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"Among the many ways to actively engage children in the learning process, educational games are one of the most fun. With so many award winning and cleverly designed games on the market, young children to teens (and even adults!) can develop new skills and reinforce other skills, without even realizing they are learning. Board, card, cooperative, puzzle games, and more encourage interactive hands-on learning in a humorous, light hearted environment. In a addition to math, reading, vocabulary, logic, problem-solving, and spelling skills regularly introduced by educational games, turn based and cooperative games foster with social interaction, communication skills, and self confidence. Consider adding one of these excellent educational games to your home or classroom collection."

"Teachers have found many different ways of using digital games in the classroom. But what kind of games are these students playing? And how are teachers incorporating them in the classroom? Last year's report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Games For A Digital Age," made the distinction between "short-form" and "long-form" learning games. Short-form games are designed to be played during a single class period. "They focus on a particular concept of skill refinement, skills practice, memorization, or performing specific drills." Long-form games "extend beyond a single class period" and sometimes gameplay can "spread over multiple sessions or even several weeks." Often long-form games are comprehensively tied to a full curriculum. They can replace textbooks by offering an interactive experience that seamlessly blends content, practice, and assessment into a contextualized learning experience. While some programs like this already exist, it's difficult to implement well. For teachers who want to get started, short-term games can supplement their already established curricula with fresh and engaging activities. Learning Games"

"School is a time in a students life where they are learning as much about how to be students and operate successfully in a school as they are about how to read, write, and think. But oftentimes, the demand for pure academic instruction and practice can fly in the face for a student's need-at any age-to play, build, interact, explore, and construct their own learning experience. Issues like these can make mobile technology like tablets a boon to learning, as they can allow individual access to the right app-and the right content, creative opportunity, game, or learning simulation-at the right time. It is the collision of the need for interaction, personalization, creativity, and constant feedback that can make video games powerful tools for learning-and the following 38 games, curated by Sam Gliksman-and excellent place to start. "

"Learning math can be a great source of fun for kids. There is a wide variety of entertaining and interactive online games  to use with your kids to introduce them to basic as well as intermediate mathematical concepts. As learning aids, games are proven to engage kids' attention and boost their interest in learning. To this purpose, and besides the multiple math resources we have shared here over the last couple of years, here is a very good collection of websites that provide games designed specifically to address kids mathematical needs."

"Games can be a great tool for teaching students about complex topics like digital citizenship, politics and even science. With about 47 percent of kids aged 4 to 13 playing digital games every day, game-based learning is poised to further engage children in the classroom. One classroom in Tampa, Fla., has discovered that digital games can help some children with mathematics. Gregory Smith, a fifth-grade teacher in Hillsborough County, tells Education Week that after incorporating math-strategy games - think word problems with corresponding interactive elements - his students' math-skills scores went from an average of 49 percent to 83 percent. The students themselves also reported more enjoyment from math."

"Teaching with video games is not what you think. Unless you recognize video games as an increasingly engaging, compelling, and interactive narrative form that is seeking to leapfrog film as the medium of choice not just for teenage boys who like Call of Duty, but, well, you too. And that teaching with them means taking as close a look at the creation and design of the stories and play mechanics and the interaction between story and player as you do the narrative itself. Which can act as a kind of schema to inform how you teach novels, poetry, government or science-as-inquiry."

"I grew up on a healthy regimen of Choose-Your-Own Adventure books, Nintendo, and role playing games, but even I am intimidated by the new brand of interactive storytelling that is flooding the iPad. More designers are exploring how the frenzy around Apple's tablet computer is evolving e-books into something new. Sure, you can find traditional children's picture books directly translated onto the iPad that simply let you flip through on a touchscreen, but there's so much more the medium allows. Embedded games, interactive backgrounds, responsive audio, non-linear stories - "books" on the iPad have become something much better: immersive experiences. I've got a host of videos to show you what I mean, check them out below. Combining games, books, music, and voices in compelling ways, these early attempts to revolutionize storytelling on the iPad are exciting…but they're just the beginning. Give it a few years and the lines between these different ways of telling stories will blur so far we'll have to come up with a new name. 'Books' just doesn't cut it anymor"

"In the past decade, researchers have shown that playing games can boost students' ability to think in systems. Any game is a system, after all, and when players take actions, the game itself, as an interactive system, can change. Moving a knight across a chessboard, for example, can change everything for the opposing player. What is systems thinking? According to the Partnership for 21st-Century Learning, systems thinking relates to critical thinking and problem solving, and systems thinkers can "analyze how parts of a whole interact with each other to produce overall outcomes in complex systems.""

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

"Dig-It! Games, an independent developer of educational, interactive games founded by a former archaeologist and middle school teacher, has launched Can U Dig It!, its latest free game app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that turns kids into archaeologists as they dig for ancient artifacts using logic and a little luck. The puzzle app virtually transports players 11 and older to excavation sites in Central America to carefully collect more than 40 historically accurate artifacts."

"Math Playground is a great website containing hundreds of mathematics games appropriate for K-8 students. I first reviewed the site back in 2008. Whenever I have returned to it since then, more games and other helpful features have been added to it. Math Playground offers a huge variety of math games for students. You can locate games according to suggested grade level, by topic, or by question type. Students who need a refresher on a skill, can probably find one in Math Playground's video library. Math Playground's video library offers more than 100 instructional videos organized according to topic. To the right side of each video students will see some suggested games aligned to the topic covered in the instructional video."

"Teaching reading is an art filled with limiting factors: motivation, vocabulary, decoding, and comprehension are only a few of the comprehensive skills or traits that students need to be able to comprehend text, making the subject of literacy, in particular, difficult to teach. video gameYes, there are ways to garner student interest, especially when it comes to interacting with text, but in a society that is becoming increasingly visual and dependent on instant gratification, the delayed gratification of interacting with text can be far less enticing to our little ones. And for this reason, it's important to help them see that interacting with text can be just as gratifying as watching a movie or playing a game. But this is not a simple task. Not simple at all."

Online learning has come a long way in the last few years.Flickr/Laurie Sullivan When I started learning to code, the options were limited-lots of books (not even e-books), some very basic online tutorials, and a whole lot of experimentation. Online learning has come a long way in the last few years. There are interactive courses, tons of online tutorials, and one of my personal favorite ways to practice coding: games. While a game alone probably isn't going to teach you everything you need to know about coding, it can be a really incredible way to practice the skills you're learning. It makes practice fun. And if you're anything like me, you might suddenly realize you've spent the last four hours reinforcing your coding skills without even realizing it. I've tried out some of the most entertaining and useful games for learning to code. Check out my favorites below. View As: One Page Slides

"For many years, digital learning games have been helping kids of all ages build new skills, grasp difficult concepts and improve their understanding of school curriculum. Young children find these games especially engaging, which can be useful when it comes to teaching kindergarten math."

"Nunook Interactive Inc has released the BrainNook Grade 2 Arithmetic 1.0 app for iPad. BrainNook is the next generation of learning games for schools and homes. It is a social educational game that allows students to strengthen critical math and language skills in real time with their classmates. The web-based version of BrainNook is used by 100,000 students in thousands of classrooms across the country."

"A key element to ensuring any successful pedagogy is student engagement. However, keeping students motivated and actively involved can be difficult. Besides the basic challenges of maintaining students' interest and participation in class, today's teachers also have to deal with growing numbers of students and the increased distraction from smart phones and other personal devices. One good way to keep students engaged in the learning process is by varying class exercises to include a combination of lectures, individual assignments, group work, computer activities, videos, and other pedagogical tools like games. Games are interactive, fun, and appealing to most students, and they also offer a number of specific benefits to the learning process."

"Code Maven and Game Maven are interactive programming tutorials from Crunchzilla. Code Maven and Game Maven use the same style as the popular Code Monster javascript programming tutorial. That style is to present a piece of code with instructions on one side of the screen while providing a visual of the outcome on the other side of the screen."

"TinyTap is a fantastic free iPad app and Android app for building fun and interactive review games. With the app you can create games based on pictures, diagrams, videos, and icons. The latest update to the app enables you to include a challenge mode in your games."

"People use the Scratch language to create interactive stories, games, and animations. Includes an active community to share projects. In the simplest terms, the Scratch language is a free programming language where you move blocks (also called bubbles) into a set order, then configure some of the blocks to create interactive stories, games, and animations."

"The iPad can be tons of fun for kids, but the trick is to balance hands-off activities like watching a movie with hands-on projects like making your own. Osmo is hands on-it's a set of iPad games played with real-world pieces, and unique stand with a red plastic piece that redirects the iPad's front-facing camera to the game pieces as your child interacts with them on a table or floor."