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"Why Minecraft? Every day, more and more teachers are using the world-building game Minecraft to engage and educate. The game is a true phenomenon and gamers young and old are using it in countless creative ways. Practitioners of Games Based Education have realized the potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms around the world. Now you can too! What is MinecraftEdu? MinecraftEdu is the collaboration of a small team of educators and programmers from the United States and Finland. We are working with Mojang AB of Sweden, the creators of Minecraft, to make the game affordable and accessible to schools everywhere. We have also created a suite of tools that make it easy to unlock the power of Minecraft in YOUR classroom."

"Maths is one of the most fundamental skills that any child needs to succeed at school and life in general. Make the learning less of a chore by implementing gaming elements into the learning process. Lots of kids chose to play these games even knowing that they are maths based. That says something about the concept on which these types of games have been developed. See if any might be suitable for your class or perhaps just for one or two struggling students."

"Kahoot! on Wednesday launched Kahoot! Studio, a new library of free, curriculum-aligned games designed primarily for K-12 classrooms. The game-based learning platform offers a library of 20 million public "kahoots," or learning games and quizzes, created by more than 50 million active Kahoot! users worldwide. Many teachers in the United States use kahoots during class, but the company heard that creating or finding usable kahoots would take a while. "Kahoot! is at the intersection of education, technology and entertainment and we felt that we had a responsibility and duty to offer original content in order to make the lives of teachers much easier," CEO Erik Harrell said in a prepared statement. "Teachers have told us that they don't always have the time to produce their own content and this was the ultimate impetus behind Kahoot! Studio.""

"Google has recently released a new game called Smarty Pins which uses Google Maps for its layout. This is basically a game that tests players geography and trivia skills. I have been tinkering with it for sometime today and thought it ideal for classroom use with students."

"Third grader Cordell Steiner makes a pretty convincing argument for using video games in the classroom in this TEDx talk. He describes feeling more motivated to learn and master new skills because of his eagerness to beat his own high score or finish before the clock runs out. He says he used to be bored in class when his teachers had to slow down to explain concepts, but now each student plays games intended to help him or her with specific skills they're trying to master. He even gives examples!"

"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."

Our educational video games offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills by incorporating features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will motivate, intrigue, and teach your students.

Arcademic Skill Builders are research-based and standards-aligned educational games that offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills. We incorporate features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will engage, motivate, and teach your students.

Great browser-based math games for early/middle years students

"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."

"We know that kids love computer games and will spend hours on end totally engrossed in them. But "education games" are often neither educational nor much fun. The challenge is to find a way to organize, implement, manage, assess, guide and provide ample learning opportunities and still keep games fun. Minecraft - a wildly popular game that kids just can't stop playing - is changing that. I have found that Minecraft combined with design-based learning is the most powerful educational tool I have ever seen!"

""The minute you're born, you learn by playing together," says Åsmund Furuseth, VP for business development of Kahoot!, a game-based learning platform with one exclamation mark and 13 million monthly users. Furuseth and his colleagues at Kahoot! want students, parents and teachers to keep that process going into school and beyond. His company enables anyone to create their own game-based educational content, and helps to found new types of classrooms in which to best exploit it. Furuseth tells WIRED.co.uk he wants to "create an emotional connection between the learners so that they learn much better together -- this is what we believe is the future of how you learn"."

Lure of the Labyrinth is a digital game for middle-school pre-algebra students. It includes a wealth of intriguing math-based puzzles wrapped into an exciting narrative game in which students work to find their lost pet - and save the world from monsters! Linked to both national and state mathematics standards, the game gives students a chance to actually think like mathematicians.

Lure of the Labyrinth is a digital game for middle-school pre-algebra students. It includes a wealth of intriguing math-based puzzles wrapped into an exciting narrative game in which students work to find their lost pet - and save the world from monsters! Linked to both national and state mathematics standards, the game gives students a chance to actually think like mathematicians.

"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"The YMCA's Camp Combe is one of the most popular and best-known sleepaway camps in the New York Area. Serving over five hundred children a day during the summer months, the facility keeps its guests both busy and entertained with a whole host of activities including swimming, archery, high rope courses, nature walks, and...Minecraft? No, I'm not kidding. An hour outside of New York City, New York, a group of third-to-fifth graders this week dove into the camp's first ever Minecraft session. Of course, as creatively-oriented as the base game is, it doesn't really teach kids all that much as far as practical knowledge is concerned. That's why Camp Combe is using an educational variant of the title: MinecraftEdu. Deveoped by TeacherGaming, MinecraftEdu is a modified version of the base game whose sole purpose is to get its players interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. After logging in to MinecraftEdu, players are first taught the basics of the vanilla Minecraft experience - logging into a server, controlling their avatars, manipulating the environment, acceptable behaviors...you get the idea. Once they've been schooled in how to play, they're then given an objective; this task could be anything from building a bridge to creating a functional particle accelerator."

"Similar to Google Alerts I covered in an earlier post, Google Scholar also has an "alert" feature that allows users to keep updated about the topics, news, and authors that interest them. Google scholar Alert is particularly useful for student researchers who are doing research around a topic area and want to have access to the latest and recent output about it. Creating an alert on Google Scholar will enable you to receive emails with updates and new releases about your alert. For instance, let's say your research topic is game-based learning and that one of the established authors you want to make sure to read his newest updates in this area is James Paul Gee. You can go ahead and create two alerts using the following key phrases : game-based learning, and James Paul Gee. From the time you create these alerts, anything published on Google Scholar with these two phrases in it will come directly to your inbox."