WoW Week 1

Today we take the much anticipated plunge into World of Warcraft. This will be our first journey into Azeroth, as part of the Alliance. Today is about getting our bearings.

You have several tasks to complete during this first adventure. Firstly, you must all begin to explore your environment. Be careful about wandering off the beaten path of trails and roads, You will encounter many dangers lying in wait if you do. You will need to complete your first few quests which will aid you in gaining experience points and levelling up, as well has help you to build up your inventory.

Your homework job for this week will be to read the first chapter of your chosen graphic novel.
When you do so, you must think about ways in which the story you are reading is similar to different elements of World of Warcraft. You will then need to write a short journal entry in this blog, of 1-2 paragraphs which discuss these similarities.

Watch out for grammar and punctuation difficulties!

It might help you to think about Lore, characters, settings, quests, language  both in the book and in the game. I look forward to reading your first journal entry. We will begin next week's quest in-world. Check back next week for a glimpse of what is in store.

Welcome Team ABC!

We are very excited to welcome you to our project this school year. During the next 4 weeks we will be working on building up experience and working in teams in World of Warcraft, while completing quests and travelling around Azeroth.

Many of you are new to the game, but don't worry, we have a few student experts among you that will help you to navigate this amazing online world and give you tips on how to be as successful as possible.

Each week you will be given a short assignment. This may be a reading or a piece of writing in the blog. There will be other assignments during class time too, along with the game play.

In order to get started you will need to first join the blog. The next step is to dive into WoW, along with the rest of us and begin your journey as an ABC Explorer and Hero!

Jumping Back In

The new school year is here and with it a new take on our gaming club. We are about to jump back in, after taking a year off, with our World of Warcraft  extra curricular club, which will run throughout  most of the school year.

Some things have changed however. This year the work won't revolve exclusively around a novel. That doesn't mean books won't be involved. It just means that we will open the club up a bit more to a greater range of language based activities.

Students who decide to participate in the club will have a chance not only to play World of Warcraft, but to engage in several other online gaming experiences including Minecraft. The lessons will involve game play time and a range of language based activities. Students will share their work and reflections on our ABC WoW Blog.

It should be an exciting year full of online gaming and language learning at the ABC. We look forward to sharing more with you as the school year progresses.

Betrayal

Cudgeon betrayed Foaley because he hated him, in Cudgeon's point of view Foaley is the bad guy because he thinks that Foaley is responsable of the burning in his face

I have NEVER BEEN BETRAYED because im way to awesome to be betrayed in WoW.

Captain Short revived because of Butler and Artemis working together to open the little capsule and putting it right next to her dead body :3

homework

A Normal Day For My WoW Character:

Go into a 24 hour dungeon with a 1 level sword and no armor, no magic, kill 10 thousand fire demons, get all their Exp. buy a griffon fly to the ORCS island, and kill them on a school night!

Then get shot in the head and DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Respawn and wait 1 hour to respawn AGAIN!

My Story:
I was born in teh misteeree-us LAND OF Garosh and died as a baby, I respawned in 100 years later! and died again because of a heart attack! then I was reborned and I was born an adult in somewhere and I had to kill orcz and stuff because I am a soldier, I like killing orcs and traveling to do quests. I dislike the Horde and stuff like that.

HW

Meek: it means to talk really low that people can't even hear you and in my opinion Artemis Fowl is like a genius but doesn't care of anyone else just himself and Butler it has a lot in common in mythical creature like fairies, centaurs and goblins and all the fairies have special abilities such as healing and become invisible

Comment on a Video

It is always very exciting to receive feedback on published work. It generates a feeling of pride, boosts confidence and helps you to realise that you can make a contribution regardless of your age.

Today I received a notification that one of the student videos received a comment. 

Our novice WoWers were able to help someone with the game in their very first video tutorial. 

"gaqol29 has made a comment on Darnassus- transportation for Night Elves.mov: thanks alot this really helped me to get out of the elf world" 

Please do take a moment to comment on our WoW blog when you get a chance. The students are submitting their first homework assignments based on the readings and the game this week.

World of Warcraft Game Guide

Hi Everyone,

Here is the link to the WoW Game Guide Page, which contains all the information you need to better understand the game. There is also a beginners guide that you can access from this same page.
We have just received an large order of WoW books including graphic novels and a WoW atlas. We hope to have these on the shelves in the LRC shortly.

Week 1 The Psychological Assessment , Prologues, Family Ties and Chix

Your jobs for this week are the following:

Read: the Psychological Assessment on Artemis Fowl, Prologue and chapters one and two
Discuss and identify unfamiliar words in the prologue.


WoW:
Partner up with another member of our group. Go off together on an adventure possibly involving a quest. Share your experiences so far in WoW and teach each some of what you have learned.


Blog: Each student is to write a short blog post which includes an explanation of one unfamiliar word from the reading, an opinion about the main character Artemis Fowl and on element that the book and WoW have in common (quest, lore, mythical creatures, special powers such as healing). Please make sure to add labels to you blog post and separate each label using a comma.

Recording in WoW

Hi Everyone,

We will be making our first attempts at recording in the lesson today. Here is a link to the instructions.
The objective is for you to think back to all the amazing things you have learned so far about WoW, places you have gone, discoveries you have made and record a short video under 3 minutes long, which talks us through the experience. This video is a screencast really, which you are all familiar with so you should find it easy enough to do. Logitech headsets are indispensable today.

You will be able to find your finished (compressed) movie in your Applications>World of WArcraft>Movies folder, please place use handbrake to convert them and place a copy in the World of Warcraft folder in Student Shared Docs using smb://dc.

Our First Meetup

We held our first meeting of the WoW club this afternoon. What can I say? Kids pick these things up so quickly. Before I knew it they were 3 levels above me, riding phoenixes, questing and learning to get around. We decided to keep everyone in the Alliance, which means a few of us, myself included had to create a new character, as our first characters belonged to the Horde.  We are very lucky in that our systems manager Mr. Montes is a bit of a  WoW expert, having played extensively over the years. The kids were thrilled to have him introduce the game to them and take their many questions. By the time we got out to the computers the energy was really crackling. The bell rang at 3:00 and no one moved to go home, myself included. Most of us continued playing until just before 4:00.

We didn't begin the readings or the reflections this week. The readings will begin after the Christmas holidays, the reflections start next week in this blog. So what did we learn?

The students began learning about WoW lore. They learned how to move and communicate in-world. They learned to accept and complete quests and began working together in order to meet their objectives.

Next week we will blog about our experiences so far, take part in some more quests and then prepare to reconvene in January.  I don't for a minute think the kids will leave it at that. I can imagine that most of them will continue playing over the next couple of weeks. I can only hope to try to keep up with them when we return.  I know they will have a lot to show me in the new year.

I am including a copy of the letter with live links here for any of our parents who need one, in order to explore further. I will be posting a video in the blog later on, which explains how to set up parental controls for those who plan on downloading the trial version at home.

Teaching ReadingThrough Gaming and Teamwork .

The inspiration for this project came from WoW in School

Resources:

• Graphic Novel Study:The Arctic Incident. Adapted by Eoin Colfer Andrew Donkin (Artemis Fowl Graphic Novel) (10 copies)
• WoW Trial version
• parent permission slips and student accounts
• ABC WoW Blog for responding

Maximum Number of Students: 9

Purpose

The purpose of this unit is to engage students in reading and response activities, which encourage them to draw parallels between online gaming activities, involving teamwork in a virtual world. Through quests, students will interact with other players, reflect on their experiences in written form as well as through discussion and draw parallels between their quests and the readings.
Each of the lessons will include a blog post which will reflect on readings and the gaming experiences students have had.

Overview

• The project will take place over a 20 week period as an extra curricular activity for middle school students (to include reluctant readers and/or writers), utilising a, gaming and learning environment combined with reading and response.
• The project will include the use of the online video game and virtual world, World of Warcraft, as well as the graphic novel The Arctic Incident. Adapted by Eoin Colfer Andrew Donkin (Artemis Fowl Graphic Novel) and a blogger.com blog set up for this purpose.
• The following themes will be addressed as key components of the project: reading and responding, teamwork through gaming and social interaction.  The ISTE Nets addressed through the project are 1,2,4 and 5.

Procedure

Over a 20 week period, students will engage in weekly quests, discussion and reflection in the Learning Resources Centre, during extra curricular time. Parallels will be drawn, in reflective blog posts, between student experiences in-world and the experiences of the characters in the novel. Readings and/or blog responses will be assigned as homework each week.