Our programming team has been working under CM’s hood to get things ready for our big plans regarding inter-country competitions and enhanced community features that will make the CM experience even more engaging (which is saying a lot considering how well it engages social studies students already). While most of the prep-work can’t be seen right now, we added features in CM 2.4.1 that are really cool and foreshadow what’s to come.

Student Avatars

Last spring we added the ability for educators to add avatars, but with this release students can add avatars too. To illustrate, we’re going to use Ms. Erin Harrison’s “student” account from a CM Training session that occurred in Guelph, Ontario earlier this year. Erin has been using Civic Mirror for 2 years with much success and (not surprisingly) she ended up as her simulated country’s national leader in the training session.

1. When students want to upload and/or edit their avatar, they simply need to click on their username/pic at the top-right of the CM interface (circled in red below):

2. This will take them to their profile page where they can click the “Change Profile Picture” link. Here they can upload, crop and edit their desired photo.

3. Once done, the student avatar will appear throughout the site for everyone to see. Below are a few examples:

Student Avatar on Citizen Homepage

Law & Government page (when elected into office)

We are really excited about this and are looking forward to seeing students further develop their CM Identities as responsible, adult citizens. However, you teachers might be thinking, “OMG, but what about inappropriate avatars!?”  Not to worry, read on …

Community Controls

Teachers have long been able to block students from the CM Community and the entire website using the Citizen Stats Control page. But, with more and more community features in the pipeline, we created a new admin page solely devoted to “Community Controls”, which can be accessed from the Admin Controls box on the Main Admin page (see pic to the right).

Once there, you educators will see that every student’s avatar can be seen at a glance. This is great just for marking purposes (e.g. “Let’s see who uploaded their avatars like I asked them to”), but educators will also have the ability to remove inappropriate ones as well. And if they’re really bad, this is where teachers can block students from the CM Community or the entire site.

All for now. In an upcoming post we will highlight some of the other features that we released in CM 2.4.1.

And if you’re not using CM and want to see what all the fuss is about – for crying out loud – Request a Free Trial!

Program Now 100% Online, New Features for Teachers, and Twitter Hashtags

This latest CM version release, 2.4.0, is one for the books. Daniel Lindenberger (CM’s Lead Programmer) and Derek Lam (Programmer and Tech-Support Wizard) worked tirelessly over the summer on features that allow us to boast that we are 100% online. What that means is, while the program remains an event-based game, with events occurring in the classroom in a face-to-face way (mock elections, legislative events, trials, etc.), teachers now have the option to run the program without any paper at all. Let us explain.

Online, Mobile-Friendly Manuals

Like we promised in April, we have developed the Civic Mirror Instructor and Student manuals into an online, mobile-friendly format and included them as part of the program without any extra cost. This means students can follow the CM event scripts using their tablets or mobile phones. While most users still prefer having the manual in-hand, these mobile-friendly versions of the manuals provide a great option for teachers moving forward.

To access the CM Manual from within the program, simply click “CM Manual” from the main navigation bar (see image below) and away you go. What’s more is that the program automatically detects what version of the manual is relevant for you (e.g. U.S. teachers see the U.S. Instructors Manual, Canadian students see the CDN Student Manual, etc.).

Online Hidden Agendas

Another great feature we released with CM 2.4.0 is online Hidden Agendas (HA’s), complete with an HA Application and review system. This allows 1) Students to apply for their HA Status Points online, 2) Teacher to review submitted applications, and 3) easier awarding, rejecting, and tracking of the whole review process.

While this will save teachers huge chunks of class time (i.e. “You have to submit your Hidden Agenda Application for homework by tomorrow,”), we still recommend teachers initially give their students their HA’s using the paper-based, sealed-envelope method outlined in the Instructors Manual. It’s one thing peaking over a students shoulder to look at an agenda title on a piece of paper, but it’s far easier to glance at the agenda title displayed on a computer monitor.

Online Performance Evaluations

In the Civic Mirror, students complete a formative assessment rubric at the end of every simulated year. Basically they evaluate their performance as a citizen on four criteria: points-earned; attitude and involvement; initiatives; and demonstration of learning. This has always been a paper-pen process, with the teacher cross-evaluating the student-given-grade and providing feedback and a final score.

Now, with online performance evaluations, this can all be done online, allowing teachers to assign it for homework and – once submitted – to offer instant and immediate feedback to their students.

More New Features for Teachers

The Civic Mirror can be overwhelming for first time teachers, which makes sense considering what it accomplishes. This summer, however, we created a “Starting Steps” sequence to help newbies out a little more. Basically the program guides first-time users through some of the most important pages, displaying a progress bar too (see picture to right). We hope this helps.

Also, with the growing number of teachers using the program, we made some organizational improvements. For starters, we no longer blend educator profile and settings information with country settings information. As the picture above indicates, teachers now have a separate space to manage their country settings, create new countries, and order more.

And, as the picture to the right illustrates, we created a page for Educators Profiles (for things like teacher bio, profile pic, list of countries, etc.), as well as a “My Settings” page (for things like email address, password, time zone, etc.).  While all these features existed before, they are now much more organized and easier to find.

Country-Specific Twitter Hashtags

Last year we observed a huge spike in the number of teachers who integrated Twitter into the Civic Mirror experience (e.g. back-channelling during political events, announcing news stories, etc.). Several of these teachers requested we integrate the social media platform into CM. We did.

Now, using the Country Settings page, CM Educators can enter a Twitter hashtag for a country so that all CM-related tweets get fed into the Country News page. What’s more, this will allow – for the first time – teachers and students to share a small part of the CM experience with the outside world.

Note that this is an optional feature, of course.

New CM Library Resources!

While the Civic Mirror Library – a space for educators to share their customized and CM-related assignments, activities, and modifications – has been alive for several years, only recently did our development team cleaned it up for easy use. Ms. Amber Rainke, a social studies superstar from Frank Hurt Secondary in Surrey, BC, has created and shared no less than 5 resources … making this space even more awesome!

Amber uses the Canadian version of Civic Mirror and several of the resources she created help scaffold the content and CM experience for students.

Charter of Rights and Freedoms Aides

For Canadian educators who don’t have time to run the two-lesson Constitution Jigsaw activity but still want to cover this important information (after all, when the game starts, students use their own real-world country’s constitution as their book of law), Amber created and uploaded a Teen Version of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and an accompanying slide show.

House of Commons Primer

When students participate in their first Government Event in the Civic Mirror, it can be overwhelming to say the least. Not only are students trying to push their hidden agendas and ensure the laws and policies passed will benefit their simulated families, but they are learning how the rules, roles, and procedures of the legislative process work!  Amber created a fantastic “House of Commons Intro” slideshow and an accompanying fill-in-the worksheet that teachers can to ensure their students write a record of the important content as they work through the slideshow. Awesome!

Election Debate Prep Sheet

Finally, Amber also created a worksheet titled Preparing for the Debate which can be used by both U.S. and Canadian teachers. She has her students use this well-structured sheet of important issues to better prepare their positions and arguments for their first election debates. To quote Amber:

I used this with my class to help them plan their strategies for the debate. I listed some guiding questions to help them frame an arguement or position on a topic that students often have questions about and will affect their hidden agendas.

On behalf of all the educators in the CM Community, thank you Amber! We appreciate your creations and sharing of them!

No More PDF Draft Manuals!

Civic Mirror continues to improve. Today we’re happy to announce that we are roughly halfway through designing and developing online versions of the CM Manuals.

Sneak Preview

If you have any questions or feature requests before we finish the job, Contact Us ASAP!!

One of the most educationally valuable aspects of Civic Mirror is its ability to offer students leadership roles in a safe, educationally-oriented way. Students can become Presidents and Prime Ministers, Senators and House Representatives, high-stakes businesspersons, lawyers and judges, and so on. The ratio between male-female leaders in the real world isn’t balanced (see the fantastic video below), and we hope teachers leverage Civic Mirror so that the girls learn to participate and lead just as much as the boys!

This week we released some improvements to the Civic Mirror Community that we want to share with everyone.

CM World News

We have overhauled the CM World News page to better displays the most recent activity in the CM Community (forums, wikis, blogs, etc.). This will allow teachers and students from all over the world to learn about (and from) the goings on in the other simulated nations in CM World.

CM Educator News

A major focus of ours at the moment is to improve the online community for teachers using Civic Mirror. The fact is, most educators do not use games or simulations in the classroom, so we want to make it easy for the ones using this program to connect with one another so they can share their ideas and support one another through the process. While we have lots in the pipeline, we have updated our Educator News page so that it feeds quality information about what other educators in the community are doing.

Active Country List and Country Archives

Finally, over the years, as Civic Mirror has grown, it’s become increasingly difficult for users to search for other countries in the community. This week we created two new pages: Active Country List and Country Archives.

The Active Country List is sorted by most recent activity, allowing users to peak and see what’s going on in other Civic Mirror countries at that very moment. We intend this to be the first step towards building inter-country functions and features in the years to come.

The Archived Countries page now allows users to see all of the countries from Civic Mirror history, what school and location they were born from, and what school year they existed in. Here’s an example:

These are exciting times for everyone using the Civic Mirror!

If you are not using the program and would like to, or would like a teacher you know to use the program, REQUEST A FREE TRIAL!