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Use engaging videos on TED-Ed to create customized lessons. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube.

This article breaks down Angry Birds to distill lessons for educators, talking about engagement, mastery, keeping users in the zone of proximal development, and of course, gamification.

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..

One of the most powerful classroom management strategies available to teachers is the provision of learning activities which actively engage students during the lesson. When students arrive at the lesson in a motivated state, eager to take part -- and then apply themselves to a given task - there is far less likelihood that their behaviour will become a problem. Like most teachers, you have probably tried a wide range of student engagement and motivation strategies to deal with disruptive students but if you are looking for a reliable SYSTEM which has been proven to raise motivation and engagement levels among the most uninterested, dispassionate learners, you'll love this video series. In this first video, Rob Plevin from Behaviour Needs Ltd explains two reasons WHY it is important to engage your students during lessons. There are hidden benefits to ensuring your students are motivated and engaged during learning activities -- as the video shows.

Minecraft in the classroom - what knowledge and skills does it teach?

Thanks for sharing Sandra, this was an interesting article about injecting passion into our lessons. There were two questions I was thinking about though: 1) If we're not already passionate about something, why and how should we get passionate about it? 2) Excitement and passion do not equate to learning whereas solving problems or inquiry-based learning focuses the lessons on learning. Is that better? Cheers!

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 article suggests lessons that other teachers can learn from jazz teachers in motivating students and talks about the social, constructivist, and personal aspects of jazz that make it a passion for students who may otherwise be uninterested in school. "Students need to be doing something every day to demonstrate their learning."

Nice article, with a reference to Foldit!

Discusses game design and using the gamers' imaginations to your advantage.

An interesting challenge... and a claim about games

As consumers of Apple's products we should be aware of what's going on in the lives of people who make them and also use it as a lesson not to make the same mistakes when we run our own companies

This article explores the educational game Minecraft and provides ideas for lessons and projects.  The interdisciplinary game has the potential to enhance math skills, social studies/history learning, and reading comprehension.  

Here's a little introduction to motivation in psychology that you might find interesting--the other videos on the site are worth a peek, as well (though FYI, they are by no means as fun to watch as TED Talks).

Pixar director Andrew Stanton's talk on what guides him as a storyteller parallels what we strive to do as educators: to inspire our audience's sense of wonder, challenge, and relatedness. "The audience," says Stanton, "actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that." I'm not sure if storytelling is an apt metaphor for all learning situations, but I personally am inspired to look to storytellers for tips on how to connect with my learners.

Andrew Stanton is also the brilliance behind "Finding Nemo" one of the better Pixar films. "Working for their meal" and the "2+2" notion relates to honoring people's intelligence and not making the story or lesson or video game too simple or the goal too obvious. Dr. Dede has said in the past that to engage students who struggle, we should give them more dificult conepts and make them accessible. Similar ideas.