Group items tagged

Courses should encourage open participation and meaningful engagement with real audiences where possible, including peers and the broader public.

Students have the right to understand the intended outcomes--educational, vocational, even philosophical--of an online program or initiative.

n an online environment, teachers no longer need to be sole authority figures but instead should share responsibility with learners at almost every turn.

Digital games for learning academic skills change depending on each student’s ability and course of action. Such games provide personalized feedback in real time—something a traditional classroom often doesn’t offer.

“The technology and the research have evolved to the point where we can actually have a sense of the impact games are having on learning,”

“One of the things we can do for these kids,” he says, “is to give them exposure to different contexts that they would never otherwise encounter.”

1) focus on project based learning 2) focus on play 3) focus on student-centric learning & passion (applied in both kindergarden and graduate school) 4) focus on practical problem solving 5) focus on the spirit of kindergarden 6) some outside the classroom learning 7) support activities & support structures for facilitating student passions 8] Everyone likes the physical world & experience (not just kids) 9) Can do media & virtual words too, in conjunction with physical world (particularly for modeling of complex systems) 10) Challenge to integrate individual/personal passion into group projects & collaboration (connect similar interests or complementary skills in an “organic way”) 11) There is a distinction between emergent collaboration and the order of “you 3 work together” 12) Scratch can change education–mirroring the use of Logo before it. Also, scratch mirrors snapping Legos together to create “media rich projects and share in an online community” Its programming for novices. Its accessible & tinkerable. Its about meaningful projects (not just generating list of prime #s). Resnick also points to the interesting program of Alice at Carnegie Mellon which is 3-D, but it unfortunately isn’t as meaningful & personal & social as Scratch. They’ve had 1 million projects in 3 years from kids around the world

When the school was created, a research and design studio known as Mission Lab was integrated into the design of the school by founding partner Institute of Play. The goal of Mission Lab is to help teachers teach the way they wish they could — the way they dream of engaging their students, were it not for the lack of support and other obstacles that often get in the way. Mission Lab supports teachers by pairing them with a game designer and a curriculum designer (staffed by the Institute of Play) who help make the teacher’s vision a reality, providing support throughout the process of design and implementation.

Teachers in their first year at the school have two weekly curriculum meetings built into their schedule, and meetings for returning teachers are scheduled on an as-needed basis, usually once a week.

he mission narrative, or context, is developed once the teacher, game designer, and curriculum designer have identified the big ideas, learning goals, and standards for the trimester.

Understanding how to use Python, or write code to solve problems, is just a way of having an additional tool to be creative with."

"The old teaching method — you know, where a teacher says something and you write it down and then take a test — that's about as passive as it gets," he says. "This idea pushes kids to be more actively involved since, by and large, it's something we're both learning together. That leads to a lot of innovative teaching — and a lot of innovative learning, for that matter."

"I'm certainly not a coder," says Lisa Brown, an English teacher and head of the English department at Beaver. "But, like anything, the more I've played around with it the more I've realized there's a lot that's really accessible and understandable."

This new revolution started in the 20th century with sound recording and film, moved next to television and radio and today takes the form of the internet.  He points out that there is a common theme when people consider these changes – that they are not simply something new but also the end of something old. 

The primary impact on the mediated context of content during the parenthetical period is containment.  Look at a printed work, Pettitt suggested, and you will see strict regimentation.  Words are forced into lines, surrounded by margins, placed on pages that are sewn into a binding, contained by a jacket and placed on a shelf where they can be contained and controlled.  The words have been "imprisoned" and have lost much of their pre-parenthetical fluidity.  This confinement of cultural production has obviously not been limited to the written work: plays move to stages and music to concert halls during the parenthesis.

He said that human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the kinds of categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a "medieval peasant."

We are aware of how much we don't know: that we have yet to explore the full pedagogical potential of learning online, of how it can change the ways we teach, the ways we learn, and the ways we connect.  

As we begin to experiment with how novel technologies might change learning and teaching, powerful forces threaten to neuter or constrain technology, propping up outdated educational practices rather than unfolding transformative ones.

All too often, during such wrenching transitions, the voice of the learner gets muffled.

blending technology with face-to-face teacher time generally produces better outcomes than face-to-face or online learning alone

Rather, what matters most is how students and teachers use technology to develop knowledge and skills. Successful technology integration for learning generally goes hand in hand with changes in teacher training, curricula, and assessment practices

Students playing an active role in their learning and receiving frequent, personalized feedback Students critically analyzing and actively creating media messages Teachers connecting classroom activities to the world outside the classroom

conference organizer will ask you to make a presentation, and while doing something different and creative - and effective - should be welcomed by all, we retreat to doing only what is expected (less downside that way) rather than doing something creative, different, and engaging. After all, doing what is expected is pretty easy, but surpassing expectations and doing something remarkable with impact is both harder (usually) and comes with an increased risk of failure.

Even when we give people a mile and encourage creativity and nonconformity, it still seems like too many play it safe and take only an inch. I can't help but think that the habits learned in formal schools across the world at least in part contribute to this cautious approach to doing things differently.

Don’t be afraid to cannibalize your own business in the name of progress.

But Kodak’s inability to make any of its products stand out over the last decade is demonstrative of an overall reluctance to innovate.

The story of Kodak’s downfall is an affirmation that true innovative spirit is much more often found in smaller companies and startups rather than old-school behemoths of yesteryear. After all, if you don’t have much to lose, you tend to make many more all-in bets. But, as Kodak has shown, if you do nothing but play it safe, the cost just to stay in the game will whittle you down until you’ve got nothing left.

new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.

"A lot of important stuff happens when playing games," Ms. Shute said. "You're just doing. You're in the process."

"Wouldn't it be lovely to actually pass along the log files of what students did in order to look at their scientific-inquiry skills?"

I’d say that 21st Century educators first need to be content experts and second need to be media literate to be relevant to their students.

We can’t expect students to use media correctly if as educators we’re not willing to jump in and learn, share and collaborate with our personal learning network.