Group items tagged

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop studied almost 200 education apps for Apple's app store. Good insight into what's in the market right now and what the current trends are.

Thanks Chris! I am looking forward to reading this thoroughly. It covers so many important topics/questions from: creating standards for apps marketed as educational (right now the developers just need to say it is "educational") to a call to academia to dive into research and help design effective, high quality material for digital age learning.

The URL just takes you to wikipedia... but anyone interested in joining a listserv about teaching/learning with wikipedia should read on. I just received this email and share it with all of you: Greetings, You're invited to join a new listserv that's been created to discuss teaching with Wikipedia. Dr. Robert Cummings of the University of Mississippi is leading this email group. This is a list for teachers of higher education who are interested in teaching with Wikipedia or researching teaching with Wikipedia. The goal is that list members will find support with pedagogy issues and find potential collaborators for scholarly research around teaching with Wikipedia. It's a list for teachers, by teachers. At the moment, there is no web interface, so the best method of joining the list is to send an e-mail to: md@listserv.olemiss.edu with the body of the message being: subscribe teaching-with-wikipedia You don't need a subject line or to include your signature or anything else. If you're interested in Wikipedia pedagogy, we highly encourage you to join the list and collaborate with others who share similar interests. The Wikipedia Education Program Team

Interesting study on rewards and motivation: Some excerpts - Rewards worked much better if they were given to students before the test, not after. Researchers found students worked significantly harder to keep what they had than they did to win something new. But none of the incentives worked at any age if students knew they wouldn't get the reward for a month. "All motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay," the researchers concluded. "Especially among children, the difference between right now and tomorrow is a big difference," Ms. Sadoff said. "For all students it's important that the reward be immediate." That impatience creates a massive problem for incentive programs based on state test results, which can often take months to turn around.

Thanks for this Kasthuri! This gives additional strength to the immediacy of digital rewards and students having access to their own "stats" (both potentially available in games and simulations). The thought of actual green-back monetary rewards for study/learning gives me the heebie-jeebies. I appreciated Alexandra M. Usher's comment, that "it's really important to reward inputs, not outputs [and] to reward behavior that kids can control, rather than just telling them to get better grades."

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!)

EducationUSA just released a virtual simulation on their Facebook page. They state that it is the "World's first game-based adventure for international students to learn about opportunities in the United States of America." A short YouTube video is linked below. I would love to get your thoughts on this application. Can creating an avatar effectively teach (and prepare) international students for the U.S. college experience? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fj01uSj4L4&feature=youtu.be

Using game creation as a teaching tool

What i found most interesting about this article was the idea that the popularity of Facebook games has caused a "technological step backward"

Kubbu is a new site that allows teachers to create activities to aid the learning process. Teachers enter the data and deploy it via several different activity types. They can then track the usage and results from these activities. In this sense, Kubbu is very similar to Quia.

Professor uses game design principles in college classes.

Awesome article about Miyamoto - the man behind Mario. Has some really interesting stuff about how he (and Nintendo by extension) creates compelling narratives and characters.

An article advocating K-12 experiences and school culture shift that instill students with motivation, skills, confidence

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication. Greg Steen currently serves as a trendspotter for Moxie, discovering and assessing marketing implications for global trends. He has over five years experience in analyzing trends and creating strategic campaigns for brands such as Verizon Wireless, Marriott and the Alzheimer's Association.