Ed Tech in Our Classrooms

  I am wholly in support of using games as learning tools and as assessments. My main reasoning behind this is that it abstracts the learning and the assessment process for the student in a way that relies upon intrinsic reward rather than extrinsic rewards. With any standard assessment, the student is working for a good grade. However, with a game, students will compete to do better than a peer, to see if they can accomplish a task, or even something as basic as the endorphins released from instant positive feedback. Motivation, in general, is stronger when it is internally based rather than external, it can be a way to keep a student on task or to push them harder. When playing a game, a student might forget that they "don't know how to do it" or "can't possibly answer that question". A strictly gaming example is recently taking my partner into a very difficult level in Destiny because they had been complaining about how bad they were at the game, but then...

Perseverance, the Mars rover, is landing today and filled with AI (artificial intelligence) applications. Here is one close to Earth but further back in time.  I have an old photograph from my high school wrestling days. Here's what AI can do to automatically restore the image then colorize it. Link to the free application . Try it.

  All throughout school, we played various online and in-person games related to the content that we were learning, but it wasn’t until now that I realized the true meaning and purpose behind all of these games. While we as students felt like we were doing something fun and interacting with our peers, our teachers were gaining valuable information on what we understand and how we interact with others. I remember playing lots of math-based games in elementary school, and that our scores would then be sent to the teacher's account or the teacher would walk around the room taking time to watch what each of us were doing.  Into middle school and high school, we played games such as Kahoot and charades to show our understanding of concepts in a not-so-stressful manner. One thing I have really enjoyed seeing during my educational career is the use of board games and other in-person games to teach skills and check for understanding in early childhood and preschool classes. Math games...

  Integrating Gaming Into Lesson Delivery - The Promising Potential of Discovery Tours It's always been of interest to me as a gamer and an education major to combine the two in an instructional way. Whenever I play video games I'm always struck by the immersion involved with open-world maps, and in particular, I'm fond of the Ubisoft game series  Assassin's Creed  for its ability to incorporate a historical setting into its storyline.  One of the best examples of how authentic the renditions of these virtual recreations are is the Notre Dame fire in April of 2019. Game company Ubisoft pledged funds and technology to help rebuild the cathedral, even going so far as to make  Assassin's Creed: Unity  available for free to promote awareness.  Unity  was created in 2014 and is set in the French Revolution, dropping players into a virtual reconstruction of 1789 Paris. One of the famous landmarks you can visit is Notre Dame, and to accurately recreate t...

  I never had experience with social media in the classroom going through K-12. The use of social media was almost shunned by teachers, banned from school computers, and never utilized as a tool for communication or student engagement. My first experience with any types of social media in the classroom was from a conference I attended   for my PRCT/CURR course a year ago that talked about technology in the classroom and the idea of having a “Teacher Twitter". It really opened my eyes to how beneficial social media can be for student engagement, both inside and outside of the classroom.  Not only is it a tool for educators to connect and share resources through the web, but allows older students (middle and high school) to be directly involved with curriculum, connect with their teachers, and interact with concepts taught in a “digital-age” way. I think social media is a great tool for the classroom. We know our older students are heavily involved, and sometimes addicted, ...

Twitter is something that has been around for a while, and I think using it in the classroom is a great idea. It is where teachers can show off what they have taught their kids and their kids can show off what they have made.  By sharing out, it gives other teachers the opportunity to implement that teaching into their own classroom. Everyone learns from one another and sharing it for the whole world to see just takes it one step further. The high school that I went to used Twitter for everything. If it wasn't the teachers showing off what their children did, it is coaches tweeting how the game went, or superintendents letting us know if there was going to be a snow day.  There is a world of possibilities that you can use Twitter for whether it's in the classroom or out of the classroom.   For High School teachers, you may find this article interesting:  60 Ways To Use Twitter In The Classroom By Category