Interactive games have a role in learning in schools.  Here are a list of 15 games from the Online University article.

Catalysts for Change: On April 3, 2012, Catalysts for Change went live online for 48 hours. The goal of the game is to inspire people from all over the globe to come together and share ideas about easing the poverty that over 1 billion people live in. The game involves playing cards with words like “momentum” or “adaptation” on them to spark possible poverty solution ideas. When players build on your card (idea), you earn points.

Spent: Designed by Urban Ministries of Durham, a faith-based provider of food and shelter for North Carolinians in need, Spent asks players to consider what life would be like as a homeless person. The game puts you in the shoes of someone who has lost their life savings, and has you choose one of three low-paying jobs to see for yourself how quickly your money runs out.

World Without Oil: If you’ve ever wondered what life would look like without crude oil, this game was for you. With the tagline “play it before you live it,” WWO simulated the first eight months of a world oil crisis. The game ended on June 1, 2007, after 1,500 players had sent in fictional “personal accounts” of their life during the crisis, which were viewed by 110,000 people. Players also worked together to develop solutions that still provide insight into potential real-life answers for the future.

3rd World Farmer: This game was originally created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen in 2005. The player is put in control of an African farm and must struggle to keep family, crops, and livestock alive while conflict and a lack of resources work against them. The designers’ hope is that people will play and realize how precarious survival is for many in Africa, and then do what they can to improve the lives of poor people there.

Free Rice: The United Nations World Food Program operates this game, which seeks to educate the public while addressing the problem of world hunger by offering rice to hungry people free of charge. Players simply go to the website, pick a subject like world capitals or English grammar, and then start answering questions. For each correct answer, the program donates 10 grains of rice to someone in need.

September 12th: A Toy World: The rules are simple: you can choose to shoot rockets at terrorists, or not. But be warned, missing civilians is virtually impossible. The purpose of this newsgame is to visually prove that the U.S. War on Terror is destined to failure, as every civilian killed results in dozens of terrorists created. It has been shown all over the world as a teaching tool against violence.

Citizen Science: Back to the Future meets the EPA in this game, where players travel back in time to investigate what led to the local lake’s pollution and what they can do to prevent it in the future. Developed by the National Science Foundation in partnership with the University of Wisconsin, the game is meant to illustrate the social factors that contribute to environmental harm.

Garbage Dreams: Cairo’s Zaballeen people may have the answer to the world’s trash problem. They recycle 80% of their trash (Zaballeen means “garbage people” in Arabic). Now you can test your mettle and see if you too can be as enterprising as they are. You have one goat, one factory, and 8 months to build a recycling system for the city. Can you make it happen?

WeTopia: Such big names as Mattel, Clorox, and DeGeneres have lent their support to this game that’s like Farmville for a cause. Players build communities and accumulate “Joy” as a form of currency, which they can then donate in-game to real-life causes. When those causes reach 100% joy, the game’s developer donates real cash to the organization that was earned through player purchases and advertising revenue.

Sweatshop: Sweatshop takes things one step further by incorporating humor, albeit black, into its message. The game begins by showing you a factory floor filled with crying or injured children who make high-end sneakers. Then it guides you through a series of choices you must make as the factory manager. As you decide whether to give your workers a safe working environment or focus on your bottom line, hopefully you will begin to wonder what kind of conditions the clothes you’re wearing came from.

A Closed World: Game designers in Singapore created this game because of the shortage of content concerning LGBT issues. Here you lead a gay character through a forest filled with “demons” who try to stop you and force their beliefs on you. You must use your words and logic to navigate your way to find your beloved.

On the Ground Reporter: Darfur: The first in the “On the Ground Reporter” series, this game brings players face to face with the shocking footage of hostilities in Darfur. The in-game objective is to find the truth and the story, but the overall goal is to expose people to the harsh realities of conflicts like that that just ended in Darfur.

Fate of the World: The whole world is in your hands. This award-winning game forces you to deal with crises like natural disasters and a growing global population. By playing through the different scenarios, players get a sense of the real challenges the world could face in the next few generations. It is based on the research of an Oxford professor and was made with the help of a veteran game producer.

Elude: The team behind “A Closed World” also produced this game that wants to change some of the public’s views about depression. The highs and lows of the illness are illustrated as your “mood” rises to the sky and falls to the depths of the earth. The game is only won when the player uses passion to reach happiness at the tree tops.

Karma Tycoon: JPMorgan Chase Foundation was the unlikely backer of this game, where players try to move their “karmameter” to 100%. They do this by helping people through homeless shelters, youth centers, and other community help centers. A grant from Chase Bank starts the game off, but players must budget their money and earn more grants to help more people and solve more problems as the game progresses. So kids learn social and fiscal responsibility while playing.

From Ian Jukes’ 21st Century Fluency Project “https://www.fluency21.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=2757&utm_source=Committed+Sardine+Blog+Update&utm_campaign=649cbaadd0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

I am indebted to Diane Dimond for granting me permission to republish this article.  As she so ably describes the situation, any community that remains silent about a situation like she describes is, in reality, condoning it.

Diane Dimond: Steubenville Rape Case Provides Teachable Moment

By Diane Dimond | @DiDimond

“There are crimes very similar to this that occur every Friday night and every Saturday night in communities across this country …” “” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine

Many of us watched with interest the rape case that recently played out in Steubenville, Ohio. The two defendants “” Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16 “” were star members of the local high school’s football team, and many in the community felt they had been maliciously targeted for prosecution because of their popularity.

The evidence was overwhelming, however, and both teens were convicted of sexually assaulting a female classmate. There was a video, still pictures and dozens of contemporaneous text and Twitter messages flying back and forth discussing details of the assault. The victim, a 16-year-old girl, was so drunk (or perhaps drugged) that she was unconscious during much of the prolonged assault. Included in the torrent of more than 3,000 tawdry messages read aloud to the court were those from eyewitnesses and classmates joking about the “dead-looking” victim and saying, “Some people deserve” to be urinated upon.

One text sent the day after the attack from defendant Mays begged a friend to delete the video of the incident that had been posted on YouTube and added: “Coach Sac knows about it. Seriously, delete it!” During the trial, it was learned that football coach Reno Saccoccia knew about the sexual assault and refused to suspend the defendants or other players who had knowledge of the incident until the season was nearly over.

As I watched the case unfold “” and read the unvarnished blog by former Steubenville resident Alexandra Goddard, who had immediately captured the offending texts, video and pictures before they were deleted “” I couldn’t stop thinking: Where was everyone else as this crime was happening?

As this young girl was being humiliated and brutalized, stripped of her clothing and carried around like a rag doll, what were her classmates doing? Why didn’t anyone step in to say, “Stop!” Didn’t other girls at the event feel her shame and move to help cover up her nakedness? Where was the owner of the house where the party was being held? What had the parents of these teenagers taught their children about coming to the aid of a fellow human being in trouble?

None of my questions was part of the court proceedings, of course, but as DeWine said upon the conviction, “I’ll guarantee that there are crimes very similar to this that occur every Friday night and every Saturday night in communities across this country, where you have people, particularly young people, who are drinking too much and a girl is taken advantage of, and a girl is raped.” DeWine is right. It is surely happening in your community and mine, too.

Yet DeWine believes that justice may not have been completely served in the Steubenville case. His investigators interviewed 56 witnesses “” from teenagers who attended the party to assistant football coaches and the high school principal “” yet there were still 16 people with knowledge of the crime who have refused to talk. So, DeWine will convene a grand jury next month to determine whether other people should be charged in this case.

Leave it alone, you say? The conviction of Mays and Richmond is enough? I don’t think so.

Consider that even after the guilty verdicts, some in that football-crazed town were still not convinced the pair had done anything wrong, and they turned their wrath on the victim. After the guilty verdicts were announced, two teenage girls were taken into custody for allegedly using Twitter and Facebook posts to threaten her with a “beating” and “homicide.” They now face felony counts of witness tampering, among other charges. After the girls’ arrest, DeWine announced: “Let me be clear. Threatening a teenage rape victim will not be tolerated. If anyone makes a threat … we will take it seriously, we will find you, and we will arrest you.”

Goddard reports she and her family continued to be harassed and maligned. She also had to fight back a defamation lawsuit filed against her and two dozen people who left comments on the case at her website. “Perhaps most ridiculously,” she wrote, “I was accused of “˜complicating’ the case because I posted the screen captures of content that these kids willingly posted themselves.” Clearly, not all of Steubenville has learned the obvious lesson of this case.

In the meantime, the victim’s mother told CNN, “We hope that from this something good can arise … (to) possibly change the mentality of a youth or help a parent to have more of an awareness (as) to where their children are and what they are doing. The adults need to take responsibility and guide these children.”

Yep. This is one of those teachable moments, the perfect time for folks to sit down with their kids and have a serious talk about the issues this case raised. Drinking and drugs, athlete adoration, teenage sex and doing unto others as we would need them to do for us if we were in trouble. It is also a good time for parents to re-examine where the circle of accountability begins and ends when one of our children is so publicly victimized.

“” Diane Dimond is the author of Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust. Contact her at [email protected], follow her on Twitter: @DiDimond, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are her own.

Zero-tolerance policies, which require out-of-school suspension or expulsion for certain inappropriate behaviors, have become the go-to disciplinary approach in many schools. But research suggests such punishments may not change students’ behavior and are often meted out unfairly.

The idea of out of school suspension for being truant or late makes no sense at all.  Schools and parents don’t have control over the kids when they’re at home. Some children see this kind of suspension as a reward and look forward to missing school so that they can engage in other activities like watching television. In addition, data indicate that suspension has been shown to disproportionately affect black, Latino, and male students and those with disabilities.  How do students who have been suspended make up the work they have missed?  Data also indicate that these punishments force students out of school – “push outs.”

What are the alternatives?  Why not in-school suspension during lunch where these students can be isolated from friends?  Or how about mandatory in-school suspension on Saturdays? 

LLE, Ky. ““ Two Catholic school athletes who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 16-year-old told police they did it because they thought it would be “funny,” according to court records released under a Jefferson County judge’s order.

Savannah Dietrich had been frustrated by what she felt was a lenient plea bargain for the two teens who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her in August 2011, so she tweeted their names and criticized the justice system.

Both teens, who were 16 at the time of the assault, said in interviews with a Louisville Metro Police detective before their guilty pleas that they also took explicit pictures of Savannah Dietrich with their cellphones while she was intoxicated.

After Dietrich initially complained about the plea deal the two teens received, Paul Richwalsky, chief prosecutor in the juvenile court division of the county attorney’s office, told her “get over it and see a therapist. “¦ The jail was for ‘real’ rapists, murderers and robbers,” according to an affidavit released Thursday.

Dietrich’s lawyer, Thomas Clay, told the court that Richwalsky gave the teens favored treatment because they were athletes at Trinity High School, where Richwalsky is an alumnus, serves on the reunion committee and supports the sports teams.

The teen boys pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree sexual abuse, a felony, and misdemeanor voyeurism as part of the plea agreement. They are required to do 50 hours of volunteer work and the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice will determine the level of supervision and treatment needed. The conviction could be set aside and erased when the teens turn 19½ if they complete a diversion program.

The teens told Detective Chris Horn in separate interviews that they were drinking with Dietrich and a few other people at her home in August 2011 when they were left alone with the heavily intoxicated Dietrich. They said they lifted her shirt, pulled down her pants and penetrated her vagina with their fingers because, according to one of the teens, “we thought it would be funny, but it wasn’t.” They said they took two or three pictures each, put Dietrich’s clothes back on and carried her upstairs to her room. Numerous other teenagers told police that the teens showed them the pictures, according to police reports.

Dietrich later learned of the teens’ plea deal, which she considered too lenient, then tweeted their names and complained about the court’s treatment of her. The lawyer for the accused at first sought to have her held in contempt for exposing what was, at the time, a confidential juvenile court proceeding. Dietrich and her parents gave permission to use her name.

The older of the two teens told police in his interview that he molested Dietrich because “she was fine with it.”

“How do you know she was fine?” police asked him.

“I mean she could have definitely been like, ‘Stop, don’t do this’ and we would have stopped, but she didn’t,” the boy responded, adding that she was conscious but “very drunk” and had “low eyelids.”

Before they were charged, the teens pleaded with Dietrich in several text messages not to go to court over what happened, according to copies of the texts released in the files.

“Savannah I know u probably think I’m the worst person in the world,” the younger teen texted her in December, asking if they could meet with her and apologize, according to the court records. “There is another way to deal with this other than jeopardizing our lives forever.”

When the older teen said their lives could be ruined, Dietrich responded in a text: “You don’t think you ruined my life forever? How would you feel knowing you basically got raped. Knowing people are seeing your pictures, tell me who all saw these pictures? It’s humiliating I feel exposed.”

Richwalsky says he told Dietrich and her mother about the plea deal and denies telling her she needed to move on or get over anything, calling the allegations “preposterous.”

The teens pleaded not guilty in March and were put on house arrest though they were allowed to go to previously scheduled college visits.

On June 26, they pleaded guilty to sexual abuse and voyeurism; their sentencing was put off for seven weeks for a required sexual-offender risk assessment.

Both teens have had to withdraw from their Catholic high school. Details about the younger teen were not available, but the Department of Juvenile Justice said the older teen had a GPA of 3.83 and was ranked 25th out of 328 students.

Jefferson County Public Schools said he would have to attend an alternative school because of the charges.

Does your school give favored treatment to a specific group of students?  Or are all students treated the same?  The perception of favored treatment is a difficult one for schools to overcome.  I believe that schools need to recognize students who “give back” whether they perform in school plays, play in the orchestra of play in sports. However, most school recognition programs favor athletics and athletes.  We give them recognition, jackets, dinners and trophies.  Why not give the same recognition to academic achieving individuals?  Schools were built to recognize academic achievement as well as athletic achievement.

Bullying among students and peer groups is a hot topic, but talking about teacher victimization is considered taboo.

A 2011 study, “Understanding and Preventing Violence Directed Against Teachers,” reported 80% of about 3,000 K-12 teachers surveyed felt victimized by students, students’ parents or colleagues in the past year. Teachers reported that students were most often behind the verbal intimidation, obscene gestures, cyberbullying, physical offenses, theft or damage to personal property. But few teachers or researchers are talking about it.

The study found that 44% of teachers said they’ve experienced physical victimization. Men who participated in the study were more likely than women to report obscene remarks and gestures, verbal threats and instances of weapons being pulled on them. Women, on the other hand, were more likely than men to report intimidation.  Young teachers especially might be afraid to talk with a principal about being victimized in the classroom because they believe it means “they’re being ineffective somewhere.”

The Internet has created multiple avenues to increase the bullying of educators.  Students have the ability to create fraudulent twitter account pretending to be someone else, possibly a teacher. The perpetrator then intentionally creates a fake account with the sole purpose being to harass and humiliate an educator. By creating a twitter or false Facebook account with malice of forethought is a violation of education codes as well as cyber bullying laws and Facebook and Twitter can be made to take down the accounts..

Tenure of teachers in the K-12 system is different from tenure in universities.  In colleges and universities, tenure basically insures lifetime employment.  In the K-12 educational system, Tenure simply insures “˜due process” ““ a series of steps that schools/districts/cities/states require before a tenured teacher can be dismissed.

In Los Angeles, a judge allowed a lawsuit that would overturn teacher tenure laws and seniority rights to move forward. A committee in the North Carolina legislature is now studying a bill that would eliminate tenure for all teachers.

On Election Day, Idaho voters rejected a series of anti-teacher laws, including scrapping tenure, proposed by the state legislature. In South Dakota, voters shot down an effort to make teacher tenure a local option instead of automatic statewide.

Teacher tenure is complex, controversial, and political throughout the United States, and many state legislatures plan to examine the matter in their upcoming 2013 legislative sessions.

What is tenure, exactly? Legally put, tenure gives teachers a permanent contract after a set term of employment, ensuring that they cannot be fired without just cause. In order to fire a teacher, administrators have to conduct intense reviews of the teacher’s performance and navigate miles of bureaucratic tape.

Proponents cheer tenure because it protects jobs, academic freedom, and teachers’ rights. Unions often cite that without tenure, school districts could easily fire veteran teachers, who cost more, and hire first-year teachers who would work for less pay. It also protects teachers, advocates say, from dismissal because of political, social or religious beliefs.

Opponents say that it makes firing bad teachers virtually impossible. They argue that teachers are granted tenure before it’s proven that they can actually teach.

States vary on when teacher tenure occurs. Mississippi, for example, allows for tenure after only one year of teaching. The majority of states allow tenure after two or three years. Ohio doesn’t grant tenure until after seven years of teaching.

In most states, before tenure is granted a teacher can be dismissed without going through the process noted above.  I know of a teacher with tenure who was threatened with dismissal because he was teaching about the United Nations in a history class.  The removal of tenure laws would allow states to get rid of higher paid senior teachers to be replaced by younger, less-experienced, lower-paid educators.   If you were faced with critical surgery and were given a choice between a newly graduated surgeon, who was highly trained at a prestigious medical school or an experienced surgeon who had performed the surgery hundreds of times, who would you choose?  Obviously politicians do not want to give parents and students a similar choice.