Ideas for Professors :

  ...Strategies for introducing simSchool to your preservice or inservice students.

Example 1 – Open ended exploration

• At the beginning of class, using a projection device, demonstrate how to get started, e.g., look at student profiles, show that the game starts in the pause state, the bell, pencil and dialogue icons etc.. To guide student exploration, ask them to look at the simStudent profiles and make decisions based on their understanding of the simStudent’s learning characteristics. Or you can encourage them to jump right in. One faculty member began her class by telling her students, "The purpose of simSchool is to assist preservice teachers in their teacher reasoning and their critical thinking," and then gave them a half an hour for open exploration.
  

  " Open exploration is not always suitable, particularly if your students are accustomed to a more directive approach. Also students who have not taken prior education courses might not be familiar with the language of teaching and the types of decisions for working with students. In this case, you might try one of the other introduction sequences listed below As students work, they might have a Word document open in which to keep notes about their decisions."

• Choose one task that is good for most students, and then select and individualize a different task for the student who is least likely to learn from the first task. Does thislead to better student performance than the classrooms with one or several tasks?

• Have students teach a series of short simulations and then look at the impact on the reports Students can look at the student profile, then make conjectures about what type and level of task is best for the student, then try a strategy, observe the changes in student posture and conversations. To end the session have the students view the reports to correlate their play decisions with the results. Reflecting on what worked and what didn’t they can devise a new strategy and then try that strategy in a fresh simulation. This encourages students to more effectively develop their thinking and to discover what works.
  
  

• If some of your students have never taught or are novice teachers or are not sophisticated technology users, you might want to have students work in pairs. This leads to sharing back-and-forth. If one student misses something, s/he can learn from the other student.

Example 5 – Having students record their impressions

• Ask students to play with a classroom of simStudents and to record their impressions. When they stop playing have your students write a quick 2 or 3 sentence summary about the behavior and learning of each simStudent.