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simSchool & Elearn!!
Full Paper Co-PIs David Gibson and Bill Halverson, along with Melanie Zibit:
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| “Bridging the Distance Between Research and Practice: Creating a Community of Practice for Piloting an Educational Simulation.” | ||
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When projects and organizations want to deploy new e-learning tools, it is helpful to bridge research, development and practice by piloting with users to learn what works, what doesn’t work, and how to create support systems for full scale implementation (Royer, 2002; Sanders, Brown & Zellner, 2002). The simSchool team discussed strategies used during the first year of the project to successfully recruit a cross section of teacher education institutions as a pilot group.
One of our selected pilot sites commented on the reason for their
interest in educational simulations: “We are interested in new
and better ways to help future teachers to really 
understand the complexity
of teaching and to see all the variables that go into decision making
processes [in order to] make better decisions to meet student needs,
without jeopardizing (actual) students.” Of particular interest
is simSchool’s broad array of online tools to foster communication
and collaboration. 
As you can imagine, the excitement about educational simulations surrounding simSchool’s poster session drew many visitors from both American and international educators.
Bill Halverson (right) with New Zealand Friendz of simSchool.
David Gibson (left) & Bill Halverson (right) with new Friendz of simSchool.
eLearn also gave us an opportunity to update our Department of Education Program Officer Steve Sniegoski on our progress.
Department of Education program officer Steve Sniegoski with Melanie Zibit.
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