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Tag Archives: learning

Designing students: Check out these contests (learning opps)!

12-Mar-13

These are projects that get young people and classrooms participating in the digital maker movement: Current or aspiring videogame designers and videographers have about a month to submit their creations to three different contests: The National STEM Videogame Challenge, Whyville’s game design contest, and Trend Micro’s What’s Your Story video producing contest. Design a videogame [...]

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EduCon 2.5 & helping kids learn in ‘a landscape with no maps’

30-Jan-13

As parents, we’re now beginning to accept this, I think: “We live in a world that is re-creating itself one life and one digital connection at a time … a landscape for which there are no maps,” as Krista Tippett said it in her introduction to a timely radio conversation with Seth Godin on American [...]

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Using social media to grow student engagement

26-Jan-13

Though student engagement seems like a tough thing to measure, Gallup recently did, calling it the education version of “the fiscal cliff” so much in the news at the turn of the year. In a survey of 500,000 students in grades 5 through 12, Gallup Education found that, while nearly 80% of elementary students its [...]

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Young readers and e-readers: Study

23-Jan-13

Despite their love for digital technology, 80% of kids and teens who use ebooks “still read primarily print books for fun,” a new Scholastic survey of readers aged 6-17 has found. But we are seeing a shift in the way kids read: “58% of 9-to-17-year-olds say they will always want to read books printed on [...]

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Mining Minecraft, Part 3: Safety & citizenship in games (do try this at home!)

14-Dec-12

Guest post by Marianne Malmstrom I’m thrilled by the competency and resourcefulness of my young students. But I also feel an urgency to inform parents and teachers that our children need us to be present and involved online. Just as in “real world” spaces, they require supervision and guidance in virtual spaces. They don’t know [...]

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Mining Minecraft, Part 2: Brilliance when students drive the learning

13-Dec-12

Guest post by Marianne Malmstrom At the Elisabeth Morrow School, we have been on a journey to help our students develop the essential skills of creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and citizenship. We turned to virtual worlds and MOGs because these are the same skills many young gamers practice through immersive play. Initially, we used [...]

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6-year-old self-taught pre-readers & tablet users in Ethiopia

05-Nov-12

Earlier this year, some 40 digital tablets (the Motorola version of iPads) were packaged into two taped-up boxes with no instructions and dropped into two Ethiopian villages, each about 50 miles from Addis Ababa and each with about 20 “1st-grade-aged” children, MIT Technology Review reported. The goal in this experiment, which OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte [...]

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Unboxing learning

27-Sep-12

Last spring I had the privilege and fun of spending a whole class period with middle school students talking about their favorite uses of technology. Of course there were about as many preferences as there were students, so I’ll just zoom in on one student whose interest I felt best illustrated how very individual and [...]

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Why kids love video games & what parents can do about it

19-Jan-12

Listen. Ask our kids about their in-game experiences, and then listen a lot. It may sound simple and we’ve heard it before, but listening can have powerful effects. This video interview for Kids and Media UK about kids and videogames with University of Bournemouth professor Stephen Heppell, who for more than 30 years has been [...]

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To bring learning back into school

22-Sep-11

This is a mashup of a blog post and a retweet. I’m basically retweeting (Twitter users’ term for reposting someone else’s tweet because you think it’s worth your own followers’ attention) educator and author Will Richardson’s March 2011 TEDxNYED talk in case you missed it. At about 1:30 into Will’s 14-min. talk, he mentions 17-year-old [...]

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