Janelle Williams
Trinity Bay State High School
Year 10 Multimedia

Janelle Williams used MiLK to deliver a year 10 multimedia class. Janelle used MiLK as an opportunity to encourage her students to work more effectively and to begin to emulate industry behavior, knowledge and work processes. She also used MiLK to introduce a game design taxonomy which the students applied when assessing themselves and their peers.

“ The relationships I strengthened with my students are perhaps the thing I found the most powerful about the project”

Over a school term, Janelle’s Year 10 multimedia class played a MiLK event made by Janelle and in teams created two MiLK event’s of their own. The first set of events created by the student teams were set within the school grounds and the second lot were ‘Ultimate MiLK Events’ (UMEs) that highlighted a particular location within the town of Cairns in North Queensland.

Throughout the semester the students studied games, in particular location based games, and engaged in self and peer assessment. They used game design criteria such as player empathy, player feedback, narrative, storytelling and immersion to reflect on their own and each other’s events.

Janelle wanted the MiLK activities to closely emulate industry practices, as such when creating their UMEs members of the teams took on production roles such as Graphic Designer (focusing on coming up with the marketing design/logo that would be given to any players before commencing the event), WIKI blogger (charged with making sure the progress of the group after each lesson was logged), Concept Designer (focusing on Storyline, Narrative and Roles) and System Designer (inputting the questions/answers/hints in to the Milk engine).

To complement the learning that occurred while creating and playing MiLK events, Janelle set up a class Wiki, where the MiLK teams could collaborate, share ideas and resources for their events. The students also used the Wiki to articulate why MiLK and using Mobile phones is important to their learning and to conduct peer assessment by writing critiques of each other’s games. The Wiki allowed the students to work on their MiLK events beyond the classroom setting. It became a social site where the students not only collaborated outside of class hours, they also shared favourite websites and organised group meetings. The Wiki played a valuable role in the students’ learning setting up a reciprocal relationship between their informal and formal learning lives.

Janelle’s Reflection:

“ The relationships I strengthened with my students are perhaps the thing I found the most powerful about the project”

“I could see that by welcoming the notion of social networking as a valid space for sharing and exchange of ideas that I could expand conversations in school out beyond the for walls of my classroom”

“This project demonstrates my passion and interest for exploring the use of new media and ICT technologies as well as my beliefs about connecting students to learning by harnessing their own contemporary culture and interests”

“I have learnt that often the best way to solve a problem is for me to be a teacher-learner and comfortably share the role and experience of being the ‘teacher’ side by side with my students, both one on one and in groups. Being able to constantly and comfortably move between these teacher, learner, facilitator and motivator roles in my classroom has been a key feature of my teaching practice”

“The use of ICT’s encouraged teams of students to work more effectively and to begin to emulate industry behaviour, knowledge and work processes.”

The project demonstrates how by using ICT’s students will engage and exhibit greater on-task behaviours and ownership of their learning”.

Student Response:

“MiLK a way for teachers to learn how we want to learn.”

“I think it is a really fun way to learn. When you first start doing it you just think it is really fun, but afterwards you realise you learn a fair bit.”

“Three simple words; teenagers, learning, willingly. We actually want to use MiLK “

“It’s really cool to have that adrenalin rush of letting other people play your game.”

“MiLK Rocks!”

“When you walk out of the classroom you actually still think about it, it is not like it just goes over your head.”

The reason why most people probably prefer MiLK to learning in the classroom is because when you go home most teenagers go on the internet, and while you are already on there you think, ok is there anything that I have to do for school, I mean you don’t automatically go home and look through history books…its convenient in that way.