Fun Failure: How to Make Learning Irresistible
Culture Bao Tri Photography By Anne Collier Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said. Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play and founder of Quest to Learn, the first public school based on the principles of game design in the U.S., explained how failure can be a motivating agent for learning in her presentation at SXSW. Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right. Game designer Jane McGonigal makes a similar point. But the opposite is true in school, Salen said. Over the past year, Salen went on a “listening tour,” interviewing game designers at Media Molecule, Valve, and Blizzard Entertainment. Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. A version of this post appeared on NetFamilyNews. Related
How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?
Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around lessons, allowing students to use their cell phones to do research and participate in class, and developing their curriculum around projects to ground learning around an activity. These strategies are all part of a larger goal to help students connect to social and cultural spaces. And it’s part of what defines “participatory learning,” coined by University of Southern California Annenberg Professor Henry Jenkins, who published his first article on the topic “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” in 2006. In an effort to change how American schools think about teaching, Jenkins’ team developed a strategy called PLAY (Participatory Learning and You) to explain the exploratory and experimental approach to teaching they think students would benefit from. [RELATED: How to Connect School Life to Real Life] Related
Weaving Debate into the Writing Process
Organized debates are an engaging way to help students discover, explore and organize ideas during the writing process. However, neither my teacher colleagues nor students share my enthusiasm. To find out why, I asked how they felt about using debate in the classroom. Here were their responses: Teachers' answers: Students are too aggressive and rowdy to debate. Students' answers: Debates are tedious and repetitive. Rethinking classroom debating might help both the aforementioned groups view this strategy as valuable. Debate activities do not have to mirror the traditional debate protocol, where students stand on opposite sides of the classroom and formally argue about a particular point -- an exercise that students and teachers may find to be tedious. Stage One: Prewriting Activity: Discussion Webs Stage Two: Drafting Activity: Pinwheel Strategy Stage Three: Revising Critical Friends Approach Stage Four: Editing Sentences on Trial Stage Five: Publishing Using Multiple Technology Tools
23 Free Learning Tools For Monological, Dialogical and Polyphonic Forms of Teaching
How Students Benefit From Using Social Media 12.98K Views 0 Likes A lot of criticism has been leveled at social media and the effect it has on the way students process and retain information, as well as how distracting it can be. However, social media offers plenty of opportunities for learning and interactivity, and if you take a moment to think about it, it's not too hard to see how students benefit from using social media. 10 African-American History Month Teaching Resources 1.26K Views 0 Likes This week’s Featured Ten Learnist boards are dedicated to African-American history month. 3 Tech Tips Your Grandma Could Teach You 2.03K Views 0 Likes Those who have been using technology, in some form, have a few tech tips you should know about.
How Tablets Can Make You A More Effective Teacher
Have you ever finished teaching a lesson and thought to yourself: “That was a slam dunk!”, only to find out later that students did not retain your lesson as you had anticipated? Teaching is a secluded profession, in which teachers spend much of their day in adult solitude, but almost certainly requires more feedback than the majority of other occupations. So the question is raised, “How can teachers better assess their teaching in this solitude?” This self-assessment technique has proven to give athletes a better understanding of their attributes as well as a comprehensive realization of their weaknesses. Figuring Out What To Improve The integration of Tablets as an assessment tool helps to answer the question: “How can a teacher improve something, if they are not sure what to improve?” Societies’ fast paced mindset expects instantaneous feedback, and teachers are no exception to this mentality. Instant Feedback
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