SimCityEDU: Using Games for Formative Assessment | MindShift - 0 views
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Gates & McArthur foundation looking to sponsor a version of Sim City for Educational use.
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"GlassLab is working with commercial game companies, assessment experts, and those versed in digital classrooms to build SimCityEDU, a downloadable game designed for sixth graders. Scheduled to be be released in the fall of 2013, it builds on SimCity's city management theme, but provides specific challenges to players in the subject of STEM. "The big pain point we've heard from teachers is that they cannot entertain their kids to the level that they are being entertained outside of the classroom," said Jessica Lindl, general manager of GlassLab. "They want to be able to create meaningful learning experiences and they just can't compete with the digital tools their kids are accessing all the time.""
Practical Tips for Mobile Learning in the PBL Classroom | Edutopia - 0 views
Now You See It // The Blog of Author Cathy N. Davidson » Distraction is Our F... - 0 views
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If we are feeling distracted, we should pay attention to that distraction. It may be telling us that there is something better elsewhere, something more deserving of our attention. Or it may be telling us we are on the wrong path, just when we thought we were zooming in to that perfect conclusion of a paragraph or a project. Or it may be telling us we need better tools, that the set-up we have is not fully appreciating the particularities and peccadilloes of our own work life and demands. Or it may be telling us that we need better partners, or a better method, someone or something to help us over the hurdle. Or it may just be telling us we are working too hard and we need to put down what we are doing and go outside for a walk, or stop for a cup of tea, or go for a run, or maybe just check out Facebook for a while. Distraction is our friend because it reminds us that we are fully human, not just workers, and that our lives are complex and, trying to shut out the complexity, may in fact turn out to be the least productive way to lead a life.
Higher Level Technology Use | Creating Lifelong Learners - 0 views
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A graphic that depicts the Technology Taxononmy I will talk about incorporating multimedia in the classroom as something all teachers should be doing but I definitely want teachers to know that they shouldn't stop there. To reach high levels of engagement, thinking, and to narrow the digital divide, teachers must turn technology over to students and guide them as they become their own content producers and influencers on the community outside the classroom.
Facing Social Pressures, Families Disguise Girls as Boys in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari. Through dozens of interviews conducted over several months, where many people wanted to remain anonymous or to use only first names for fear of exposing their families, it was possible to trace a practice that has remained mostly obscured to outsiders. Yet it cuts across class, education, ethnicity and geography, and has endured even through Afghanistan’s many wars and governments.
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There are no specific legal or religious proscriptions against the practice. In most cases, a return to womanhood takes place when the child enters puberty. The parents almost always make that decision.
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A bacha posh can also more easily receive an education, work outside the home, even escort her sisters in public, allowing freedoms that are unheard of for girls in a society that strictly segregates men and women.
Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
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“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
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A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.
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Actually Going to Class? How 20th-Century. - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views
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Interesting to think how this relates to primary and secondary education.... not just tertiary..... "In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely-or seriously reshapes them-might produce a very effective new form of college. That was the provocative notion posed here recently by Randy Bass, executive director of Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, during the annual meeting of the Educause Learning Initiative. He pointed out that much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do."
A Difference: You, Your Kids, and Your Phones - 1 views
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Digital Citizenship isn't an expression often heard outside of school. The ways in which it's discussed in main stream media are quite different from how it's discussed in schools. Most often the popular press shares sensational negative stories how kids use the internet and their phones to hurt each other. We have to have open and honest conversations about how things can and have gone wrong and what we can do to make things better in the aftermath of things like cyber bullying, online harassment, or sexting. That said, it's a far more powerful message to talk to kids and parents about how engendering empathy helps us understand each other so we choose not to hurt each other. It's also important to share stories and ideas how our modern mobile technologies empower us to effect positive change in the world around us in ways that weren't possible 10 or 15 years ago. We have to move beyond stranger danger and scare tactics. Sharing frightening stories (often overstated) does nothing to model positive outcomes or move the conversation to discussions of how to deal with something gone wrong. Kids need more models of empathy and empowerment. Parents do too.
11 Ways Finland's Education System Shows Us that "Less is More". | Filling My Map - 0 views
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Finland follows the basic formula that has been performed by math teachers for centuries: The teachers go over homework, they present a lesson (some of the kids listen and some don’t), and then they assign homework.
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What if we didn’t force students who know that their talents reside outside of the world of formal academics to take three years of high school classes that they found boring and useless? What if we allowed them to train in and explore vocations they found fascinating and in which they were gifted?
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This system allows the Finnish teacher more time to plan and think about each lesson. It allows them to create great, thought provoking lessons.
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...why are Finnish students succeeding and ours are failing? The difference is not the instruction. Good teaching is good teaching and it can be found in both Finland and in the US. (The same can be said for bad teaching.) The difference is less tangible and more fundamental. Finland truly believes "Less is More." This national mantra is deeply engrained into the Finnish mindset and is the guiding principal to Finland's educational philosophy.
How Google Is Changing The Way We Think - 0 views
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According to Small’s research, using a search engine increased activity in the regions of the brain dealing with decision making, complex reasoning and vision. Also, the more-experienced Internet users exhibited more than twice as much brain activity as the less-experienced subjects, leading Small to predict that the more we search, the stronger the brain’s reaction to searching.
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One influential study, produced by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that people were less likely to remember a piece of trivia when they had access to the Internet. Instead, they were more likely to remember where the information had been saved.
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“The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the researchers concluded.
Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: Change Agent - 0 views
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You’ve written that too many teachers are “un-Googleable.” What do you mean by that and why does it matter? What I mean is that too few teachers have a visible presence on the Web. The primary reason this matters is that the kids in our classrooms are going to be Googled—they're going to be searched for on the Web—over and over again. That's just the reality of their lives, right? So they need models. They need to have adults who know what it means to have a strong and appropriate search portfolio—I call it the “G-portfolio.” But right now—and this is my ongoing refrain—there’s no one teaching them how to learn and share with these technologies. There's no one teaching them about the nuances involved in creating a positive online footprint. It's all about what not to do instead of what they should be doing. The second thing is that, if you want to be part of an extended learning network or community, you have to be findable. And you have to participate in some way. The people I learn from on a day-to-day basis are Googleable. They’re findable, they have a presence, they’re participating, they’re transparent. That’s what makes them a part of my learning network. If you’re not out there—if you’re not transparent or findable in that way—I can’t learn with you.
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Why do you think many teachers are not out there on the Web? I think it’s a huge culture shift. Education by and large has been a very closed type of profession. “Just let me close my doors and teach”—you hear that refrain all the time. I’ve had people come up to me after presentations and say, “Well, I’m not putting my stuff up on the Web because I don’t want anyone to take it and use it.” And I say, “But that’s the whole point.” I love what David Wiley, an instructional technology professor at Brigham Young University, says: “Without sharing, there is no education.” And it’s true.
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What could a school administrator do to help teachers make that shift? Say you were a principal? What would you do? Well, first of all, I would be absolutely the best model that I could be. I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changing. I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.
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inquirers.org - for thinking about learning - 0 views
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Posted on 03/05/2011 10:17 am by Simon Davidson Project overview The current project of the inquirers.org team is a research project on the traits of successful people, and how they relate to their educational experience and learning from life outside schools and colleges. The research question is What are the traits of successful people? - What are the underlying common traits that lead to success? - Are they different in different fields/cultures - How do they link to curriculum outcomes and other effects of education? This will be developed into a book and proposals for educational reform. The main authors are Simon Davidson and Lindsey Ferrie.
Let's Ban Bans in The Classroom | DMLcentral - 0 views
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I’ve yet to read an earnest blog post calling for a ban on pencils in the classroom — but rather portable electronics, most notably the laptop.
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but then one wonders why the shoddy outcomes of the lecture format are worth defending.
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Screen Time? How about Creativity Time? - Mitchel Resnick - Medium - 1 views
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Too often, designers of educational materials and activities simply add a thin layer of technology and gaming over antiquated curriculum and pedagogy
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But I’m also sure that some students found it very discouraging and disempowering. And the activity put an emphasis on questions that can be answered quickly with right and wrong answers — certainly not the type of questions that I would prioritize in a classroom.
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In many cases, the skeptics apply very different standards to new technologies than to “old” technologies. They worry about the antisocial impact of a child spending hours working on a computer, while they don’t have any concerns about a child spending the same time reading a book. They worry that children interacting with computers don’t spend enough time outside, but they don’t voice similar concerns about children playing musical instruments. I’m not suggesting that there are no reasons for concern. I’m just asking for more consistency.
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