Education Technology Possibilities Are Endless!
Posted on: March 6, 2009
Posted in: Education Reform
Technology 4 Learning!
Teaching Students to Program With Stories
Alice is a 3D virtual worlds programming environment that makes it easy to create animations for either story telling or interactive games. Students can learn the intricacies of programming through enjoyable activities.
Available for free download on the internet (provided by Carnegie Mellon), Alice has been used with 4th-6th grade youngsters on up to high school students.
Teachers can use Alice to integrate computer science with any other discipline.
Alice can be used in two ways:
- At the lower level students can learn enough Alice to build interactive worlds to integrate it into course modules
- At a higher level, Alice is a complete course on learning programming. In any current module in which a student creates a poster or presentation, the student now can build an interactive story or game as the presentation.
The wonderful thing about Alice is that students, yes, even middle school girls, can learn computer programming through storytelling.
What a breakthrough!
Inspired Teaching Made Into Fun
MYST is another technologically-advanced program for involving and engrossing students to achieve peak levels of performance.
These videos are about an award-winning teacher in the U.K. and the techniques he uses to motivate and inspire his students. As Clive McGonigal (the friend who told me about Tim Ryland) mentioned in his email to me. . .
“How many classes of kids do you know that moan when the lesson’s over?”
Enjoy the videos and take a look at the website. See what can be accomplished when teachers are allowed to use their creativity.
What a fellow teacher says about the effectiveness of this technique.
For years, Don Kingsland, author of “Set Our Teachers FREE! A Plan to Save Public Education” and “The Kingsland Plan” utilized creative techniques to help his students far surpass expectations. The newest generation of creative teachers is exemplified by Tim Ryans.
Our students are bright and they deserve the best education we can give them. Schools must be revamped to allow excellent teachers to provide innovative learning environments for those students, at all ages.
Take a look at Tim’s website Tim Rylands website and his blog Tim Ryland’s blog to learn more about the results of education done creatively.
Just think, the POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!
Until next time!
Brennan
March 7th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
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March 7th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
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