own 3D projects and virtual worlds is much more interesting to students than reading through sterile textbooks.

And because they get to define the nature of the virtual world project (even if they don’t choose the topic), they have a sense of control over their learning which is absent in traditional classroom instruction.

The Third Principle: The “Audience” Component

This component stresses the value of making a useful contribution while learning and “knowing” that there will be an audience seeing your work. Ideally each virtual world project has an outside “viewer” that the virtual world is being conducted for. The viewer/participant could be a classmate, whole school viewing, teacher assessment, or peers.

In many cases, the projects are directly related to core concepts being taught in the regular classroom curricula. The authentic learning context of the project increases student motivation and satisfaction. This principle is consistent with the emphasis on having an audience for your work and creates both motivation and self-awareness that the product being created will be ‘seen’ and in many cases played by other end users.

The Fourth Principle: The “New” Component

The fourth and final principle stresses addressing high order thinking and coming up with new and novel uses for concepts learned. This creative approach to learning prompts students’ pursuit of connections among ideas and concepts. Students who frame questions and issues and then go about answering and analyzing them take responsibility for their own learning and become problem solvers and, perhaps more importantly, problem finders.

What Is Creative Learning?

Virtual Worlds Teacher Creative Learning

Last week we started talking about the Wilostar3D Creativity Theory and approach to learning. Today I would like to answer the common question, “What is creative learning?”

I believe that education needs to back away from teaching to standardized testing and re-emerge as the world leader in teaching our students to create, to imagine and to invent. Our nation was founded on these traits and our nation’s schools and teachers need to once again build teaching opportunities into the curriculum that foster creativity and imaginative thinking.

Addressing higher order thinking skills can be a daunting task but one thing teachers have to understand is that they can relinquish control and give some of it back to students to see remarkable results. Let students visualize how they want their virtual world to be and they can translate that into tangible, real world results. Let students unleash their imaginations and create new characters to overcome challenges in rich immersive stories and they can understand how to overcome real world obstacles.

At the basis of the WiloStar3D Creativity Theory is the following definition of creativity: to bring something into being or form out of nothing. A creative idea may be considered as a “novel combination of old ideas.” Creativity is part of how fundamentally new ideas emerge.

By creative learning, I mean that all student activities involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. In addition, students are intrinsically motivated to learn due to the meaningful nature of the immersive learning environment and activities.

ICAN! is based upon the idea of creating successful collaborative teams and individual virtual world projects that are meaningful to someone inside AND outside the 3D classroom.

Next week we will discuss the individual components of the WiloStar3D Creativity Theory.

WiloStar3D ICAN! Creativity Theory: A Framework for 3D Immersive Learning and Teaching

Virtual Worlds Teacher 3D Immersive Learning

The WiloStar3D Creativity theory known as ICAN!, has emerged from the author’s decade of experience teaching students in grades 4-12 in 3D educational virtual world environments.

The fundamental idea underlying the WiloStar3D Creativity Theory is that students must be meaningfully engaged in 3D learning activities through interaction with others and actively involved in the creative process for meaningful learning to take place.

While in principle, the ICAN theory could occur without the use of virtual reality technology, I believe that 3D virtual reality technology facilitates creativity in ways which are difficult to achieve otherwise.

Stimulated by what I have witnessed over the last decade teaching students in a 3D immersive setting and encouraged by the writings of Dewey, Bruner, Piaget, and Papert, I have developed strategies that require students to take a more active role in the learning process with a primary focus on the creative process itself.

The WiloStar3D Creativity Theory is a conceptual framework that drives the pedagogical fostering of constructivist learning in K-12 Virtual Worlds.

WiloStar3D stands for illuminating thought and helping students understand that within each and everyone of them, they have an inner light of knowledge that can shine out. It does not need to be contained within the walls of a classroom or subdued by teaching to standardized testing.

WiloStar3D shines in the universe as a beacon of hope and learning to show students they have their own creative potentials that can be shared and expressed. Uniqueness is valued and treasured. Creativity is gold. Imagination is fostered and cherished.

Digital Storytelling: How Does It Work?

Digital Storytelling: How Does It Work?

Virtual Worlds Teacher Digital Storytelling

Last week, we discussed the importance of focusing on creativity and on storytelling rather than on the mechanics of writing. We also pointed out to the fact that schools and online courses are unfortunately placing an emphasis on mechanics.

The good news: the development of students’ imagination and creativity is back! WiloStar3D has developed a groundbreaking avatar visualization and creation tool to help students inhabit the virtual minds and bodies of their characters.

It’s one thing to have a student sit in a classroom and use paper and pencil to draft ideas about character development, story conflict and what the character will do to bring the story alive. It’s another thing to actually be able to jump inside the story and have the character they have created come alive, walk around, talk and tell their story!

That’s what Avatar Storytellers online homeschooling writing class allows students to do: give an added level of immersion, creativity and imagination to their thinking process. Avatar Storytellers also allows students to learn how to create and develop ideas by manipulating the story as it evolves in the 3D virtual world setting. Students can walk or fly up to their 3D storyboard and move ideas around, expand or reshape the story conflict and watch their drafts evolve.

Students interact with NPC (non player characters) to write their own quests, mysteries and digital stories. Students customize and develop expressive 3D avatars to populate their stories. The avatars are a springboard for new ideas and directions in the story and help shape the writing process itself.

Writing is not just about proper grammar and mechanics. Writing is about creating captivating stories that pull the reader into the plot. Avatar Storytellers online writing classes for homeschoolers encourage students to reach their full creative potential as writers and storytellers.

Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling

Virtual Worlds Teacher Digital Storytelling Digital Storytelling

Writing is about so much more than proper grammar and mechanics. It’s about imagination and creativity. It’s about developing interesting characters that the reader cares about. It’s about evoking a feeling in the reader.

If the story creator does not have an emotional stake in the story, if they are not enthusiastic about it, the story will fall flat. But to date, writing classes, both in traditional schools and online, have used traditional methods that place an emphasis on the writing process and mechanics.

Little thought or devotion goes into teaching students the importance of character development and how to use creative thinking to evolve story lines.

Worksheets, grammar lessons and teacher corrections on the mechanics of writing do not get to the core of what good writers need to know, which is how to imagine, create and develop ideas that drive stories.

Avatar Storytellers online writing classes for homeschoolers and middle school classrooms unleashes this kind of potential in students. Based on WiloStar3D’s research-based approach to how students learn in virtual worlds, Avatar Storytellers leverages 3D virtual worlds and avatars to take online writing classes for homeschoolers and classroom teachers to a whole new level.

Please stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will discuss the details of how Avatar Storytellers lights up students’ imagination and encourages them to become creative writers and imaginative storytellers.

K-12 virtual worlds for teaching and learning

K-12 virtual worlds for teaching and learning

Virtual Worlds Teacher K-12 Virtual Worlds

Welcome to this informative and exciting blog about adventures in K-12 virtual worlds for teaching and learning.

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Recent Posts

  • Bringing The Classroom Into The 21st Century
  • Educational Virtual Worlds
  • Gifted Education: The Importance of Creativity
  • Digital Storytelling: Sharing, Assessing, Creating
  • The Educational Process – Continued

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K-12 Virtual Worlds