If you carefully choose the right sort of game it will engage the children in your class - in my opinion you have to take that as a given. It is what you do with that engaged group of children and how you make a difference to their learning that counts.
The core content of Hector's World™ material features high quality 2-D animation with fun and engaging characters. Children can observe the characters as they learn how to stay safe online.
Quality assurance,
in its broadest sense, is any action taken to prevent quality problems
from occurring. In practice, this means devising systems for carrying
out tasks which directly affect product quality
To implement systems
for an organisation, you need to carry out three basic steps: first develop
the system; second, document it (this takes the form of policies, procedures,
and reference information); and third, inform, instruct, and train staff
to use it.
Quality assurance does not only apply to products.
Services, and even "non-production" activities such as administration
and sales, benefit from a quality assurance approach.
These
Standards exist because many large organisations will not buy from suppliers
who cannot give them assurance that they have systems which support quality.
These large organisations include Government Defense Departments, Health
Departments, car manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, and General Motors,
and Aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed.
Until the mid 1980's
these large organisations published their own standards or codes for suppliers
to follow, and their staff would audit supplier companies regularly to
make sure they followed the code. It was not unusual for a supplier to
be audited separately by a number of larger customers, all with their
own quality system codes. In some instances suppliers hosted 30 or 40
quality system audits a year from all their major customers. To reduce
the number of audits to which individual suppliers were subjected, the
International Organisation for Standards (ISO) published a series of standards
in 1987 known as ISO 9000. Most large purchasing organisations accepted
this worldwide standard and ceased to issue their own codes. They also
ceased carrying out their own audits and accepted the findings of independent
audit companies engaged by supplier companies to check their systems against
the ISO 9000 standards. This allowed supplier companies to reduce the
number of audits to two or three per yea
What students are really motivated by are opportunities to be social — to interact around challenging concepts in powerful conversations with their peers. They are motivated by issues connected to fairness and justice. They are motivated by the important people in their lives, by the opportunity to wrestle with the big ideas rolling around in their minds, and by the often-troubling changes they see happening in the world around them.
Technology’s role in today’s classroom, then, isn’t to motivate. It’s to give students opportunities to efficiently and effectively participate in motivating activities built around the individuals and ideas that matter to them.
Basically what I’m arguing is that finding ways to motivate students in our classrooms shouldn’t start with conversations about technology. Instead, it should start with conversations about our kids. What are they deeply moved by? What are they most interested in? What would surprise them? Challenge them? Leave them wondering? Once you have the answers to these questions — only after you have the answers to these questions — are you ready to make choices about the kinds of digital tools that are worth embracing.
The results found that both the implementation and outcomes of the program were varied across the five 1:1 settings and over the three years of the student laptop implementation. Despite these differences, there was evidence that the types of educational access and opportunities afforded by 1:1 computing through the pilot program led to measurable changes in teacher practices, student achievement, student engagement, and students’ research skills.
"This paper examines the educational impacts of the Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative (BWLI), a pilot program that provided 1:1 technology access to all students and teachers across five public and private middle schools in western Massachusetts. Using a pre/post comparative study design, the current study explores a wide range of program impacts over the three years of the project's implementation."
The key for me is that I want this device to be a valuable tool in collecting data, staying in touch with my administrative team, unrestricted real-time access to my PLN, and as a form of motivation for my teachers to take more risks with technology to engage students in the learning process.
"In my last post I wrote about some iPad apps that I thought were must adds for administrators and educators alike. Since then I have received some great suggestions from my PLN and had the chance to check out other apps that I have found a use for as a High School Principal. "
"It's always been the case that whatever young people are doing now and whatever is the fashion now, there will be crusty and unfortunately ignorant people who think that somehow it has less weight, less heft, less intellectual respectability, less connection with our cultural identity, less seriousness," he said.
"It's nearly always nonsense."
"In what could be one of the great misjudgments since the record company that turned down The Beatles, one of Stephen Fry's teachers once described him as "feckless, fickle, flamboyant and evasive .. He told ABC Radio's PM of his enthusiasm for all things digital, including micro-blogging site Twitter, which he think has also been misjudged as trivial."