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Podcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
How 2 simple role-play games can transform students into active learners
Role-play enhances engagement and subject matter mastery. It’s also a lot of fun
Students learning about the code of Hammurabi by acting as a council trusted with applying it
Maybe you’ve seen them interacting at Comic Con in fantastic costumes or reenacting decisive Civil War battles down to the smallest detail. Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably more familiar with role-playing than you realize. In education, role-play-as-learning is a unique experience which enhances student engagement, social skills, interest, and mastery of subject matter. It’s an approach that can have some major benefits for students.
At its core, role-play involves spontaneous, co-creative, contextualized, personally involved learning, and one of the best ways to introduce the concept to the classroom is though LARPs. Short for Live Action Role-play, LARPs are one part acting, one part historical immersion/interaction, and one part systematic modeling. It conceptualizes major concepts interwoven within human narratives that inspire students to enjoy and retain their knowledge within their experience. It leverages emotion as a mechanism for students to personalize key knowledge, processes, and concepts. And it involves embodiment and situational modeling, guiding students to not only learn the material but to experience it in context.…Read More
App of the Week: Skaffl
Ed. note: App of the Week picks are now being curated by the editors of Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. Click here to read the full app review.
What’s It Like? Skaffl is a tool for distributing, completing, and grading work on the iPad. Teachers create classes and then share each class’s unique access code with their students, who can then use that code to enroll in the class via their own Skaffl login. Teachers then create three types of activities: an in-app assignment, a student dropbox, or a handout. A handy workflow for these activities appears every time teachers create a new one. Teachers can distribute activities instantly (to some classes, some students, or all at once) or schedule them for a later date.
Price: Free/subscription
Grades: 6-12…Read More
Can robots teach kids to code?
As technology has evolved, so too has the capability of our robotics, EdTechMagazine.com reports. At least that’s what former Google executive Vikas Gupta was banking on when he left the search engine to launch Play-i, a well-funded startup that uses toy robots to teach children to code. As recently reported by technology blog TechCrunch, Gupta’s latest venture — he sold his first company to Google for a reported $70 million in 2010 — has produced prototypes for two robots — Bo and Yana — both of which can be programmed to respond to simple commands via an app installed on your smartphone or tablet device…
…Read MoreThis board game aims to teach preschoolers how to code
These days, the effort to get more of us writing computer programs has become part of an “everybody should learn to code” ethos that folks like President Obama and have gotten behind, NPR reports. “We all depend on technology — to communicate, to bank, [for] information — and none of us know how to read and write code,” Will.I.Am points out in an online ad for , a nonprofit aimed at making coding more mainstream. that he wants young people to “know how to produce stuff using computers and not just consume stuff.” There is no shortage of books and online programs teaching you how to code once you can use a computer. But how would you learn to code if you can’t even read? How could 3-year-olds begin to learn the basics of computer programming?
…Read More