I've had this sitting in draft for about 7 months. It goes all the back to the end of May when I had the good fortune to attend the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Conference held here in Winnipeg. The line up of speakers was excellent, but Rick Van Eck stood out as the highlight of the entire conference for me. (I blogged about Rick's Breakout session at the time.) He has a very down to earth, practical, honest approach to using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) games in education. Unfortunately the question period isn't included. Rick really shined during the Q&A afterward where his direct, honest, polite replies to pointed questions impressed everyone.

Anyway, I've mentioned this talk several times in passing since I saw it and now I can point people to hear the man himself. It's short; 22 min 21 sec. Worth every minute. You can click through Rick's slides below the video as he speaks.

(Download mp3, 25.4 MB)

Slides:

Microsoft Innovative Teacher Conference--Keynote

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This is the closing keynote presentation given by Les Foltos, Director of the Puget Sound Center for Teacher Learning and Technology, at the Microsoft Innovative Educators Conference held in Winnipeg on May 29, 2008. (The site appears to be down, or broken, now. I thought it was supposed to serve as a commons around which a growing network of teachers was going to built. I wonder what happened?)

This is the last podcast from the from the conference I recorded. It's a little noisy to listen to. We were all talking in small groups trying to crystallize what we had learned over the previous two days. The good news is we talked about many of the same things that we had discussed in the previous day's Ustream. The voices you hear talking in our little group are me, Clarence Fisher, Chris Harbeck, John Evans, Andy McKiel, Kathy Cassidy, and another lady whose name, unfortunately, I've forgotten. She was sitting in a neighbouring group and kept looking over at us, interested in what we were talking about. So, I invited her over and I'm glad she joined us. I think we all got a lot out of this conversation. Give it a listen and add your own two cents in the comments below.

(Download File 30.0Mb, 62 min. 30 sec.)

UPDATE

Great news! Chris found the Ustream recording!! Good on ya Chris. ;-)

Watcher beware: a surprising amount of time is devoted to discussing Dean Shareski's eating habits and his coffee mug — we had a lot of laughs. ;-)

Time: 36 min. 13 sec.

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This is the audio from Richard Van Eck's breakout session at the Microsoft Innovative Educators Conference. It's full of very practical ideas for how to incorporate using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games in teaching a variety of subjects in the K-12 curriculum. Rick's presentations are very grounded with very little flash in his slides but lots of good concrete ideas to take back to the classroom. The night before this session Rick gave a keynote presentation on games based learning. He was asked if the kind of learning kids do in games based learning transfers well to the content areas. He looked the questioner straight in the eye and said, loudly and clearly: No. Then he fleshed out that answer. I still might be able to track down the audio from the keynote. If I can get it I'll publish it here. In the mean time this is a very practical talk about how to begin using COTS games in your classroom.

At about 19 minutes in Rick tried to get online but was locked out. Thankfully, Chris Harbeck was there and had the password. ;-)

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(Download File 14.6Mb, 30 min. 30 sec.)