After our Second Life experience, a few of us decided that we might venture into Quest Atlantis to check out a virtual world that is curriculum based and suited for primary and high school students. So three of us duly signed up for the professional learning sessions and we have now completed three of the four sessions. Here I am in Teacherville, completing a misson in order to become a qualified QA teacher.
Quest Atlantis has many complex layers. Firstly there is the gaming through quests which cumulatively lead you to a final solution. Then there is the curriculum layer. The quests involve ‘just in time’ literacy and numeracy learning in key learning areas such as science, maths and English. Students must do a lot of reading and writing to complete their missions and ‘level up’. Another layer is the social commitments which involve values and giving back to the Quest Atlantis community. This really interests me as it builds on the values work we have been doing over the past few years and particularly how ‘giving’ builds resilience.
I can see Quest Atlantis could be used to support transition by setting up some co-quests for students in years 5 and 7 or years 6 and 8. So when the primary students come to high school, they will have year 9 peer support mentors. I also like the potential for Quest Atlantis to deal with issues of cyber bullying. This is such a big issue in schools and takes up a lot of teacher student management time.
Quest Atlantis can be used as a program for our gifted and talented students as well as our least engaged students. So we are going to propose an initial trial targeting some of these students. We know there will be issues such as how to fit this into our already very crowded curriculum, parental permissions and also technology issues. Nevertheless we think this is worth investigating.
It's all about learning 