Group items tagged

"Both of these instances are things I never really thought about when I made the conscious effort to get my class connected.  I wanted them to learn and share with others and see how similar and how different they are from other children in the world.  But these are two benefits that I never really thought about.  I am sure there will be many more benefits to having a connected class.  Now I'm curious,what unexpected benefits have you had from having a connected class?"

Interesting perspective on the benefits of playing video games. 

<> Each one-hour program features classroom case studies and informative discussions. When you participate in the workshop in a group setting, you get the added benefits of peer interaction during pre- and post-viewing activities. The Learning Science Through Inquiry workshop provides a solid starting point to explore, discuss, and critique the inquiry approach - and ultimately put it to use in your own classroom.

increases a child's memory capacity, computer and simulation fluency, helps with fast strategic thinking, hand eye coordination, benefits children with attention disorders, helps particular skill development 

Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.

If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.

"Shouldn't learning be as easy and effortless as possible? Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be mostly wrong, as numerous studies have found that making material harder to learn - what the researchers call disfluency - can actually improve long-term learning and retention: There is strong theoretical justification to believe that disfluency could lead to improved retention and classroom performance. Disfluency has been shown to lead people to process information more deeply,more abstractly,more carefully, and yield better comprehension, all of which are critical to effective learning. This new paper attempted to provide the most direct test yet of the benefits of disfluency ."

Social/Emotional benefits of gaming

If you are a parent who has been limiting your child's computer play because of the claims you have read of harmful effects, the research summarized here and in my previous posts on video gaming might give you pause.  The bulk of the research suggests that the claims about negative effects of video gaming are largely myths and the positive effects are real.  As children know in their bones, the kinds of mental skills that video games help to develop are among the skills that are increasingly important in today's world.

Benefits of podcasts in class

"Here are five benefits that I would consider you would have in starting up your own teacher blog this year to assist you in your professional development as a teacher:"

Andy Robertson presents his call for a new "Priesthood of Player-Critics" who nurture fresh perspectives on videogames that enable more people to benefit from their emergent ways of telling stories about being human.

As an instructor of undergraduate and graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, I created a syllabus for the benefit of other college/university level instructors. I created a copy of the original syllabus for modification to use with high school students (probably juniors or seniors). I will rely on actual high school teachers to help me modify this source document. Please feel free to use, modify, and share this syllabus in your own way. Reorder the modules, add or subtract required or recommended texts and learning activities. Use your own assessment methods. If you wish to help improve this seed document, contact howard@rheingold.com and I will add you as a commenter and/or editor. 

For five weeks in January-February, participants and ESOL experts can engage in collaborative, online discussion or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. These sessions will bring together participants for a longer period of time than is permitted by land-based professional development conventions and will allow a fuller development of ideas than is otherwise possible.   Sessions are free and open to anyone around the globe. Bring your colleagues!  

"Gone are the days when you can dump out a backpack or flip through a folder to see your kids' work. The answers to "What did you do today?" are locked inside a password-protected device. Often kids have the upper hand in understanding how the device works -- and those 10-inch screens make it difficult to look over kids' shoulders. That's why the Common Sense Media Education team created the 1-to-1 Essentials Program. It's a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive, and free offering that covers everything that administrators, teachers, and parents need to know to maximize the benefits of schools' technology programs. "

An interesting study on benefits of gaming

For as long as I have been involved in education, the focus for finding the key to fixing education has always been about providing professional development for the teachers and administrators. The philosophy is top-down with the intent that knowledge will eventually trickle down to benefit the students.

The conventional wisdom today is that copying is bad for creativity. If we allow people to copy new inventions, the thinking goes, no one will create them in the first place. Copycats do none of the work of developing new ideas but capture much of the benefit. That is the reason behind patents and copyrights: Copying destroys the incentive to innovate. Except when it doesn't. 

I had the wonderful app-ortunity to make a site visit to Westlake H.S. in Eanes ISD on Wednesday February 1st. When we arrived, various campus and district officials shared some background on the student-centered learning initiative. They focused on multiple benefits of the 1:1 iPad initiative where high school seniors were issued iPads like textbooks at the beginning of the year. In a time where global communication, inquiry-based opportunities, and self-directed learning is how students manage the information revolution, it was refreshing to get to observe an iLearning Utopia.

But the biggest benefits of playing games, I've come to see, are social.