Lessons Learned From Gaming

There has been a lot of buzz recently about gaming in education, but I haven't paid that much attention to be honest. This article, however, focuses less on the act of playing video games, but rater what we can learn from gaming and how we can take these ideas and apply them in our classrooms. Fun Failure: How to Make Learning Irresistible suggests 4 principles that can be applied to education:

1. Don't shoot the player while she's learning.
2. Learning is social.
3. A strong sense of community creates safety.
4. Learning that empowers the learner makes it irresistible.

How can you do (or what do you do already) to make learning irresistible?!

How do you engage your students?

It's not the beginning of the school year, and none of us teach honors physics (thank goodness because that was my demise in high school!), but the ideas and strategies presented in this post are applicable to all. This is a great article that makes you really think about and assess the ways we connect and engage our students. Our students live in a connected world, so how can we meet them where they live in this digital landscape?

Base Ten Blocks

Base Ten is a wonderful virtual manipulative to use on your interactive white board (IWB). It is quite simple: you are given a number to make and then you have to drag the appropriate blocks to the yellow mat to represent this number. Once you have correctly represented the target number, you will be given a new one. You can choose to use 1, 10, or 100 blocks by clicking on the buttons on the left.