Group items tagged

Apps that will help you learn a new language.

MindSnacks leads the way in "Gamified" educational apps for learning new languages. Some of these look pretty cool...

Article focusing on emerging technology in the realm of facial recognition that may be able to bolster the non-cognitive abilities of adaptive learning environments, by recognizing a student's reaction to content by analyzing body language.

As we get closer to the presidential election, organizations and individuals are once again appealing to officials for an education reform. Over the past few years there has been a push for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) programs. What about a push for language instruction?

this article reminded me how unengaged I was/am by the idea of diagramming sentences in spite of some people I know who thrill in the memories. It seems to me that the ipad offers some ap capability to reinvent this idea and make it even more visual.

"Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language."

I am going to try to use Kodu. If a 4th grader can use it..... :)

This teacher also provides a nice, practical synthesis of some of the ideas presented by our recent reading.

Internet sland term added to the Oxford English Dictionary

This is such a well-designed learning platform! 

How's your Spanish/Italian going? Do you think this site is good for fostering creativity as well as memorization?

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

This blog post describes the successes and failures of one school to integrate games into their latin language instruction. Teachers found the game compelling because it forced students to engage and prepare in a way that students do not in traditional classrooms.

If everyone is learning to write code for the internet, will we see an explosion of new sites, apps, and even games?

Some researchers are looking at how video games open up new wiring in the brain. "Infancy is filled with the best of times: critical windows of weeks and months when the growing brain fine-tunes things like language skills and vision. And it's wise to take advantage of them, for when the windows slam shut, those skills don't develop. Or so scientists used to think." Also, "Playing a video game called Medal of Honor helped some people recover lost visual abilities." But some researchers are not confident we know enough or raise ethical questions about further interventions.

In this presentation by Cecilia d'Oliveira, MIT OpenCourseWare's Executive Director and Shigeru Miyagawa, Chair of MIT OpenCourseWare's Faculty Advisory Committee and Head of MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Department, we'll examine the how open educational resources are changing the educational landscape and meeting the global demands for open knowledge.