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Wonderful Talk. Very interesting notion of 'meaningful work' that makes us value our work more.

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.

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.

Students at the Center Project Explores How Students Learn Best--Reports on Enhancing Literacy and on Math Instruction for Minorities also Released New educational technologies offer exciting ways to help teachers adapt classrooms to the interests, needs, and strengths of individual students, but they cannot replace the crucial creative and emotional work of teachers, according to a new research paper from the ambitious interdisciplinary project, Students at the Center: Teaching and Learning in the Era of the Common Core.

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."

An effort to engage kids in coding by getting tech and non-tech celebraties to discuss coding in an accessible way. Also, attempts to motivate  them to get into a career where they can work in a really cool office...

Resource to consider for those working on game design; include

This a great (and local) group doing exciting work with Game Mechanics and Science Inquiry. Check it out!

Reducing the size of MOOC communities to foster collaborative  work and learning.

Taking focus to a whole new level! "While the equipment could have other uses for doctors, psychologists and other professionals working with the mind, developers are creating equipment that gamers can use to play with their minds." "The Neurosky Mindset includes a "Brainwave Visualizer" that lets you control on-screen shapes with your mind. A Math Trainer enables you to answer math questions with your mind. The company also has a MindHunter game in which you can fire a weapon by concentrating hard enough, or you can use the Mind Labyrinth where you travel by meditating through 52 levels of an ancient temple as your relax more and more. "

The Parent Engagement Tracker (PET) is a secured information system developed to easily track, measure and link parental involvement to student achievement. The software is available via the Internet and Microsoft Access Principals are able to measure parent attendance of various parent activities, school compact parent requirement hours, and the popularity of the different types of activities on a daily, monthly, quarterly or annual basis. This is really new. I have never seen something that tries to incentivize parenting.Do you think this would be a good initiative for a school.

How did you stumble on this? The copyright date is still listed as 2010 and three of the 5 links, including "About Us" are not working. In addition to the fact that I do not think it would be successful or a good idea and PET is a terrible name, the company simply does not seem to be up and working. Perhaps it is the wireframe for a college project :)

I'm sorry that I didn't see this earlier. I definitely think this may have been a real organization. The Connecticut parents union seemed to be doing something with it and here is a link to their brochure http://ctparentsunion.org/PETBrochureFinal.pdf, IN addition, the Hartford Public Schools piloted the program in 2010. They might have disappeared but there is definitely evidence that they were an actual organization.

As we students become graduates, Christensen's article is interesting both for perspective on career advice as well as it's broad references to extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in the workplace. As an HBS professor, he takes a very Business School approach to motivation.

This article applies what we've learned about self-efficacy, interest, and engagement to literacy: "What makes a child an engaged reader?"

Thanks for sharing this, Stephanie. Part of my job is to select books for a reading & writing academy in Seoul, and after reading this article I realized that affective elements of reading play a significant role in my book selections.

Hi Stephanie - The author is listed as working for Reading is Fundamental, which is an organization I now follow for my work on the T545 class project. Part of their agenda is to "prepare and motivate children to read by delivering free books and literacy resources to those children and families who need them most." They focus on reaching underserved children from birth to age 8. I am hoping my website project addresses some of the issues raised in this article. Thanks.

Caspian Learning built an immersive 3D serious game for Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity in the UK to increase operator engagement in training to use medical hoists.

I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement about getting into digital textbooks (article/link below) and 2) the criticism (this link) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters. Education needs to rethink the need for textbooks altogether. Digitizing them is not the answer. She states, "You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."

Hi Emily - thanks for your thoughts! Bloggers (especially those who use the name Hack in their title) are going to be provocative (one-sided) in their writing... but it helps raise questions about standard practices. I too agree that eTextbooks or iBooks are going to be tremendously more engaging and up-to-date than the ones that weigh down kids bookbags. But now take a look at the other article I posted: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/flow-digital-textbooks that suggests how publishers are not open to new and niche ideas that might be incredibly beneficial to education. The publishing market has a hold on education. Is it possible that the textbooks will not be available across a range of platforms, but only on a few that the publishers agree to work with? Maybe it is time we push for a more open source model... that could also work towards digitizing textbooks... or would innovate other ways for students to access "textbook"" knowledge.

Thanks for the nudge to read the other article that you posted as well! It was a nice counterpoint to Watters and the FLOW platform seems like a promising stab at digital textbooks from an open-source standpoint.