HGSET545

Here is the latest volley from NYC in its maneuvering with the teachers' union. No particular relevance to technology, except that I guess this loan repayment offer would attract young teachers with loans hanging over them.

Video game exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, through Sept 30.

Just for fun.

Not bad.

A blog post by Dr. David Dockterman. In learning by playing videogames, constructivism and flow are significant.

SuperBetter is a game designed to increase the player's "personal resilience" or grit while facing health or illness recovery challenges. Jane McGonigal is one of the creators. The game is in closed beta; it looks like you can sign up to play at least part of it from this site.

Many adults have little idea of how children use technology in their everyday lives. Out of fear that it will be used to engage with non academic content, we want to keep schools the same good old way - very different from the rest of their lives.Addressing both school culture and issues of inequity would be important in enabling students to learn with tools they are most familiar with.

Roger Travis, Professor of Classics uses games to teach Homeric epics. The 1:1 mapping he used for learning objectives and play objectives led him to coin the term "practomime" from "praxis and mimesis," that is, a doing and representing.

I really liked the building points toward a grade concept and the idea that people were more willing to compose in Latin.

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.

Special section of Education Week focusing on virtual schooling

This article brings us back to an old unanswered question...how will we assess students to truly capture what they are learning? Online platforms tend to rely heavily on multiple choice. Online course developers will need to be more creative than plain old multiple choice in order to prove the rigor of the online environment.

The classic on visual design for consistent "usable" windows-based interfaces.

Diedrich on grading.

Educators interested in "flipping" their classroom (that is, providing traditional lecture material for review at home and problem-solving exercises in the classroom) now have two more options to provide core content with a minimum of effort.

Two faculty members test out social media (Twitter and Google+) in the classroom. They evaluate the pros/cons of using these technologies, admittedly not knowing if/how it affects learning outcomes yet.

Salman Khan (graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School) talks about the flipped classroom and how tech changes the shape of future "classrooms" in an Education Week interview.

Doodling - self-mechanism for processing info and sustaining engagement?

The nonprofit group called TED, known for streaming 18-minute video lectures about big ideas, today opened a new YouTube channel designed for teachers and professors, with videos that are even shorter. The new channel, called TED-Ed, was announced a year ago, but its leaders are only now unveiling the project's first videos.

"In his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee derives a set of learning principles from his study of the complex, self-directed learning each game player undertakes as s/he encounters and masters a new game. He suggests that adherence to these principles could transform learning in schools, colleges and universities, both for teachers and faculty and, most importantly, for students."

Here is a different take on engagement. The people who promote this new service see this as a way to use technology to help the homeless engage with people. Engage or exploit? You decide.