Video Games Transforming Education: Infographic | SiliconANGLE - Persistent Pondering. RPTools - Home. How Technology Wires the Learning Brain. But that’s not the headline here. Small’s main point was this: “The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective.” Video games, for example, aren’t just about repetitive tasks – many of them have built-in social components that allow kids to communicate. Texting isn’t about using a gadget -- it’s about connecting with someone else. “Texting is an expression of what it means to be human,” Small said. That’s why one well-liked teacher Small knows gives her students a five-minute texting break in the middle of class. It might seem odd, but Small suggests also carving out time for face-to-face emotional exercises and in-person conversations to counterbalance all the inevitable gadget-communication.
“We can train empathic behavior,” he said. Is technology making us less creative? Small said the Internet trains our minds to have a “staccato” train of thought, jumping from idea to idea, like we do from Website to Website. Small’s conclusion? Game Theory. How Much Data Will Humans Create & Store This Year? [INFOGRAPHIC] - Persistent Pondering. Games: Serious and Social. Demolition City. Teaching Tenacity & Metacognition through Games : Professional Learning Board. Games and objects ground instruction, and provide the basis for experience and mental representation — comprehension. When we have this, we can spend less time decoding and more time discussing printed text. So by writing about accessible narratives such as games, we were more successful when reading related printed text.
We had learned process, concepts, and deconstructing problems. This led to huge changes in student academic performance and confidence. The majority of my curriculum that year was in studying video games as new narratives. Here is the curriculum Here is a class you can take I have been offering for the last seven years. There is a lot to learn in a game, but there is a whole lot more to learn outside of the game in documenting, listening, presenting ideas, and extending them, than just playing the games themselves. If you want, there is a whole bunch of games curriculum on my teaching blog for language arts, reading, engineering, computer science, etc.