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Consider the possibilities for a performance assessment while playing through this simple "escape the room" game. The validity of the experiment involved in the solution is questionable.

Escape games are very big in the publishing industry right now due mostly to their inquiry based assessment and the low development cost compared to highly immersive first-person games. The biology lab escape is one of the better ones that I've seen out there. Thanks Chris!

I played for about 8 minutes and then grew tired of the game. I am curious how assessors would have graded my performance. I found the easier way to "escape the room" was to close the browser window.

One example of using Ipads instead of math books. There is a brief mention of incorporating video, but the article does not go into detail about the format of the digital text books

Interesting to see what kind of role educational technology will play in this conversation.

"National statistics show that 68% of eighth graders cannot read at their grade level; American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared to 30 other industrialized countries; and most college students are "non-traditional" - spending more than four years in college or enrolling well after high school." ...and they say the industrial school model doesn't need a makeover. Sheesh!

A mother from New York who raised young children in China argues that the high-pressure testing that made them "feel bad" about themselves at the time was a good thing in the long run.

Really interesting article about the perceived importance of Internet to the K-12 student and suggesting how other entities and organizations are supporting equal access in this way.

Big money for games that help young children learn STEM

Maybe you or someone could comment on what this has in common with the Tesla project (or what is different). Would love to hear more. As a future middle school teacher, this inspires me. The contest geared toward middle school age validates my conviction that middle schoolers can and should be learning technology ... yes, even in BPS there's got to be a way.

TESLA is studying both how we can make math education more effective and what types of motivational inductions appeal to various types of students in grades 5-9. The emphasis in engagement is on building intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in math, rather than using external motivation to "sugar-coat" math as yucky, but necessary. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is often ignored by game designers,and as a result kids who are momentarily engaged in STEM can actually be demotivated longer term. TESLA is trying to established a more nuanced view of how to build this type of game.

David Walter Banks/Luceo for Education Week Susan Kramer watched her packed 10th grade biology class weave through rows of desks, pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead "carbohydrates" and goofy "phosphate" hats as they navigated their "cell." As they went, they explained how the cell's interior system works.

Using Facebook in the classroom has come up a few times in our discussions. In the same vein, this is a look at an interesting way of using Google Docs in the classroom.

"School of One uses technology to develop a unique learning path for each student and to provide a significant portion of the instruction that is both individualized and differentiated." I liked the definitions of individualized (pacing), differentiated (learning preferences/methods), and personalized (pacing, preferences, and content/objectives).

CHANDLER, Ariz. - Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They're studying Shakespeare's "As You Like It" - but not in any traditional way. To hear from more experts, and to share your own predictions for the future of technology in the classroom, visit the Bits blog.

Logical Choice Technologies has released an update to Letters Alive, an augmented reality education app for kindergarten and preschool. Letters Alive is a reading curriculum for preschool and kindergarten (and grades 1 through 5 for remediation and ESL) that consists of augmented reality-infused animal cards, augmented reality-infused word cards, software, teacher resources, and student activity sheets.

This is incredible. They REALLY took the AR capabilities and built out a robust curriculum. They didn't just stop with what I have seen as a "typical" use of AR (making the image or the letter appear as 3D objects), rather, they made the cards interactive and educational with sounds, changing color, sentence structure, punctuation, etc. Incredible!

Another example of a one-to-one laptop program in schools. Interesting to think of this from the standpoints of the various stakeholders, and how awesome is it that we have so many representatives in our classroom alone - teachers, parents, siblings, caregivers, researchers, and of course, publishers :-) Sally Ryan for The New York Times MUNSTER, Ind. - Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.