Another great class – carefully structured and effective in illustrating the concepts and making sure everyone was on the same page… but a “no go” for Canvas – class is much more about the readings and class discussions that the tech tool 🙂
Class Notes
Note Followup:
Transfer (the ability to apply what you learned in one context into another) – the “holy grail” of teaching.
Had the fortune of being assigned to a really great group – Soren Rosier and Alexandra Cristea – and our task for this week was to go out and have some fun:
“Get to know your group. Do something fun together. Create a group name. Submit a note about who your group is and what you did.”
What we did
Went to Ray’s and took turns telling our stories and drinking some beer. Stimulating conversation!
Group Name
S.A.L (our initials… also means salt in Portuguese)
Presentation by Prof. Martin Carnoy – interesting debate about how you cannot compare the US as a whole with other countries since each state and in some cases, municipalities have their own educational system and perform at very different rates.
Went to the EdClub meeting Monday afternoon.
“The Education Club engages Stanford business and education school students in discussions about education issues, their role in education, and business’ role in education.”
Interesting to find out more about the joint MA/MBA program.
On Monday I interviewed with Edmodo for an internship position to work on their beta product called Spotlight” – a resource sharing center for all of their teachers. Two positions available research on understanding the needs teachers have or research on how teachers are using the tool and how it could be better.
Reading:
In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives
Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, Laurie McCarthy (2008)
Notes:
Response:
“How designers could perhaps leverage the types of interactions in the vignettes to create engaging learning experiences”
I believe kid’s learning experiences can be more engaging if they encourage kids to teach each other, empowers them to ask questions, enables collaboration in the discovery process and offers tasks that are learnable.
In the first vignette we see Rachel getting her information on a need-to-know basis making her experience flow better. In the second vignette Mikey teaches Maddy very efficiently how to use the code correctly. In the third, the boys used their ZPD and pulled each other through the task. In the fourth vignette, modeling was used to teach.
With video games, kids engage in these behaviors naturally and perceive the task of learning as part of the enjoyable task.
“Relevant” learning objectives can be inserted into the already familiar game mechanics of video games in a way that they become challenges within a larger context that the kid is in control of. For example – trigonometry – the in-game character has to built his own bridge to cross a river. To do so he must understand angles and calculate how much material he would need to complete the task.
What stroke me most was the potential learning between the younger and older kids. Perhaps this interaction has not been fully explored yet. Many learning experiences have been designed for the parent-child interaction but maybe not as many have been designed for kid-to-older-kid interactions explicitly. Experiences where kids of varying ages can play/learn/teach together with the explicit goal of showing off what they know and/or learn from each other.
Why not a video game room in the school where teachers act as coaches and facilitators to explore and make evident these positive interactions that lead to learning and sharing knowledge? With careful curation, teachers could potentially find games that illustrate key concepts and encourage the kids to teach each other.
The “kidification” of education 🙂
Just found out about APA Style – a format for academic documents such as research papers, journal articles, books, and so on.
For one of our assignments has to be written in that style. Found a Great tutorial here.
Reading:
“EDUCATION POLICY BEGINS AT HOME: WHY DIFFERENCES IN STUDENT PERFORMANCE AMONG U.S. STATES ARE MORE USEFUL FOR EDUCATIONAL POLICY THAN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS”
Martin Carnoy – Stanford University
Emma García – Economic Policy Institute
Tatiana Khavenson – National Research University Higher School of Economics
September 14, 2015
Notes:
note: the crossed heart is not part of the notes 🙂
