Group items tagged

Bill Gates responds to NY ruling that teachers' performance assessments can be publicized. He calls for a rigorous and comprehensive teacher evaluation system that will provide educators with constructive feedback (not public humiliation) so they know what needs improvement.

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

This blurb announces a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop software tools that detect student engagement while using educational software--and use the data to improve learning. "To study engagement, robust learning, and emotion in real classrooms, [Ryan S.J.d. Baker's] research combines quantitative field observations of student behavior while using educational software with data mining to detect patterns in the ways students tackle the tasks that [his educational] software presents."

GIVING a child a computer does not seem to turn him or her into a future Bill Gates-indeed it does not accomplish anything in particular. That is the conclusion from Peru, site of the largest single programme involving One Laptop per Child, an American charity with backers from the computer industry and which is active in more than 30 developing countries around the world.

There's readings on this topic from Prof.Dede's course last fall. You can find it on the syllabus

With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.

The 24 new courses will use video, interactive software, games, social media and other digital materials to present math lessons for kindergarten through 10th grade and English lessons for kindergarten through 12th grade..