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Is this his warm up for us? I don't think teachers need more money. I think they want teaching contexts that are designed to work. Spend the money on that and teachers will feel great that they can perform in an environment that makes sense.

Greenlight for Girls uses various 2.0 tools to engage girls in informal learning to promote girls toward STEM careers. They compliment online work with on the ground, face-to-face conferences so that the online conversation has correlation with face-to-face experiences and interactions, making the online engagement more visceral.

This article is a bit snarky but it raises some worthwhile cautions around the buzz of tech in education, particularly Apple.

It is amazing to me that Apple and technology can take center stage in the education conversation without a word of professional development, best practices, learning outcomes... As I have stated before, I/we are an Apple family... but I am worried about the prospect that Apple's role in the textbook industry will eliminate other platforms and in-turn will limit access to many.

Tying in with our conversation about flow, this article mentions a way to physically induce flow through "transcranial direct current stimulation".

I have to say..I am a bit weirded out by this article. The days of Johnny Mnemonic are not far behind.

Students learn how to make educational web games. Globaloria is sponsoring some of the events for the Digital Learning Day (posted below) and are "opening their Globaloria game design classes to parents, friends, educators, administrators, policy makers and media. Visitors will get to experience first-hand the innovative, hands-on "game design studio" that these classes engage in daily. They will see students developing original STEM learning games, collaborating with peers and their teacher, using a digital curriculum, and receiving support through an online learning network."

This blog was named the best educational wiki of 2011 by Wikispaces. It's a little crowded, but full of interesting links.. For example, the link to http://www.neave.com/bounce/ is a screen full of colourful balls and if the students make noise , the balls bounce (it's meant to be a classroom management too, but could also radically backfire..)

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

This article emphasizes that the appeal of technology is not enough to motivate children to learn. Stresses that self-efficacy and the ability to set reasonable and attainable goals on their own is essential to fully engage students.

Perhaps this is also the answer to make sure technology doesn't turn into a distraction instead of a learning tool? I think many kids would benefit from learning strategies for using technology efficiently/avoiding distractions.

Thanks for this article! It captures some of the self-efficacy conversations that have been helpful in designing my project. I think as the role of the teacher evolves, we will rely on students having choices for modes of learning and and as the article states, "we [will] rely more on children's independent initiative and motivation."

Students earn virtual currency by completing math "missions" with third party content. This is a start-up incubated by Pearson. To unlock premium content, students would pay real money (this portion is modeled on Zynga's facebook games)

Nice to see the customization revolution well underway. Makes sense to focus on the upper teen segment who might be inspired to try something new to NOT dropout of HS or college. I wonder if their preliminary studies find changes in performance in traditional classes?

When you design a didgital product, it pays to look ahead and see what is coming around the corner.

One point not covered in the article is that there may be something inherently similar about "gamers" (such as a motivational, attentional, or perceptive profile) that makes them different types of learners than others. Yes, it's true that some people deeply enjoy the structured (some more/some less) challenges provided by games, both board and virtual...but others do not. The big question is, does it benefit a majority of learners (or, say, a majority of at-risk learners) to invest in curricula that leverages game-based-learning?

It may stray a bit from the topic of motivation, but here's a neuroscience article (that I found quite interesting) that discusses how a difference in striatal volume appears to affect how one's performance improves in playing a game: Erickson, K. I., Boot, W. R., Basak, C., Neider, M. B., Prakash, R. S., Voss, M. W., Graybiel, A. M., et al. (2010). Striatal volume predicts level of video game skill acquisition. Cerebral Cortex, 20(11), 1-9. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp293

This type of research is very difficult to do - so without examining the actual research articles it is difficult to determine how valid these studies are

The WSJ article makes strong causal claims based on observational studies. Classic confounding of correlation and causation. From what I could find of the Michigan-based research, for example, the "effect" of video game playing on behavior was a fixed-effect in a multiple regression analysis. It didn't (or shouldn't have) carried any causal implication. (Interestingly, the research also found that students with higher self-reported video game playing times over the school year also had lower GPAs...a finding conspicuously missing from the WSJ piece.)

Thanks, Shane!

A study on game-based cognitive training and performance.

A valiant effort to make the best use of a 'bare bones' classroom.

An excellent account of fostering engagement in students.

This paper makes a case for learning games grounded in principles of good fun and good learning, explores the commercial games market, gleaning lessons from this rapidly growing and diversifying place, analyzes the downfall of edutainment in the 1990s and establishes how the current movement differs. Then, this paper lays out the ecology of games with a purpose beyond play and establishes principles and best practices for moving the field forward in a positive direction.