Video Game Playing and Literacy During the COVID-19 Lockdown in 2020

Video games can encourage young people’s creativity through writing, and playing video games can support young people’s literacy, creativity and empathy.

This research by the National Literacy Trust finds that playing video games can support young people’s literacy, creativity and empathy, while parents say communicating with family and friends through video games during lockdown has been helpful for their child’s mental wellbeing. These benefits were found to be strongest for boys and reluctant readers.

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      string(2614) "toimprove fine motor skills and their social and technological skills. In the digital age, we must accept that the currentgeneration of children will undoubtedly already be spending hours playing gamesonline in their spare time. However, as educators, we can use this to ouradvantage to increase students’ engagement and enjoyment of learning.Gaming improves mental health and cognitive functionAccording to research carried out by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health on 6-11 year-olds, high video game usage correlated with higher intellectual functioning and overall school competence. Results were based on data from the School Children Mental Health Europe project for children ages 6-11. The study assessed the association between the amount of time spent playing video games and children’s mental health and cognitive and social skills. ‘After adjusting for child age, gender, and the number of children, the researchers found that high video game usage was associated with a 1.75 times the odds of high intellectual functioning and 1.88 times the odds of high overall school competence.’ What was of equal interest was that there were no significant associations with any child self-reported or mother-or teacher-reported mental health problems and less relationship problems with their peers.However, the findings came with a warning. ‘Video game playing is often a collaborative leisure time activity for school-aged children. These results indicate that children who frequently play video games may be socially cohesive with peers and integrated into the school community,’ said Katherine M. Keyes, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. The researchers caution against over interpretation, however, as setting limits on screen usage remains and important component of parental responsibility as an overall strategy for student success. Improved engagementThere’s a big difference between sitting with a mobile device in hand for eight hours a day on a just-for-entertainment video game and spending a set amount of time on a resource that is based on extensive research to ensure higher engagement and improved learning outcomes for the player. Thankfully, today there are many resources that offer versatile and intuitive interfaces that are extremely appealing to children, and therefore provide a great way for them to solve puzzles and problems while also being entertained. https://uk.splashlearn.com/maths-games"
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Digital Learning

If we want children to be confident mathematicians, we must get parents on board

18 Nov 2020

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      string(5392) "Minecraft,you can see that it is possible to kill two birds withone stone; you can address some of the issuesin your school’s computing curriculum, and youcan encourage more students to collaborate andcommunicate. Before you know it, you’ll havecreated a class of independent learners who wantto find out more about what their learning tool cando for them. Why not try Minecraft yourself and seethe impact it can have on your pupils?Ray Chambers is a teacher and Head ofICT at Uppingham Community College inRutland. He is a Microsoft Expert Educatorand a regular speaker at the Bett Show. 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Take it one step further by acting out the scenes that take placethere, then use a screencasting app to record the scene and turn it into a film. Alternatively, create your ownoriginal stories and films.n Foster collaboration and explore how communities evolve by stranding your class in survival mode. Pupils willneed to build a shelter and find food to stay alive; usually, they’ll start assigning roles, and a working communitywill gradually form. Will it be a democracy, or will it degenerate into scenes resembling the Hunger Games?!n Build quizzes to test pupils’ end-of-unit knowledge. Use your knowledge of logic gates to make the only meansof escaping a locked room the correct answer to the question. Hyperlinks can also be embedded to send pupilsto materials beyond the game.n Compose an original song using the music blocks, or recreate a famous one (the girls at Uppingham favourOne Direction). A quick search on YouTube will bring up many examples.n Practise ratio and proportion by building scale models of famous buildings and landmarks or even yourown school. Alternatively, explore historic monuments such as the Globe Theatre or the Roman Colosseum,painstakingly rendered in Minecraft worlds by devoted gamers. Import them to MinecraftEdu and send yourclass on a virtual world tour.Finding existing teacher-created contentThe MinecraftEdu Wiki is the place to go for lesson plans, activity ideas and resources, as well as practical adviceon installation and troubleshooting. The teaching homepage features a range of links to some of the best teacher-made content on the web6, including American teacher Eric Walker’s ‘Wonderful world of humanities’. This isa fantastically vast virtual environment which transports pupils back in time to learn about ancient countriesand cultures such as Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, medieval Britain and more. Students can also exploreEuropean myths and legends in the Fairytale Forest, follow trade routes through Mali and the Sahara Desert todiscover oral traditions of middle Africa, and even travel to the future to settle a conflict between Ancient Scholars,who seek to protect artefacts from the past, and time-travelling Minecrosoft Agents, who wish to sell ancientartefacts to modern private buyers.The Edu Wiki also hosts a World Library, where teachers can upload and share Minecraft maps, accompaniedby lesson plans. Highlights here include:n Coordinate hunt – a treasure hunt in which pupils use coordinate grid skills to find a number of hidden items.n Swiss Family Robinson experience – pupils are stranded on a tropical island under similar circumstancesto the family in the book. The goal is not only to survive, but to learn how to thrive through cooperation andgood communication.n Viking world – students undertake a series of tasks which expose them to different components of Vikingculture, including exploration, trading and raiding.n Rainforest challenge – pupils are transported to the Ecuadorian Rainforest, an area heavily affected bydeforestation and erosion. The children work collaboratively to reforest the area.n Palaeontology dig – students work together to uncover, identify and preserve a buried dinosaur fossil.n ComputerCraft Code Academy – a mission-based map that gives children a chance to practise and developtheir programming"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

A teacher's guide to Minecraft in the classroom

23 Jul 2015

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      string(5626) "Over the last ten years, education technology evangelists have made remarkable claims about how new technologies will transform educational systems. In 2009, Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School predicted that half of all secondary school courses in the US would be online by 2019, and that they’d cost 1/3 of a traditional course and provide better outcomes. Sal Khan of Khan Academy proposed in a TED talk that he could use short videos to reinvent education. Sebastian Thrun of Udacity said that in 50 years we’d have only 10 institutions of higher education in the world after massive open online courses colonized the field. As the winner of the TED Prize, Sugata Mitra claimed that students didn’t even need schools or teachers, and that groups of children with access to the internet could teach themselves anything.A disasterAnd then in 2020, the world was blighted by a terrible pandemic. Schools serving over 1.6 billion learners shut down. It was a moment that technologists had promised for years could be transformative, but for most learners and families, remote online learning has been a disaster.As educators face the challenge of spooling up new online and hybrid schools to serve vast numbers of students, they can choose from three kinds of technologies that support learning at scale. In classifying education technology, the first question to ask is “who controls the learning experience for students?”There are three answers to this question: instructor-guided online courses, algorithm-guided adaptive tools, and peer-guided networked learning communities. Each of these genres has strengths and limitations; each is good for some subjects, but not others; for some students, but not others.Very successful students do wellFor older students, there are many different forms of instructor-guided, self-paced online courses available: free offerings from Khan Academy or FutureLearn along with subscription virtual courseware from a variety of companies. These cover many topics in the curriculum, but they only serve a subset of students well. Research shows that the learners who are most successful in self-paced courses are those who are already very successful in school—self-motivated and academically well-prepared.Virtually none of our youngest learners meet these criteria. For auto-didacts, the options are limitless, but for the vast majority of us who need contact with human teachers to help us learn, these kinds of offerings are not very helpfulThere are a variety of algorithm-guided adaptive tools that are engaging and beneficial to student learning. Part of the appeal of these tools is that they use a variety of different kinds of automated assessments to determine student understanding, and then they provide personalized learning pathways to students based on their performance.Theoretically compellingTheoretically, it’s a compelling model, where each student gets the instruction, the assessment, the feedback, and the experience that they need. But, the model depends on having good automated assessments, which only exist in three domains: mathematics, computer science, and early language acquisition (such as learning to read a native language in primary school, or learning the introductory parts of a foreign language).Even within these domains, the assessments are only partially useful—in computer science we can automatically assess whether a student has met a well-defined engineering challenge, but not if they’ve made an aesthetically pleasing home page for a new website. Automated math tutoring software can be a useful part of a school systems’ remote learning plans, but there simply isn’t good automated tutoring software for studying literature, science, social studies, or most of the rest of the school curriculum.While instructor-guided and algorithm-guided technologies attempt to use computers to directly teach students, some technologists have built learning environments where peers teach each other. The Scratch community, where young people learn computational creativity and share their programs, tutorials, and resources with one another, is probably the best example of a peer learning network that has been adopted in schools.Outside of formal schooling, virtually everyone in the networked world participates in some way in these learning networks, when they peruse and comment on makeup tutorials, or read up on video game wikis, or participate in networks for hobbies and crafts. The kind of learning that people do in these networks is rich and deep, but it depends tremendously on internal motivation. People learn amazing things in online learning networks that tap into personal interests, but they tend not to be useful for teaching and learning about mandatory school subjects.To sum up: instructor-guided self-paced online courses are great for autodidacts, but not particularly useful for most students; adaptive tutors work great for many learners, but only in a few subject areas; peer networks work well for learning about personal passions, but not so well for mandatory school curriculum.Sweet spots for distance learningFor two decades, education technology entrepreneurs have promised a disruptive transformation of the learning landscape, but in reality, the field has produced a limited set of tools that only work for some students, in some subjects, in some contexts. Within those sweet spots, learning technologies can be incredibly powerful. But those sweet spots only cover a fraction of all of the learning that typical school systems try to provide for all of"
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Digital Learning

A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education

28 Aug 2020

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      string(4848) "Most people think it will never happen to them so the scenarios show the personal cost of malware.One of the powerful deterrents in most crimes is the fear of getting caught. Most consumers don’t know anyone who has been caught and so not only is it a ‘victimless crime’ in their minds, or a Robin Hood approach to redistributing resources to the poor,  but also it is seen by them as no-risk. However, this is clearly not the case as a cursory search of the web reveals. FACT stands forFederation Against Copyright Theft. It was formed in 1983 to protectthe content, product and interests of the film and television industries.Regarded as leaders in IP protection, FACT also investigates fraud andcybercrime. Its mission statement says: ‘Our ethos is to protect, prevent,detect, deter, disrupt and dismantle, always keeping in mind the ultimatesanctions of criminal prosecution and civil litigation.’They work with police forces and recent examples of ‘deterring and disrupting’ include warnings issued by Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary Cyber Intelligence and Serious Organised Crime Directorate, to subscribers of a service called GE Hosting. It stated that using these services was a crime carrying a maximum sentence of up to five years imprisonment and/or a fine.They work closelywith other investigating agencies and prosecute violations of copyright lawincluding film and DVD piracy, and illegal downloading of content. These crimesare covered by acts of Parliament including:Video Recordings Act 1984Trade Marks Act 1994Copyright Designs & Patent Act 1988 Conspiracy contrary to common lawPiracy can be big business FACT also researchesand produces reports such as https://www.fact-uk.org.uk/files/2017/09/Cracking-Down-on-Digital-Piracy-Report-Sept-2017.pdf that giveinsights into the size and scale of illegal operations: ‘Site operatorswho run streaming sites – making live content such as sports events availableillegally – often steal innocent people’s credit card details first, so theycan access hundreds of premium channels under those people’s names and covertheir own tracks. They then put these streams online for their customers towatch and make money from them.’‘It’s obviously very tempting for people to think they aregetting a bargain,’ said Police Scotland, ‘but it’s important to remember thatthere are organised criminals behind these fraudulent schemes, often supportingand funding other more serious crime, such as human trafficking and drugs, sopeople need to be aware of that. Purchasing a ‘so called bargain’ may lead to avisit from the police at your door so think twice before saying yes.’ There has been a big crackdown on illegal streaming of live football inthe last few years. InMarch 2019, three men from Coventry who sold illegal Premier League streams to more than1,000 pubs, clubs and homes were jailed. Steven King, Paul Rolston and DanielMalone were given a combined total of 17 years, some of the longest sentencesever for piracy crimes. They made more than £5m from their websites. Kieron Sharp, the CEO of anti-piracy organisation Fact, said: ‘It’s about having to pay for a product that we all enjoy watching and want to see. The money that’s in the game has made the product what it is. If the money is not paid back by those who are watching it then we won’t be seeing the football and other activities in future.’The Media Smart competition All you have to do is send MediaSmart your pupils’ creative ideas on how to dissuade their peers from engaging in piracy by designing a social media video. Entries can be a storyboard OR film.Send entries by 1 April 2021 to be entered into their prize draw – winners will be selected from all eligible entries received and chosen at random.PrizesWinning Prize – £2,000 worth of film or media equipment for your school (tell us what your school needs and we will buy it)!All students in the winning group will receive a download voucher for a HD rental from video-on-demand platform Rakuten TVTwo Runner Up Prizes – £500 worth of film or media equipment for your school (tell us what your school needs and we will buy it)!All students in the winning group will receive a download voucher for a HD rental from Rakuten TVEarly Bird Prizes – The first five group entries that we receive from any school will receive a download voucher for a HD rental from video-on-demand platform Rakuten TV.      Students will also be given the opportunity to create ashort anti-piracy campaign in the form of a storyboard or a one-minute film.This element will run as a competition with schools being given the chance towin £2,000 worth of media equipment for their schools and prizes from digitalentertainment retailer, Rakuten TV."
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Digital Learning

Cheap Thrills? There's Nothing Clever About Piracy

3 Dec 2020