Wednesday, October 20, 2010

T and T Oct 21, 2010

Note: The Smartboard is booked from 10:00 - 3:00 on Monday for you to practice. You are welcome to just drop in, or you can sign up for a specific time on our wiki.

Presentations

A11 - Bela & Ashley W - Photoshop
Dan, Laurel, Ashley H. - Smartboard
Mary and Julia - Geocaching

A12 - Caroline and Shireen- SMARTBoard
Courtney, Kaela, Eugene

Summary of Digital Games and Learning - PollEveryWhere - favourite games
  • Which kinds of games work best in the classroom?
  • What aspects of learning are best enhanced with games?
  • Which students benefits from using games?
  • What is the teacher’s role when games are used in a classroom?

From The Psych Files
Really Good Games..Really Good Teachers…
  • have win states to give us a feeling of accomplishment
  • employ conflict/competition/challenge to up our adrenaline
  • use dramatic problems
  • use otherworldly stories and characters to stir the emotions
  • require problem solving
  • encourage interaction to solve challenges
  • are unpredictable
  • provide a sense of urgency
  • have rules to give play structure and help put us inside the game world
  • have goals to provide motivation and let us measure ourselves against something
  • are interactive to keep us doing things
  • are situated in an interesting place or time
  • have outcomes and immediate feedback from which we learn
  • adapt their difficulty to our skills to keep us in flow
  • are “hard fun
  • Have goals for their lessons
  • Draw on “Motivation to Learn” strategies which engage students through the use of puzzles, questions, mysteries, apparent conflicts (Here is the link to episode 29 which explains the Motivation to Learn concept.
  • Provide immediate feedback to students on how they’re doing
  • Help students summarize what they’ve learned
  • Help students reflect on their experience
  • Help students draw on prior knowledge
  • Encourage students to use metacognitive strategies (“Did I understand what I just heard/read?”)
  • Provide students with appropriate challenge to optimize the potential for “flow
  • Provide a context for the material to be learned (i.e., instruction is “anchored” to a setting)
  • Encourage active exploration among students (not focused on right and wrong answers)
  • Provide opportunities for safe practice

Important Ideas

Creativity, Problem Solving, Copying and Remixing
  • what is needed to be creative?
  • is everyone creative?
  • why is creativity hard?
  • what is the difference between copying, remixing and stealing?

Ken Robinson ???

Jeff Han - TED talks - new interface

Literacy With ICT
  • at what level of the Cognitive Domain are we being creative? [Knows and Comprehends, Analyzes and Applies, Synthesizes and Evaluates]]
  • is it possible to be creative in the affective domain? [Responsibility & Ethics, Social Implications, Collaboration, Motivation & Confidence]
  • how can ICT assist in extending critical and creative thinking?
Fresh Brain
iPhone music - U of Michigan (thanks Steph)

Video/Mashups - the new essay?
    - samples from REC UNESCO projects

Thanks Amanda for this:
Steven Cameron, in his article, "Technology in the Creative Classroom", provides another point of view on creativity in Digital Natives. He points that creativity is an individual artistic quality that lies in those willing to take the time to pay close attention to detail. As a professor of creative technology classes, his trained eye can see a clear difference between those students who took the "short cut" in quickly cutting and pasting their projects together and those who actually spent time in manipulating their work into creative masterpieces.

While Cameron's skepticism of creativity may be of greater importance in his university classrooms, it is also a valid point for senior years teachers to keep in mind when seeking creativity from their students. Has the student quickly slapped together their 'creative' project, or is there something more, something fresh and original such as Palfrey and Gasser are alluding to, coming out of their digital work? This question is for the classroom teacher to decide when assessing their students' digital work.

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