Educators We Want To Hear From You!

Many years ago I collected information about teachers using PeaceMaker and began the process of building an educator community that included a forum and resources for lesson plans associated with the game. Unfortunately that forum has long since been overrun by spammers and my information is definitely outdated. I would love to try to kick start this effort again and if you are an educator using PeaceMaker we would love to hear from you.

We have recently been contact by someone at UNESCO MGIEP who is trying to compile best practices around education and games and would love your help. He is very interested in hearing how you use PeaceMaker in the classroom at all levels. Hopefully we can also pull specific best practices around using PeaceMaker from his work as well. I will update this post soon with a link to a survey that he will be providing but in your contact please let me know if you would be willing to be introduced.

We are also starting to try to get the news about our newest release out there through press and reviews. We have been asked by some interested parties if we could put them in touch with our users to interview for their stories. If you would be willing to speak to them we would greatly appreciate it and again if you would be willing to have your contact shared please include that in your contact.

Finally we would just love to hear how you are using the game. If none of the above appeals to you we would still love to hear from you and have you let us know where you are using the game, what context and what format. As much or little information as you are willing to share would be great. I will try in the near future to make it even easier on you by creating a survey and attaching it here.

Please contact us using our contact form and sending to general inquiries or whatever box tickles your fancy here.

Play the Election 2012: Going Live With Play the News Election Edition

We have had the amazing opportunity to partner with Rand McNally to launch, free to schools and educators, an election version of Play the News for the 2012 US Presidential Election.

You can go straight to the site here.

And view the Press Release here.

This was a great opportunity to do a lot of things we have wanted to do for a long time. Over the years we have conducted a lot of outreach to schools and foundations because we think Play the News could be great for the classroom. We have also heard from many of you educators out there requesting the opportunity to use it in you classes.  Here is our chance to find out if it is as great as we all hoped.  Sorry to the rest of you Play the News fans since this version is specifically set up for educators and students, but hopefully if this is successful enough (with your help) we can leverage it into partnerships and opportunities that will help us bring back the open to all broad news topics platform.

Inside you will find all kinds of extra teacher resources to help integrate this into your classroom or community including the opportunity to create your own game stories. Stay tuned as I hope to hold a couple webinars down the line to interested teachers on the game creation process.

PeaceMaker: Launching the Educator Community

I am writing to announce the launch of a PeaceMaker Educator Forum.  We have now had over 2 years of teachers and students playing PeaceMaker.  Over these 2 years we have had many inquiries from teachers, researchers, and even prestigious press organizations as to how the use of PeaceMaker has contributed to classroom and out of classroom learning.  Who better to answer these questions then those of you who are teachers and students.

We would be very grateful if you could quickly answer the following relevant survey.  I promise you that it is a very short survey and will only take a couple moments of your time.

Educator Survey

Student Survey

The goal of this outreach is to create a central repository and community where you can share with each other all of the different ways that PeaceMaker can be used to enrich learning and community initiatives, provide testimonials to promote the use of PeaceMaker in and out of the classroom, and create a list of individuals that are willing to be contacted by peers and press.  We would love for you to visit the Forum at forum(dot)impactgames(dot)com (sorry for not hyperlinking it but it has started to be apammed), and even better to contribute your own testimonials and lesson plans for others to learn from.

We greatly appreciate your continued support.