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Another blog on using play or gaming to learn! Love the Daniel Pink quote!

The website says: "THE Place For Educational Games!Our research-based and standards-aligned free educational math games and language arts games will engage, motivate, and help teach students. Click a button below to play our free multi-player and single-player games! In the future we'll add features enabling you to save records, tailor content for differentiated instruction, and pinpoint student problem areas." I think using the games in conjunction with a holistic approach to developing skills would make for a great way of getting students to practices some skills. Let students play, set goals, monitor those goals, reflect on their progress, and apply strategies/heuristics to specific problems they struggle with would create an environment in the classroom where learning was fun, self-monitored, and successful. 

OK, this is a pretty cool game site that is all about teaching and learning. I played the multiplication game longer than I should have and even played with the pet hamster for a while. He runs on that whell a long time. From the website, "All games here were made by Exuberant Games. Each game goes through important information for a certain subject matter for grades Kindergarten through 6th grade. The math games are great if you need to review your math facts for addition, subtraction , or division. Be sure to check out our new games for other subjects.

Great activity for having students develop their skills at estimating. Potential for developing their understanding of error analysis/estimating/measurement. Easy to play, and allows comparison to other players or comparison to their own plays.

Online games. I played a couple of the math games.Again primarily drill and practice but it pits you against an opponent so +s and -s.

What mathematical competencies must a teacher have to teach the subject well? This has proven difficult to investigate (1). A current view is that teachers' knowledge of mathematics "remains inert in the classroom unless accompanied by a rich repertoire of mathematical knowledge and skills relating directly to the curriculum, instruction, and student learning" (2). Unfortunately, there is no consensus on which "knowledge and skills" might activate teachers' inert knowledge. Two perspectives prevail, neither with a research base that enables strong claims about practice. The majority of current studies focus on explicit knowledge of curriculum content and instructional strategies. Such knowledge might be assessed directly through observation, interview, or written test (2), with a parallel research emphasis on the formal contents of teacher education programs [e.g., (3)]. A second school of thought, presented here, is that the most important competencies tend to be tacit, like skills involved in playing concert piano, learned but not necessarily available to consciousness.

This is also a great tool for cropping and slicing parts of a video to share with others. You can use to specify the start point of your video or to skip scenes, zoom in, annotate your video,and even play it in motion.

This is another web tool that lets users select a specific portion of a video to play. The difference between this tool and the ones mentioned above is that it only lets you specifiy a start time but no end time.

recently led a Google Docs session at Whittier Christian High School and was asked to provide a quick demo video illustrating the way I used formulas (and in particular the IF formula) to grade a quiz made using a Google Form. Apparently my explanation plays well face-to-face but considerably less well from memory. ;) For this video I cut right to the chase and did my best to explain the IF formula for beginners… while keeping under a 5 minute time limit. I hope it's helpful for you and your colleagues and I hope you'll let me know what you think.

Simple example of a blog post that has lots of power. This is the kind of blog post that I think we can do at CTL as an on-going piece of our work. It captures the ideas that we generate all the time, applies them to the work we are doing, provides a systemic way of producing new material that we can later turn into finished pieces of work. If we begin now, capturing these kinds of thoughts in a library, we can launch a CTL blog with a catalog of ideas that we can turn into posts. If the authors need some help clarifying/fine tuning that is where the system comes into play. By the way this is a fantastic post about the potential of something that is already in many students hands, but repackaged for use in an educational way. I imagine this as part of any distance network that we create, especially with Africa.

skills to solve equations, explanations of events from a Civil War Battle, aspects of an ecosystem, fill in the blank.

Lots of different 'games' to play to reinforce vocabulary for all kinds of subjects. If a student/teacher just wants to create a list of study cards this can do it. If there is a station in your class for vocabulary development you can use this site in lots of different ways to have students practice vocabulary skills. I dare you to try the space race. It's tough!

Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge.

Welcome to the Animated Atlas of African History! This map gives a year-by-year presentation of selected themes in the history of Africa between 1879 and 2002. Toggle buttons allow you to select which thematic layers to activate. Choices include: Territory names Changing boundaries, imperial rulers and political systems Violent conflicts Economic and demographic trends You can advance or reverse the chronology and change the speed with "play," "fast forward," and "rewind" buttons. The site also offers a textual summary of the year-by-year changes. The Flash-based animation may be operated interactively on the web or downloaded as Mac OS X or Windows executibles. The AAAH is designed to be an instructional tool at the secondary and college levels as well as for the general learner. It is subject to revisions based on new research and user feedback. Please check often for the latest version.

Prezi is a way cool (that's a high level technology term) presentation tool that I'm playing with. Here is an example that a student did for an honors physics class that I came across. I've bookmarked some other stuff this teacher has done, she is AMAZING! I haven't introduced Prezi yet because I don't think most teachers are ready for it, but I think this is a great example of rigor and cool.

Fun little game to learn how to write and identify linear equations. Moves students slowly through development of slope, horizontal and vertical lines. Fun to play.

"LiveBinders is your 3-ring binder for the Web * Collect your resources * Organize them neatly and easily * Present them with pride Best of all, it's free!" Now we are talking not only an organization tool but a creativity tool. In the process or organzing my materials, I'm creating those connections and webbing of links to where and why I post material in multiple places (3 ring binder tabs). I like it. I also like that it's drag and drop. I need to play some more with this one!

Easy game to play in which students have to use their understanding of fractions to fill in gaps. 

Some flash based games that students can play to hone their computation/number sense skills

Live Binder dedicated to iPads being used in schools.