HGSET545

teaching academic content with games

educational video games and digital age

motivation, kinect, fitness

there is also a video on the homepage

misquotes go viral

Tech advances likely in the next year

An example of thoughts about gamification

This paints a picture of what a whole-school approach to educational technology-use could look like. Interesting to think about what can motivate teachers to use technology consistently and effectively...

What we discussed in class today. The experiment in New York schools.

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.

A fascinating use of Wikipedia. My son, a college freshman, loves this game. His crew uses "speed race" or "least clicks." Can this be brought to other educational levels?

An ebook reader in every student's hand by 2017.

With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.

Not just Apple but the whole movement of APPS has become its own entity. I feel like Howard Gardner should get royalties on the Multiple Intelligences category.

An interesting article that explores the question of whether kids will learn more and better on tablets.

Thanks for sharing! I think many of the strongest proponents of "tablets for all" would benefit from this more balanced perspective.

Interesting NYTimes article - an elementary school organizes regular field trips to provide students with basic experiences that many low-income kids don't get to have (i.e. an auto repair shop so they get a chance to experience sitting in a car) and connects these to academic work.

Great article! It seems like there is a growing movement to bring "play" back into childhood learning.

Using lotteries and other devices to motivate people to do things they might otherwise find unattractive.

Makers and users of mobile apps for children, take note!

The actual report itself is excellent, "Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing." [The link is embedded in the article.] Improvement in this area is critical. When apps came on the market, they were like "valet parking"... where a user could get directly to a software without roaming the web. This was an attractive feature (and avoided unwanted advertising, a plus for parents.). Now, not only are apps collecting data that we are unaware of (PRIVACY!), but many are engaged in advertising, some that we are aware of and some that we are not (click through to a website, etc.) "Staff found that about 7% of the 400 app store promotion pages indicated that the app contained advertising. As above, this number is likely to understate the number of apps containing advertising because app stores do not appear to require developers to disclose in-app advertising on their promotion pages, and because advertising is a common way to monetize apps." Free? Not so much.