Group items tagged

Students communicate with individual tutors online during classroom time.

An interesting article that discusses the highlights of the Learning Without Frontiers conference, which took place in London last week. One such highlight--a professor of neuroscience at Bristol University addressing the neuroscience behind engagement with video and computer games.

This is great! Teaching kids at a very young age that computers are not just smart but are programmed to be smart can be very valuable. So many new tools and technologies these days are completely abstracting how they actually work, which makes me worry that kids just think computers are magical.

So true! Clearly, it's the people who create the technologies that are magical. =p

Interesting article and video about a new way of teaching children to program. A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time. The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.

I just heard about this from a friend and then stumbled across your link - and then wound up on the Raspberry Pi website to try to find out more about the education component of it (which is supposedly the whole motivation). Right now, the website is focused on showcasing the capabilities of the device and the hardware/software choices that they made. I was disappointed to find, when looking through their FAQ, that there is only one small blurb about educational material in which they vaguely state that support resources are currently under development. No doubt they are allowing a greater number of people access to a cheap Linux machine, but that does not mean those people are going to use it to learn to program. I'll be interested to see if the focus really does shift to education as the resources come together... right now it just seems like a cool new toy for a Linux geek (with the potential to be so much more!)

An article about computer games in science education using "active prolonged engagement," as opposed to "planned discovery."

Teacher Joel Levin has seen the positive effect Minecraft can have on relationships among schoolchildren - especially on those who would otherwise be dismissed for being too geeky. "Suddenly those computer skills become transferable into social capital," he says. Mr Levin is the co-ordinator of Minecraftedu which was set up to show how the game can be used in classrooms. About 1500 schools are now using it as a teaching aid and not just in computer science lessons.

This article proposes that one of the reasons to integrate technology into the curriculum is to support active engagement in learning.  

Too engaged in digital media? Not engaged with humankind? Here is a national unplug day invite. March 20th people all over the world will be quiting their phones,computers or whatever other device of choice keeps them from spending time interacting with other humans and enjoying the analog beauty that is all around us.

I can't do this and I'm pretty old! Can't imagine young people being able to.

This is an interesting article that speaks to the result of over-engagement. I wonder if this problem is specific to Korea and less so in other countries (if so, what is it about that environment that makes video games so addictive) or if it's only been studied in Korea but could be a similar problem in other parts of the world.

a computer game that is operated by eye movements

"Everything that happens in the game has two components -- the visual component where you can see what's going on, and then there is the audio component where you can also hear what's going on"

"Two teams of computer programmers from the University of Houston are being honored in a national competition. They created a couple of video games designed to entertain and educate."

K-12 version of Horizon report

Dr. Kenneth Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, shares a keynote presentation at the Saylor Foundation's 2013 Digital Education Conference

Professor Rosalind W. Picard, ScD is founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, co-director of the Things That Think consortium, and leader of the new and growing Autism & Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. In April 2009 she co-founded Affectiva, Inc., where she serves as chairman and chief scientist.

Thanks for sharing Rupangi. This tool could provide so much valuable feedback to educators as they design formal and informal learning environments for students. There are two things which I think any educator should be very aware about before implementing it though: 1. The privacy of the data and who has access to it 2. The steps that can be taken to prevent a misinterpretation of the data.

Kids today just love to play computer games, and the West Virginia Department of Education is tapping into that love through a website called Learn21.

I think I just found a host for my EMF rubric! Thanks Gozie!

story of a third grade class in Chicago using a computer-based memory game to improve their "fluid intelligence." article focuses on the work of Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl of the University of Maryland

One Laptop per Child- results are still unconvincing.