Being Me: School-wide, online social database (2009)

Being Me is an online social network space being designed for faculty and students of the Game School. If we want to help kids develop dispositions as researchers and learners and help them to become confident, ethically strong, empathetic, and civically engaged, we feel we must place the concept of student identity at the center of the Game School’s pedagogy. Being Me supports this effort in providing a long-term space for students to document, explore, and “take on” a range of identities within a connected community of practice. The space is designed to help move kids from identities as social selves to identities as learner selves, and to help kids discover what it is that they are interested in doing, thinking about, and being. Being Me is designed to support reward and validation from peers, as well as to operate as a portfolio-based assessment space for teachers, allowing them to better understand the kind of learning that is taking place in each student.