Group items tagged

ence.   I have used almost all lessons in the Expansion/Slavery curriculum section and I absolutely love these lesson. They are easy to use, well planned out, and it gets the students to stay on task and use academic language when discussing the material. The information is easily retained and the students are making more and more connections with material previously covered in class.   Rodney Del Rio, Teacher, Delano, CA More Testimonials

Review Gives Many States 'D' or 'F' for Science Standards

based on the current Maryland Educational Standards; the difference is the thematic problem-based approach to covering the content. Unit design within the program is driven by the grade-level science curriculum.

The team plans the units around an overarching question or problem that meets the following criteria: The problem is valid. Students can relate to the problem. There can be multiple paths to a solution. The problem can be applied to the various classes to truly integrate the unit across the grade-level curriculum

That beginning meant we had to give everyone access to technology - kids and teachers alike.

For too long we have ensured that the power of the engine - technology - was kept down to a level at which it would not do any harm - to curriculum

Curriculum must be built around core values: love of learning, lifelong learning, learning how to learn, working collaboratively.

themes

literary forms

The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like "tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication." The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy."

What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids: the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.

game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!