Meet Thomas Suarez, 12-year-old innovator, app designer, and teacher

This kid is great.  In this Manhattan Beach TEDX talk, he shares how his passion for games led him down a simple yet truly rewarding path… and, look here he is presenting among the greats about innovation and educational transformation.  In under five minutes, you’ll see how he moved from a consumer to researcher to producer to teacher to change agent.  And, what I love best, he’s still a kid – not a kid trying to be an adult.  Very cool… someone to follow for sure!  One of his best lines in his talk, “Students usually know a little bit more than teachers… with the technology.”  The audience got a kick of that statement.

Video games for Learning: A K-12 Innovation

Education Week featured a commentary written by Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and Alan Gershenfeld, co-founder and president of E-Line Media, on video games for learning.  Like the authors, I see great potential in game-based learning.  If video games are designed well – that is, they draw upon learning theories and design and usability principles – they can offer a personalized, challenging, and interesting experience for a learner.  The authors highlight that video games can leverage many instructional frameworks such as project or problem-based learning and collaborative learning, based on a student’s or a group’s proficiencies.  And, of course, by design, video games challenge learners to think critically and problem-solve, requiring that learners use immediate feedback to make decisions throughout the game experience.

The authors also point out the gap that exists between the “ideals” of video games for learning and the “realities”.  In other words, “if video games are so great for learning, why aren’t we using them more?”  The authors state that the challenge has been scaling up games from research trials to the mainstream and the need for strong private-public partnerships.  I will add that video games, good video games, are expensive and time-consuming to design and develop.  Up until recently the buy-in from educators (“the demand”) hasn’t been strong enough to push production (“the supply”).  However, the tides are certainly changing which is why we will continue to follow game-based learning… more to come.  To read the commentary, click here.

Ed Tech Conference Reflections

The Principal & Education Technology Conference on Wednesday proved to be an inspiring day filled with thought-provoking presentations and dialogue.  Here are some of my highlights:

• Channel 1 News Interactive offers an exciting (not to mention easy) way to integrate daily fresh content into the classroom to spark discussion and debate.  I think teachers, particularly elementary teachers, often struggle with bringing current events into the classroom in an age-appropriate way.  Channel 1 News Interactive offers an alternative way to share and discuss current events through multi-media (video, animations, images, etc.) resources.  The fact that the new stories are reported by young people and feature the perspectives of young people makes them even more relevant and meaningful.  And, Channel 1 News Interactive even creates follow up news stories based on students’ responses.  Very cool.
• Kevin Baird’s keynote reminded us that teaching today should focus on thinking rather than knowing.  It resonates with a key question that I use to gauge the quality of a learning experience – “are you asking a student to think or to remember?”  He tied this to the Common Core State Standards movement, highlighting that the initiative is really about changing our instruction or practices in the classroom – less about changing content.
•  I thoroughly enjoyed Sara DeWitt’s presentation sharing some of PBS’ interactive learning projects.  First, I appreciated their approach.  The product development process she described was very exploratory and user-centered.  For instance, she highlighted that they are interested in understanding if motion and movement help to further or deepen the learning for young children.  The games she shared (some online, some apps) were great examples of leveraging the affordances of the technology to enrich the user’s experience.  For instance, using the computer’s webcam to capture the user’s movement which triggers action in the game or using the computer’s microphone to capture audio (a clap) to pop and count bubbles on the screen.  And, of course, their commitment to research and evaluation is wonderful.  SRI International studied the impact PBS KIDS Raising Readers media-rich curriculum had on preschoolers and the results are impressive.  Check out some of the new experiments at PBS Kids Lab here.

Thank you to all who attended the conference!

Games, not Grades

Since Daniel Pink recommended this Edutopia video interview with James Paul Gee, professor at Arizona State University, I thought I’d give it a quick review.  It is definitely worth the time – dense with powerful messages.  While most of his messages align with good learning theory (constructivism) and pedagogy, he frames his messages in a 21^st century context, urging the need for educational reform.  Here are my big take-aways:

• We need a major reform in the design of our schools.  Today’s schools are “test prep academies”.  Schooling must focus on helping students learn how to solve problems, collaboratively, so they are able to compete in today’s global economy.  “The group is smarter than the smartest person in the group.”  This aligns with project-based and problem-based learning (not new)… but demands a shift in assessment as well (which leads to his next point about games as assessment)… 
• Games are wonderful models of learning problem-solving skills – essentially, in a game, the player is constantly assessed.  Games do not make the mistake of separating the learning from the assessment.  The use of continuous and immediate feedback helps the player learn as he/she solves a problem.  In this way, knowledge is something that is produced not consumed.
• In games, language is presented “just in time”, allowing the player to immediately apply the language to solve the task at hand.
• Digital tools, including social networking tools, enable youth to easily and quickly join communities centered on their passions.  These “passion communities” are very different than school in that anyone can teach and learn, essentially, roles are fluid.  He mentions that there are very high standards within these communities. 
• Kids seem to understand (better than the baby boomer generation) that media is converging.
• Teachers need to be rewarded for innovation.  The need exists to “re-professionalize” teaching, empowering teachers to build their own curriculum, develop their own practices, etc. – instead of using what the “top” pushes down. 
• We need to make teaching a sexy job.  It isn’t right now because schools are not cool.  Until we design different, innovative educational environments, teaching will not be a “cool” job. 
• Encouragingly, he states that the U.S. does a good job at reform when they are really scared (references the Sputnik period), and we could be at a tipping point.  The new competition schools have coupled with the innovation crisis could lead to a paradigm shift in education.

Are you motivated to join the reform movement?  I am!  It starts within a classroom… so, let’s go for it!

Learning with Games

Today I attended Tedd Landgraf’s presentation on Learning with Games at Punahou.  Tedd challenged participants to think about the place for games in the classroom with an engaging and powerful video of Sir Ken Robinson in a TED Talk.  I’ve seen the video before and it was just as moving (and entertaining) as the first time I saw it.  I highly recommend it.  Tedd also shared some good reads – Play by Stuart Brown The Kids Are Alright by John Beck and Mitchell Wade. 

We spent the remaining time playing with SCRATCH, a free MIT programming application.  It is an incredible tool.  Simple and intuitive yet challenging – pushes you to think logically and sequentially.  It offers the perfect trial and error learning experience – you can create a “script”, run it, and immediately see if it works.  If it doesn’t, you can change the script and test again!  What a powerful tool for teachers to spice up assessment in the classroom or a great way to engage students in developing games as a learning and problem-solving experience.