Group items tagged

Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.

Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.

24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).

“When there’s no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time”.

My Perfect School I’ve been asked on several occasions what my perfect school looks like. Today as it stands in January 2012 this would be my perfect school. PreK - 1st Grade: 1 iPad for every two students: iPads stay at school owned and managed by the school. 2 - 3rd Grade: 1:1 iPad program: Each student has their own iPad and iPads primarily stay at school and can be checked out by the parents to take home if need/wanted. 4th Grade: 1:1 iPad and 1:1 Laptop: The iPads are allowed to be taken home and are tied to a guardians account. The school purchases a set of “standard apps” anything above that is up to the parents. The laptops stay at school and can be checked out by the parents to take home if need/wanted. 5th Grade: 1:1 iPad and 1:1 Laptop: Same as 4th grade however the students at some point during the year gain the responsibility of taking both the iPad and the Laptop home. 5th Grade is a great time to do this because: In 5th grade students still only have one classroom teacher. This sense of classroom community is a great place to talk about responsibility and practice it. A good time to practice taking care of your devices before hitting middle school where students have 4 to 6 different classes in 4 to 6 different classrooms with 4 to 6 different teachers. Allow students to learn to organize their digital lives so they are not trying to figure this out at the same time they are learning a new “schooling” system of lockers, freedom and multiple classes. 6 -12th Grade: 1:1 iPad and 1:1 Laptop: Both devices become the sole responsibility of the student. The school loads a “standard” set of software on all devices and the students/parents are responsible for managing the rest.

The problem is not with the teachers, but with the very definition of 'media literacy' itself. What is it, really? Can we swap the term out with 'digital learning' or 'ed tech' or 'culturally relevant education'? If so, all these terms are essentially meaningless. A student learning how to use an iPad in the classroom is not the same as a student asking critical questions of the messages in television. One is about using the media; the other is about analyzing it. These skills are as different as reading and writing. Before we can take any steps toward a national media curriculum (like the UK has had for a long time), we need to come to a consensus about the meaning of these words. If the average American can easily articulate the difference between reading and writing, he should also be able to quickly explain why we need media in the classroom. Only then can our students get the forward-thinking education that they deserve.

Almost half of all content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust traditional media sources less than they did five years ago

Equally interesting is the fact that almost 50% of content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust the content that they’re finding on blogs—a number that rivals the 60% of content consumers who trust the content they find in print newspapers, television broadcasts and radio programming.

60% of all bloggers surveyed spend between 1 and 3 hours per week working on their blogs—and the average blogger posts new content to their site 2-3 times per week.

It's The Integration Economy, Stupid.

Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing.

Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking.

The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.

How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?

social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.

This naked bipartisan effort to exert power over teachers comes at a time when rhetoric praises teachers and recognizes their crucial role in the lives of children yet actual policies end up smearing all teachers with the tar-brush of selfishness and self-interest in this unrelenting attack upon teacher unions. Related Articles

Teacher Leaders must be compensated adequately for the additional time they spend fulfilling their leadership duties.

t doesn’t take a great quarterback rating to win games; it takes a team effort. Have the elected officials in Austin m