HGSET545

This conversation and the reporting her have more depth.

Common features of successful iphone games.

Here is a TEDxBlue talk by Dr. Duckworth on "grit," including overviews of some of her studies.

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.

An example of how teachers are using iPads to streamline data collection and analysis

Panel Discussion at the DML Conference on March 2, 2012

A study on game-based cognitive training and performance.

A research article regarding the interesting phenomenon of choosing avatars opposite of your real-life gender.

The growing badge-based-learning movement, which provides students with digital credentials that challenge traditional measures of achievement like college degrees, got a boost yesterday. Winners of the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition, which began in September, were announced at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, in San Francisco.

This article discusses 20 tips to enhance one's collaboration and blended learning experience.

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

For those who enjoy sport analogies, I received this from a coaching organization. Do you think they break 'motivation' down accurately?

The City University of New York connects educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY who are interested in games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching. They hope to facilitate the pedagogical uses of both digital and non-digital games, improve student success, and encourage research and scholarship in the developing field of games-based learning.

This is an interesting piece by Ben Shneiderman, the reigning authority on graphical user-interface design, and Greg Kearsley, an authority on distance education.

Related to the Pew Foundation Study on Tagging we read earlier in the course... Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text. A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. Coupling the use of such tools with blogging allows students (plural) to spot trends in their collective writing. The key is to "share-out" their pieces in weekly class review sessions. This "ups" the level of engagement.

A free tool to create and visualize your own tag clouds. Useful to analyze group themes in student writing. Sharing this data and the corpus of students texts, either synchronously or asynchronously, seems to be the key to upping the level of engagement.

This author advocates for using pop quizzes to motivate studying. I disagree with his method, but it's still good to see his side of the argument.

With a bank of 40,000 educational apps that have been cataloged, reviewed, and approved, a Tennessee initiative hopes to make it easier for educators to use apps in the classroom and beyond. Sometimes, finding the right app can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Seth Godin is giving away a book online, encouraging it to be spread among teachers and getting hundreds of thousands of readers. He usually writes about marketing and the spread of ideas, but he takes on education in this series of blog-post-provocative-conversation-starting writing. He states, "School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer."

Students at George R. Staley Upper Elementary School compete in a math video game that incorporates the STEM curriculum