How To Use Your Smartphone As A Scanner 5 MOOCs Teachers Should Take As Students 8.42K Views 0 Likes MOOCs may or may not save higher education, and if they save it they may further widen the gap between elite and lesser-known schools. They may also reinforce existing achievement gaps for students. As massive open online courses continue to evolve, however, educators need to know what they are and how they are changing the education landscape. Gamification Classroom From Smoke Signals to Tweets: How The Evolution Of Communication Is Changing Your Classroom The following post is written by Beth Holland & Shawn McCusker from EdTechTeacher. Be sure to sign up for one of the last remaining spots at their iPad Summit! From quill and ink, to slate and chalk, to pencil and paper, to typewriter, to computer, to iPad…. each evolution of technology has allowed students to make their thinking visual, articulate their ideas, demonstrate their understanding of concepts and skills, collaborate with their peers, and communicate in complex and modern ways. Each advance has made it possible for those who master them to go a little further and to communicate a little more effectively. Andrew Carnegie was “discovered” because of his ability to use the telegraph – the peak of communication at the time – to unravel a rail snarl that paralyzed his company. Edison created a way for people to record themselves, and others, and share these messages widely. Bill Gates invented a way for people to visually interact with data on their computers. Classroom Applications
Can Playing Video Games Help With Dyslexia? By Linda Poon, NPR Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population. Many approaches to help struggling readers focus on words and phonetics, but researchers at Oxford University say dyslexia is more of an attention issue. So programs should emphasize training the brain’s attention system, they say, something that video games do. When people with dyslexia had to shift their attention between sight and sound, their reaction was delayed. “It’s not just shifting attention from one location to another, but we should also be training shifting attention from sound to visual stimuli and vice versa.” The results showed that the dyslexic group took longer than typical readers to respond when they had to alternate their attention between a sound and a flash.
The 20 Best Pinterest Boards About Education Technology Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the biggest sources inspiration and innovation when it comes to cooking, design, and education. That’s right, education is a prominent fixture on Pinterest now and that, of course, means that education technology plays a starring role. In an effort to help curate the massive amount of Pinterest boards about education technology, you can use the following list as a jumping off point to start your Pinterest journey. The following boards are curated by teachers, admins, and other education enthusiasts. Don’t forget to check out the Edudemic Pinterest board where you can keep track of all the stuff we’re up to. Patricia Brown : Patricia showcases a myriad of videos, articles, tutorials, and lots of other resources all about education technology. We want to see what YOU are pinning!
Everything You’ll Ever Need To Know About Gamification Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. A friend of mine once relayed this quote (as a joke) to me about consulting: “Why make money solving the problem, when you can make so much more by making it worse?” And, like all such quotes, it’s funny because it contains a kernel of truth. I provide consultancy services to people who need game design advice, like mechanics, user interface, progression curves etcetera, and mine is a position of some power. Rather than say things like “Well we really need to see the problem from all sides and develop a complex solution that tailors to all of your users’ needs” (Or “getting them on the tit” as Don Cheadle calls it in House of Lies), I tend to say “Just move that number over there. This is all, not to put too fine a point on it, overheated extrapolation.
Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web Yesterday, the ever-churning machine that is the Internet pumped out more unfiltered digital data. Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 BILLION emails were sent. And that's not counting all the check-ins, friend requests, Yelp reviews and Amazon posts, and pins on Pintrest. The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. What's happened is the web has gotten better at making data. While devices struggle to separate spam from friends, critical information from nonsense, and signal from noise, the amount of data coming at us is increasingly mind-boggling. In 2010 we frolicked, Googled, waded, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of digital bits and bytes. Which means it's time to enlist the web's secret power—humans. If you want to understand how fast curation is growing on the web, just take a look at Pinterest. 1. How will curation evolve?
“This Game Sucks”: How to Improve the Gamification of Education (EDUCAUSE Review Sarah "Intellagirl" Smith-Robbins (sabsmith@indiana.edu) is Director of Emerging Technologies and a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. With this issue of EDUCAUSE Review, she begins a one-year term as Editor of the New Horizons department. Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page. "Focusing on the ways that entertainment technology engages us can result in methods that we can transfer to any learning situation." Gamification. Education has been a system of status and points since the dawn of the Industrial Age. What Is a Game? The first step is to understand exactly what a game is. A goal: Every game has a win condition: the combination of events and accomplishments that players need to achieve in order to end the game. True gamification requires that all three characteristics be present. Is Higher Education Already a Game? How does the typical higher education system match up to games? Notes 1.
Gmail Meter: A Free Tool To Help You Combat Email Overload The 18 Best Free Web Tools Chosen By You 6.20K Views 0 Likes It's the start of a new year and that means there's infinite possibilities that lay before you. 6 Web Tools To Make You A Better Writer 3.45K Views 0 Likes Your essay needs to be done and you can’t get it done with all of these distractions.