Leaderboard – Brightspace.com – Brightspace by D2L. needs to be purchased, but allows modify and customize with HTML and CSS
Badges: meaningless if the entire institution is not on board. google and mozilla badges platforms. D2L is about to roll out badges, only if the entire institution and the business recognize them. otherwise, the badges are dead upon exit from class.
Scavenger hunt mentioned. Bluetooth info beacons used across campus to enable scavenger hunt. Across mobile devices.
Librarians and instructional designers mentioned.
His D2L home page has twitter widget and skype widget. He says the Skype widget enormously used. When will my proposal for Adobe Connect Widget will be addressed, am asking I for years?
Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. Whether you’re assessing at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy or the top, you can use tools like Padlet or Poll Everywhere, or measure progress toward attainment or retention of essential content or standards with tools like Google Classroom’s Question tool, Google Forms with Flubaroo, and Edulastic,
Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, FlipQuiz, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity
Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they’re sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to:
write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,
draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or
do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.
Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students’ understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments
Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it’s helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the “muddiest point” in the lesson—the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check:
Milliman also plans to create a U Arizona course tailored to individuals who might come to the university via the Age of Empires IV experience. “It will help them transition from being gamers to being students,” he explained. “This will get online students familiar with doing historical research and being a university student. There won’t be any textbooks or tests. It will be project-focused and based on the experiences they had playing the game with our additional content.”
Sean Gallagher is founder and executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy, and executive professor of educational policy.
a new national survey of C-suite executives that we recently conducted, 70 percent said that U.S. workers should be worried about their skills becoming outdated over the next few years.
Online education services companies – or “OPMs” as many refer to them, have continued to play a major role in the scaling of online higher education, within, and now increasingly beyond the U.S.
By reflecting-in-action, the practitioner is able to gain metacognitive awareness and perceive his/her intuitions and biases, test hypotheses, and take on new perspectives. The approach of having students learn by designing their own games combines design thinking and game-based learning (Kafai, 1995, 2006; Li, Lemieuz, Vandermeiden, & Nathoo, 2013). Design thinking also supports new forms of literacies brought on by new media technologies as well as game-based learning.
It is likely that the effects of gamification cannot easily be measured satisfactorily through surveys of motivation, engagement, attendance, or grades because there are too many variables that could affect how students respond. Critics of gamification argue that it over
simplifies complex problems (Bogost, 2015; Robertson, 2010). However, both gamification and design thinking are approaches to problem-solving. With design thinking, gamification may be used in more meaningful ways because design thinking offers a different lens through which to conceptualize the problem.
What the metaverse will (and won’t) be, according to 28 experts
metaverse (hopefully) won’t be the virtual world of ‘Snow Crash,’ or ‘Ready Player One.’ It will likely be something more complex, diverse, and wild.
The metaverse concept clearly means very different things to different people. What exists right now is a series of embryonic digital spaces, such as Facebook’s Horizon, Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox‘s digital space for gaming and game creation, and the blockchain-based digital world Decentraland–all of which have clear borders, different rules and objectives, and differing rates of growth.
TIFFANY ROLFE
different layers of realities that we can all be experiencing, even in the same environment or physical space. We’re already doing that with our phones to a certain extent—passively in a physical environment while mentally in a digital one. But we’ll see more experiences beyond your phone, where our whole bodies are fully engaged, and that’s where the metaverse starts to get interesting—we genuinely begin to explore and live in these alternate realities simultaneously.
It will have legacy parts that look and feel like the web today, but it will have new nodes and capabilities that will look and feel like the Ready Player One Oasis (amazing gaming worlds), immersion leaking into our world (like my Magicverse concept), and every imaginable permutation of these. I feel that the Xverse will have gradients of sentience and autonomy, and we will have the emergence of synthetic life (things Sun and Thunder is working on) and a multitude of amazing worlds to explore. Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.
YAT SIU, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF GAMING AND BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY ANIMOCA BRANDS
Reality will exist on a spectrum ranging from physical to virtual (VR), but a significant chunk of our time will be spent somewhere between those extremes, in some form of augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality will be a normal part of daily life. Virtual companions will provide information, commentary, updates and advice on matters relevant to you at that point in time, including your assets and activities, in both virtual and real spaces.
TIMONI WEST, VP OF AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY, UNITY:
I think we can all agree our initial dreams of a fully immersive, separate digital world is not only unrealistic, but maybe not what we actually want. So I’ve started defining the metaverse differently to capture the zeitgeist: we’re entering an era where every computer we interact with, big or small, is increasingly world-aware. They can recognize faces, voices, hands, relative and absolute position, velocity, and they can react to this data in a useful way. These contextually aware computers are the path to unlocking ambient computing: where computers fade from the foreground to the background of everyday, useful tools. The metaverse is less of a ‘thing’ and more of a computing era. Contextual computing enables a multitude of new types of interactions and apps: VR sculpting tools and social hangouts, self-driving cars, robotics, smart homes.
as carbon is to the organic world, AI will be both the matrix that provides the necessary structural support and the material from which digital representation will be made. Of all the ways in which AI will shape the form of the metaverse, perhaps most essential is the role it will play in the physical-digital interface. Translating human actions into digital input–language, eye movement, hand gestures, locomotion–these are all actions which AI companies and researchers have already made tremendous progress on.
Qualcomm views the metaverse as an ever-present spatial internet complete with personalized digital experiences that spans the physical and virtual worlds, where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.
As an active researcher in the security and forensics of VR systems, should the metaverse come into existence, we should explore and hypothesize the ways it will be misused.
CHITRA RAGAVAN, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER AT BLOCKCHAIN DATA ANALYTICS COMPANY ELEMENTUS
I picture [the metaverse] almost like The Truman Show. Only, instead of walking into a television set, you walk into the internet and can explore any number of different realities
We imagine the metaverse as reality made better, a world infused with magic, stories, and functionality at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
CAROLINA ARGUELLES NAVAS, GLOBAL PRODUCT MARKETING, AUGMENTED REALITY, SNAP
Rather than building the “metaverse,” a separate and fully virtual reality that is disconnected from the physical world, we are focused on augmenting reality, not replacing it. We believe AR–or computing overlaid on the world around us–has a smoother path to mass adoption, but will also be better for the world than a fully virtual world.
URHO KONTTORI, COFOUNDER AND CTO OF AR/VR HEADSET MAKER VARJO
In the reality-based metaverse, we will be able to more effectively design products of the future, meet and collaborate with our colleagues far away, and experience any remote place in real-time.
ATHERINE ALLEN, CEO OF IMMERSIVE TECH RESEARCH CONSULTANCY LIMINA IMMERSIVE
I prefer to think of the metaverse as simply bringing our bodies into the internet.
The metaverse isn’t just VR! Those spaces will connect to AR glasses and to 2D spaces like Instagram. And most importantly, there will be a real sense of continuity where the things you buy are always available to you.
At its core will be a self-contained economy that allows individuals and businesses to create, own or invest in a range of activities and experiences.
NANDI NOBELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE AT GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FIRM CALLISONRTKL
the metaverse experience can be altered from the individual’s point of view and shaped or curated by any number of agents—whether human or A.I. In that sense, the metaverse does not have an objective look beyond its backend. In essence, the metaverse, together with our physical locations, forms a spatial continuum.
NICK CHERUKURI, CEO AND FOUNDER OF MIXED REALITY GLASSES MAKER THIRDEYE
The AR applications of the metaverse are limitless and it really can become the next great version of the internet.
SAM TABAR, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, BITCOIN MINING COMPANY BIT DIGITAL
It seems fair to predict that the actual aesthetic of any given metaverse will be determined by user demand. If users want to exist in a gamified world populated by outrageous avatars and fantastic landscapes then the metaverse will respond to that demand. Like all things in this world the metaverse will be market driven
After studying children ages 4 to 11 on their use of screen time, a University of Michigan study found that “how children use the devices, not how much time they spend on them, is the strongest predictor of emotional or social problems connected with screen addiction.”
According to an Australian study on active and passive screen uses, there are actually two types of active screen use: physical and cognitive. Kids can actually get similar benefits to physical exercise when they play with active video game systems like the Nintendo Switch, XBox Kinect or Pokemon Go.
Playing active games has been proven to have similar effects to moderate walking, skipping and jogging. There are also plenty of active screen uses that spark the cognitive side of the brain.
Studies show that children respond to activity-based programming when it is fun, designed for them and encourages imitation or participation.
Acquisitions and partnerships are a cornerstone of Byju’s early learning programs: It bought Palo Alto-based Osmo in 2019, which combines digital learning with manipulatives, an approach the companies call “phygital.” For instance: Using a tablet’s camera and Osmo’s artificial intelligence software, the system tracks what a child is doing on a (physical) worksheet and responds accordingly to right and wrong answers. “It’s almost like having a teacher looking over you, My note: this can be come disastrous when combined with the China’s “social credit” system.
By contrast, Byju’s FutureSchool (launched in the U.S. this past spring) aims to offer one-to-one tutoring sessions starting with coding (based in part on WhiteHat Jr., which it acquired in August 2020) and eventually including music, fine arts and English to students in the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Indonesia and others. The company has recruited 11,000 teachers in India to staff the sessions
In mid-July, Byju’s bought California-based reading platform Epic for $500 million. That product opens up a path for Byju’s to schools. Epic offers a digital library of more than 40,000 books for students ages 12 and under. Consumers pay about $80 a year for the library. It’s free to schools. Epic says that more than 1 million teachers in 90 percent of U.S. elementary schools have signed up for accounts.
That raises provocative questions for U.S. educators. Among them:
How will products originally developed for the consumer market fit the needs of schools, particularly those that serve disadvantaged students?
Will there be more development dollars poured into products that appeal to consumers—and less into products that consumers typically skip (say, middle school civics or history curriculum?)
How much of an investment will giants such as Byju’s put into researching the effectiveness of its products? In the past most consumers have been less concerned than professional educators about the “research” behind the learning products they buy. Currently Gokulnath says the company most closely tracks metrics such as “engagement” (how much time students spend on the product) and “renewals” (how many customers reup after a year’s use of the product.)
How will products designed for home users influence parents considering whether to continue to school at home in the wake of viral pandemics?
Nurse’s Escape is a VR game that simulates an escape room based on the five stages of the Sepsis Bundle. The purpose is to supplement nurse’s lecture-style curriculum with an interactive way to test nurse’s Sepsis knowledge. Sepsis is one of the leading causes of deaths and hospitalizations yearly, so equipping nurses with the right skills and information to treat sepsis in a timely manner can save lives and money. Help treat the millionaire’s illness before time runs out!
This game is sponsored by the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Nursing-Lincoln.
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Australian hospitals leveraging VR tech to fast-track clinician training
It only takes 10 minutes to practice a procedure in a session through a VR platform such as Vantari VR.
Using flight-simulator technology, Vantari VR provides medical training using a VR headset and laptop. Its modules cover 90% of medical procedures as part of doctors’ core training and deliver steps that are recommended by college guidelines.
In Fiona Stanley Hospital, for example, over 20 registrars have been educated to perform chest drain insertions.
Vantari VR was awarded a $100,000 grant from Epic Games, the American video game company behind the online game Fortnite. Presently, the startup seeks to raise $2 million from a funding round that will close in August.