simSchool September 2012 News

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Dear Colleagues:

Welcome back to a new school year for our Northern Hemisphere partners and mid-year for our Southern Hemisphere partners! In this update, we’d like to know your plans, share ours and document some of the big accomplishments of the past year. Be sure to respond to the simSchool 2012 Survey in this edition to update us on your status and plans. We want to keep you in mind and have you do the same!

Your Plans

As you know, simSchool is free to professors and colleges of education, but has real costs associated with serving users. With our grant resources ended, we are helping professors and college programs transition their students into co-paying partners, with a variety of options. We want to hear from you which of these options is good for you or if you need a new alternative.

Beginning mid-September student users can pay $25 for a single course or $50 for unlimited course use for a year (a great deal!). We can provide an ISBN number for an introductory manual that can be purchased online or in your college bookstore that wraps this cost in as a textbook with online access.
Alternatively, institutions may choose to pay up front for a block of student registrations and absorb this cost under materials fees, lab or technology fees.
Institutions may also purchase research licenses (which include student seats) and field work licenses, which can produce a significant cost savings and benefit for accreditation reporting purposes.

What are your plans? Take our simSchool 2012 Survey to let us know!

Contact Stacy Kruse, skruse@simschool.org, for more information on student pricing, licensing, or to obtain ISBN numbers for inclusion on course syllabi

Our Plans Here are a few items on our development horizon for the coming months. We’ve drawn from your suggestions and examples, which have inspired us! Do you see anything here that looks interesting?

New iBooks and eBooks with simSchool modules and exercises (authors welcome!)
Designing module packages in teacher education topic areas (authors welcome!)
A network of researchers for “Virtual Fieldwork Experiences” (join up!)
Certification program for simSchool trainers – add to your reputation.

simSchool Badges – achievements and levels related to Master’s level skills

Accomplishments of the EDUCAUSE grant year What a year! Thank you all for contributing your energies to great success stories in 12 short months. Last year at this time we were set to launch version 2.0, which when launched had about 600 users – that climbed to over 10,000 in a few short months! Here are a few of the high points that have not appeared in newsletters yet:

Presented a numerous conferences (SITE, AECT, AERA, ISTE and several regional conferences), offered 3 face-to-face workshops, and dozens of web-based meetings that reached over 10,000 people.
Named in the New Media Consortium’s “Horizon Report for Higher Education” as a technology to watch!
Created a “Games and Simulations” workshop component of their new Teacher Education Initiative
Began the process of forming a network of simSchool users among Historically Black College and Universities.
Formally expanded into K12 Professional Development with our first local school system contract – and looking to do more!

We may contact you privately for help in reflecting back on the year as we pull together a final report to EDUCAUSE.

Our continued thanks to our research partners and friends who help simSchool continue to improve!David Gibson
simSchool