Education 2.0 & 3.0

A few weeks ago, I blogged about my gaming club in Video Games for Relationship- and Team Building. It is still going very strong. Students from the three schools where I teach gifted students look forward to it all week long. We started with Fornite Creative but now they have moved onto Rocket League and Among Us. Recent research supports the positive benefits of playing video games:

One of the most effective ways to nurture the 21st century’s trademark skills is by creating opportunities for kids to do what kids do naturally: play

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

"Teachers are leveraging the power of gaming to turn even reluctant student writers into enthusiastic storytellers...

When ninth graders arrived for their language arts class earlier this year, they were in for a surprise. With only a brief introduction, teacher Philip Bird and student teacher Evan Manconi invited the students into a futuristic, magical world called Cataclysm where they would spend the next several weeks in a role-playing game.

“Students took to it almost immediately,” Manconi says, using creativity and collaboration to develop characters, generate dialogue, and negotiate plot twists.

Six weeks later, the students had written some 729,500 words—nearly the equivalent of the first six books of the Harry Potter series. “They have written and written and written,” Bird says, “and all the chatter in the classroom has been focused on what their characters are doing. If writing is a muscle, I’ve gotten some incredibly muscular students out of this experience.”

"Two decades in, and it’s abundantly clear that one of the most effective ways to nurture the 21st century’s trademark skills—creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration—is by creating opportunities for kids to do what kids do naturally: play. So we’ve crafted this educators’ guide to game-based learning, packed with resources for gaming gurus and greenhorns alike."

Jim Lerman's insight:

A sizable, and growing, collection of resources on game-based learning for educators. Resources are grouped into 3 sections:  The Big Picture, Gaming in the Classroom, and Teaching with Minecraft. Don't miss the beginner's Minecraft video tutorial.

Incorporate a game-based teaching style into the classroom without spending a lot of time or money.

U-M's successful gameful learning technology is now available to other institutions.

Gamification in learning is an established trend, and uses the core elements of what make games fun – mastery, narrative, instant feedback, competition, and reward, to create new ways for learners to internalize information.That's why students simply love a game-based learning experience.