Group items tagged

In 2011, game designer Jane McGonigal published Reality is Broken, where she outlined four simple rules that define a game: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Both Jeopardy and The History of Biology fit this definition, but clearly there is a difference between games that teach the recall of facts and those that teach higher-order thinking skills.

esame Workshop, published a paper in 2011 called “Games for a Digital Age.” They distinguish between short-form games, “which provide tools for practice and focused concepts,” and long-form games, “which are focused on higher order thinking skills.” This is a useful first distinction teachers can use when evaluating games for use in the classroom.

A theme that comes up with teachers who use long-form video games is teaching empathy. “When I first started teaching natural disasters in Grade 7, there were case studies in the textbook, or videos,” says Mike Farley, a high-school teacher at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS). “When we invite students to play a simulation like Stop Disasters or Inside the Haiti Earthquake, they are more immersed; there’s more of an emotional learning.”

Gamification is the process by which teachers use video game design principals in learning environments. The effects are increased student engagement, class wide enjoyment of academic lessons, and high levels of buy-in, even from your most reluctant learners.

Components of Gamifying the Classroom There are several aspects of video-game design that can be incorporated into the gamified classroom. Here are several:

Points: In video games, users gain points as the travel through their quests. The more time they invest in the game the more points they earn

In education 1.0, online games which are nothing else but electronic worksheets were played in one unidirectional  way and there was only way correct way for players to win ; in education 2.0 commercial  games have made it into the educational scene and teachers and students started using them, examples of these games include: SIMs, World of Warcraft, Portal. However, in education 3.0, learners are not only using these commercial games in unique ways but they are also using several platforms to create their own games.

JeopardyLabs allows you to create a customized jeopardy template without PowerPoint.

Purpose Games allows you to create your own games, host your own groups / classes, study for a test, or just dazzle us with your knowledge. PurposeGames is a completely FREE service!

GamePress is a game creation app that allows anyone to make the games of their imaginations with no programming or graphic design

The Brain Puzzle The Thinking Skills Club organizes fun, cognitively enriching games into a curriculum disguised as a brain puzzle. The puzzle pieces fill with colour as games are passed in all 6 areas of the site: Executive Function, Problem Solving, Memory, Processing Speed, Social Skills and Attention.

They unplug at family dinner and before bed. They have a family movie night on Fridays, which is an example of the principle Radesky touts in her research, of “joint media engagement,” or simply sharing screen time.

But more than just limiting time, says Radesky, “I try to help my older son be aware of the way he reacts to video games or how to interpret information we find online.” For example, she tries to explain how he is being manipulated by games that ask him to make purchases while playing.

She sums up her findings from over a decade of research: “As kids and adults watch or use screens, with light shining in their eyes and close to their face, bedtime gets delayed. It takes longer to fall asleep, sleep quality is reduced and total sleep time is decreased.”

Initially in many institutions the move will be crude pedagogically, with an emphasis on video recording of lectures and flipped classes, or merely increasing the amount of online learning supporting regular classes. Over time, though, as instructors get more experience in hybrid learning, get more instructional design support, and greater pressure from the administration, full course re-design will increase, but major redesigns around hybrid learning may take as long as five years in many institutions. One reason for this slow adoption of re-design is the current lack of appropriate models for hybrid learning that have been tested and evaluated; this will change though as experience grows. Best practice for hybrid learning will emerge, as it did for fully online learning.

10. Expect the unexpected: One year: 100%; Three years: 100%; Five years: 100% These are the monsters lurking in the shadows. In online learning, the only thing you can really be certain of is the uncertainty. These are Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, so by definition they are unpredictable or non-forecastable. However, there are also some known unknowns that perhaps we should discuss. (MOOCs are good examples – they were known in 2011, but the likelihood that they would take off in 2012 in the way they did was not known, at least by most pundits.) Here are some possible bogeymen to lie awake worrying about:

the privatization of post-secondary education in the USA. Many states are in dire financial trouble. Will this result in some states privatizing their public post-secondary education systems? What price would Alabama State University fetch from a commercial buyer and how would that affect the state’s finances? If some states do decide on privatization, expect online learning to increase – indeed, online learning will likely increase in financially challenged states without privatization, because, rightly or wrongly, it will be seen as cheaper; also expect federal student financial aid to take a hit in the USA as Congress grapples with the deficit. a major Internet player (Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) jumps into the online learning market, perhaps in partnership with some elite universities, and takes a major share of the for-credit online market, because of lower costs, quality content, and accreditation from elite universities (but with a different category of degree from their on-campus programs) The US Congress backs publishers and shuts down all publicly funded open educational resources; copyright legislation is tightened on US-based Internet companies making it all but impossible to use educational resources over the Internet for free major power shortages/outages, due to bad weather/a surge in energy prices/political activists (pick your reason) makes online delivery increasingly unreliable during winter quantum computing arrives at a reasonable cost and completely changes the game.

The authors of this study conclude that teacher bias regarding behavior, rather than academic perfor

mance, penalizes boys as early as kindergarten. On average, boys receive lower behavioral assessment scores from teachers, and those scores affect teachers' overall perceptions of boys' intelligence and achievement.

The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements: Lessons that result in an end product--a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example. Lessons that are structured as competitive games. Lessons requiring motor activity. Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others. Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems. Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork. Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization. Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise.