This Monday we dedicated a station to analyzing our data from last week’s small-group gaming.
Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more [...]
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Posted 29 January 2010
† Chad
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Also tagged: Authentic engagement, Authentic work, Collaboration, Game-based learning, Instructional technology, Learning with games, Lives lost: levels won metric, Relevance, Small-group gaming, Strategic thinking, Video games
Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.
Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with [...]
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Posted 25 January 2010
† Chad
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Anecdote
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Also tagged: Authentic engagement, Authentic work, Collaboration, Communication, Game-based learning, Instructional technology, Leadership, Learning with games, Lives lost: levels won metric, Meaning making, Relevance, Small-group gaming, Social learning, Social stories, Soft skills, Strategic thinking, Video games
[Author's note: I love Foyble.com and its potential to add relevance and voice to students' community service. I greatly appreciate the opportunities I have to work with Foyble.com, but I am in no way compensated by the site.]
Monday night I Skyped with Brian Foy (@Foyble_org), a co-founder of Foyble.com, and Jack King (@drjackking), founder [...]
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Posted 14 January 2010
† Chad
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Also tagged: Authentic work, Brian Foy, charity: water, Community service, Digital citizenship, DoGood, Education reform, Educators give, FaceBook, Foyble.com, Haiti earthquake 2010, Innovation, Instructional technology, Jack King, Meaning making, Northfork Center for Servant Leadership, Relevance, Service learning curriculum, Skype, Social media curriculum, Student blogging
My sources say these predictions for 2010 are pretty sound. Network macronodes will ditch the hubs and spokes and explode into clouds as learners carry new learning with them from opportunity to opportunity.
Social reading
I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed [...]
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Posted 02 January 2010
† Chad
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Also tagged: 2010, Authentic work, Book challenge policy, Career & Technical Education, e-Reader, Edmodo, Flexbook, Innovation, Inquiry by RSS, Instructional technology, Karin Perry, Laura Oldham, Magic 8-Ball, NCLB, Patacritical Demon, Predictions, RttT, Skype, Social media, Social reading, SpecLab, Teacher evaluation, Teacher pay, The Educational Optimists, TwitterKids of Tanzania, Website challenge policy
Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in [...]
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Posted 19 November 2009
† Chad
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Also tagged: Alfie Kohn, Authentic engagement, Authentic work, Becky Fisher, Bud Hunt, Education reform, NCTE, NWP, Personal meaning, Semi-school environment, Standards, Student entrepreneurship, Student publication
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, [...]
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Posted 06 November 2009
† Chad
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Also tagged: Africa, Arusha, Authentic engagement, Authentic work, Instructional technology, Interactive whiteboard, Plot structure, Relevance, Seesmic, Shepherd's Junior School, Tanzania, Twitter, Twitterkids
When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.
However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of [...]
Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.
It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.
Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against [...]
[Editor's note: Guest blogger Damani Harrison, gifted musician and mentor, joins Classroots.org for a series of posts sharing his take on authentic engagement in teaching and learning. Damani works for the Music Resource Center, "a state-of-the-art facility where teens can learn the latest technology in the music industry and study and participate in every phase [...]
Over at Twitter recently, @mctownsley pointed toward an earlier post at Edumacation about the tension between standards-based assessment and traditional grading.
Assessments, like any kind of data-based research, can be used by many people in many different ways.
One teacher might pump her fist in the air after seeing that 95% of her students passed this year’s reading [...]
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Posted 09 August 2009
† Chad
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Also tagged: Assessment, Education reform, Edumacation, Grade book, Grading, Kevin Hurt, Matt Townsley, PLC, PLN, Report card, Reporting, SBAR, Standards-based