Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
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Humans love music, especially when there’s repetition that catches the attention.
“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full body workout,” says educator Anita Collins in a TED-Ed video on how playing music benefits the brain. Playing music requires the visual, auditory, and motor cortices all at once
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more on the brain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=brain
Embracing online school requires a new mindset, as well as new criteria for measuring academic success—measures that take into account the nature of teaching and learning online, the types of students online schools serve, and the unique ways in which those students learn.
Teachers interact with students during synchronous learning sessions, and they connect one-on-one through calls, online chats, texts, and interactive whiteboard sessions.
Accountability measures must adapt to and reflect a self-paced, competency-based learning environment. A traditional one-size-fits-all rubric does not translate cleanly with respect to online schools.
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more on online engagement in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+engagement
“Formulating a product, you better know about ethics and understand legal frameworks.”
These days a growing number of people are concerned with bringing more talk of ethics into technology. One question is whether that will bring change to data-science curricula.
Following major data breaches and privacy scandals at tech companies like Facebook, universities including Stanford, the University of Texas and Harvard have all added ethics courses into computer science degree programs to address tech’s “ethical dark side,” the New York Times has reported.
As more college and universities consider incorporating humanities courses into technical degree programs, some are asking what kind of ethics should be taught.
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more on ethics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ethics
January 8, 2019
In October 2018, the Education Week Research Center conducted a nationally representative online survey of nearly 500 K-12 teachers, principals, and district leaders to learn more about their views on innovation—a common buzzword that was defined in the survey as “the introduction and/or creation of new ideas or methods.”
January 17, 20195:17 PM ET HAFSA QURAISHI
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/17/685506582/one-more-thing-the-shutdown-took-panda-cams
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
Integrating technology into your teaching practice can be intimidating. Where do you start? What tools do you choose? What are the questions you need to ask?
In Selecting the Right Tech Solutions for Your Classroom, you’ll get the guidance you need to thrive with edtech, whether you’re just dipping your toe in or rethinking a districtwide approach. Throughout the course, you’ll engage in online content, develop materials specific to your context and receive feedback from experts. The course culminates with a capstone project that can be used to communicate with stakeholders about your selected technology, your rationale for choosing it and how you’ll implement it.
This is a 15-hour, instructor-led course.
Winter session: February 5 – March 29, 2019
How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming
https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/the-most-important-video-game-on-the-planet-c26988a8f497 Jan 11 2019,Brian Feldman
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/how-fortnite-became-the-most-popular-video-game-on-earth.html
Every number released in conjunction with Fortnite is staggering, even within the context of a $137 billion industry. On the same day as its Fortnite Pro-Am tournament at E3, the video-game industry’s largest convention, the game was released for the Nintendo Switch, and within 24 hours it had been downloaded more than 2 million times. Analysts estimate that Fortnite is currently raking in more than $300 million a month, and has made its maker, Epic Games, more than $1.2 billion since its battle royale mode launched in late September.
Fortnite is virtually identical on every platform, and players can move from their PlayStation to their phone and back without missing a beat. Milligan first heard about the game back in September. “It was the next new game, like when Minecraft came out, but way more popular.”
The cadence of a Fortnite game is that nothing is happening and then, very suddenly, everything is happening. The game has three main modes: solo (every player for themselves), duos (teams of two), and squads (teams of three or four), but there are consistently around 100 players in every session.
Even when kids aren’t playing Fortnite, they’re talking about Fortnite or finding ways to profit from it.
Video games pioneered the dopamine-rush cycle. Using bright graphics and sound effects to make players feel continual accomplishment, arcade games were honed to make players feel like they needed to feed in just one more quarter over and over again — slot machines that kept people entranced without ever having to pay out. The addictive core of video-gaming never went away, even as games became more complicated: Every win, every high score, every 100 percent completion, every secret and Easter egg was a chance for a little rush of accomplishment and satisfaction.
And then mobile products learned to do the same thing. Give people goals, reward them with flashes of color, and you could entrance them into something resembling addiction. This was called, tellingly and unsurprisingly, “gamification”: Treat every app and every activity as a video game, with scores, prizes, and leaderboards. Snapchat rewarded users who talked every day with “streaks”; the exercise app Strava allowed you to compete with other joggers and earn badges; Foursquare turned the entire world into a game of king of the hill.
The process has come full circle. Fortnite is a gamified video game.
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more on FortNite in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fortnite
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/03/31/ready-player-one/
‘My reminders are not spam!’: Teachers and parents protest Verizon over new texting fees
Remind, emailed users late Monday to tell them that Verizon had decided to treat their messages as spam — a move that would make it impossible to continue distributing messages for free. The change would affect 7 million of the service’s 31 million users
Remind officials said the company had been trying to negotiate with Verizon since last summer, when the company first announced the rate increase. (They also said they are locked in a similar conflict with a telecommunications company in Canada.)
Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum with Guest Sue Bohle, Serious Play Conference |
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| An interactive discussion on gaming in education | |
| January 17, 2 – 3 PM (EST) |
Sue Bohle, Executive Director, Producer, Serious Play Conference, for a lively discussion on gaming in education.
Sue is a leader in the space and has seen tremendous growth and potential of serious games in corporate training and eLearning. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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notes from the webinar:
i had issues connecting and the streams of the guest speaker (Sue) and Bryan will stall when each of them were talking.
examples for formally learning through games
I’d love to hear Sue chat about: Students as game authors, what do you do to encourage reflection on game events?
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more on Future Trends in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=future+trends
The overuse of technology has overtaken drugs, sex and bullying as the biggest parental worry, according to the annual Brigham Young and Deseret News American Family Survey.
the intersection of child development and digital media: the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.
The American Academy of Pediatrics supports this idea of joint media engagement, basically engaging alongside your kids, as you suggest, whether with games, videos or social media. But isn’t there such a thing as too much screen time?
When people talk about addiction, I think it’s weird we want to blame the digital media because you can form unhealthy relationships with lots of things — food, sex, work, money.
We’re using screens as a babysitter.
There’s an interesting study that recently came out that looked at how parents and young children were interacting around devices. It showed that this joint media engagement is not happening.
I feel like part of the problem is that parents are getting essentially abstinence-only education, like in sex education. The research on that says, if all you hear is, “Just say no,” it has no positive effects.
Nobody actually thinks we’re going to have a world without [tech]. They’re aiming for that healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is you being able to have the autonomy to make good decisions.