Technical innovations have enable us to design nice 3D educational games, graphics, and environments, but what are the best practices to integrate them in eLearning?
When designing 3D educational games, the first thing to do is setting up the graphical environment of your module. Indeed, a well-rounded graphical environment is a solid foundation to a...(Continue Reading)
How to Cope With Stress During Exams Infographic
Stress during exams is a serious threat for students, as it can affect their sleep, appetite and trigger depression. How can they cope with the stress?
Research reveals that 1 in 2 students have skipped meals while studying for an exam and 1 in 7 said they have used alcohol as a way of dealing with exam anxiety. As if this wasn’t enough 2 out of 3 said it affected their sleep and are seeking professional help to ease their concerns. According to the research, the stress students are experiencing comes from not wanting to disappoint their parents, fear of failing and overall academic pressure.
The How to Cope With Stress During Exams Infographic presents the results of an exam stress survey 2000 undergraduate students participated in and shows the impact anxiety has on their exam performance. To help students out, it also suggests some ways to relieve exam stress and how to study effectively. Have a look! If you know anyone who is suffering from exam anxiety, send them this infographic to help them out. The tips it provides could make a real difference!
View also:
Via: www.studymedicineeurope.com
The post How to Cope With Stress During Exams Infographic appeared first on e-Learning Infographics.
World of Cheddar just created a 10 page guide filled with FREE financial literacy resources for financial educators. We’ve included sources for:
To receive your FREE copy, go to the World of Cheddar website at www.worldofcheddar.com and subscribe to our mailing list.
There are a LOT of discussion boards. I chose only one to follow so that I could experience a discussion board in a class with 71,000 students from 147 countries. The board I chose to follow is “Is Gamification Unethical?” You may recall that I posted on this topic in this blog. I posted a similar statement in that discussion board, and received a couple of replies.
The range of sub-topics within this discussion board is insightful. It seems that many discussion board participant believe that gamification is unethical. Sub-topics revolve around:
Those are the themes I recall; there were SO. MANY. POSTS.
The major themes seem to be:
And to me, the underlying idea behind these posts is that a person who is exposed to a gamified process has no choice over their actions in the process, including the choice to participate. There’s no free will once a system or process has been gamified. I thought games were all about choice and free will participation, so wouldn’t gamification be, too?
What are your thoughts? Does gamification assume that the target audience loses his or her choice to participate? If you decide to gamify a class or topic or some part of the educational process, are you limiting student choice in a negative way?
You can listen the latest episode of the World of Cheddar podcast series by visiting the the World of Cheddar Website at www.worldofcheddar.com and clicking the Podcast square. In Episode 4 Vicki talks about Financial Well-Being.
You can also listen to the podcast on iTunes. Go to the iTunes Store, select podcasts and search for World of Cheddar
The EC Network has a cool video that gives some ways to gamify education. Looks easy enough to me, but then, I don’t run a classroom. I’d love to hear what you teachers think. Could you apply any of these ideas THIS semester? I betcha that you could do a variation of the connection game around financial literacy topics.
Click the link below to watch the video.
Author Savita Iyer-Ahrestanin at AdvisorOne.com published a nice article on August 27, 2012, on Vicki Brackens and her work with financial literacy improvement through game-play, and about a game that Vicki is developing through Syracuse University’s iSchool call Cb3d (Cheddar Bowl in 3D). You can read more by clicking this link:
Here are the Week 1 statistics for this free online gamification course that I’m taking through Penn/Wharton School:
The figures are incredible! I can’t imagine teaching 71,000 people. As a student, the numbers haven’t impacted me. One of the assignments is a peer-reviewed paper. We’ll see how that works.
Just thought I’d share.
The World of Cheddar website just published reviews of three more games:
You can read these reviews at www.worldofcheddar.com.
We’ve included links to the games, so go play them yourself and then come back here and tell us what you think!
Do you have first hand experience using these games with your students or other young people? If so, please share your experiences here.
On Monday the Penn/Wharton online gamification course offered through Coursera began. I mentioned this game in an earlier post. Having listened to an interview on NPR about Coursera and the huge course enrollment sizes — 100K students — I decided to enroll in the course. I wanted to experience an online certificate-granting course that aims to teach tens of thousands of students at a time.
The course uses video lectures to deliver content; students should be able to complete the assignments from watching the video lectures. Each module has several videos that range between six and 17 minutes. No textbook is assigned, however, optional online materials are provided. During the videos students are asked to answer a multiple choice question or make a reflection (not an online reflection). At the end of Week One, students took an multiple choice quiz. This week’s quiz was only five questions. All told, I spent about two hours total on Week One.
There is a HUGE discussion forum. Lots of discussions from which to choose, and there is a wiki. Navigating and participating in the discussion forums take more time than the course work.
I’ll be sharing some of the links and ideas from the course in future posts.
My initial impression is: So far, so good.
In my August 21 post about IDEO Design’s website Design Thinking For Educators I mentioned that you can download a FREE Design Thinking For Educators Toolkit. Well, I decided to download and explore the toolkit.
This is a 94 page PDF document that describes the IDEO Design design process. The beginning of the document immediately points out that educator problems need not be solely content delivery problems. Examples include:
This is not simply a “teacher effectiveness improvement tool, but a school effectiveness improvement tool. This tool can improve creativity and innovation on a personal, classroom or school level — even a school- community level.
Its a five phase process that starts from defining the problem, identifying solution possibilities, selecting the “best” solutions, implementation and evaluating the results for continuous improvement. IDEO Design specifically describes this from an educator’s/school’s perspective.
Here are the five phases as they describe them:
The process is completely collaborative. It cannot be implemented by a single teacher. And the toolkit reminds educators that while the process looks straight forward, it can be challenging. But the creative process is challenging. It is iterative, and require using new brain muscles to grapple with unfamiliar ideas and skills to give birth to something innovative. (Just like what we require of students.)
The document also includes case studies of educators experiences in using the toolkit.
Download the document, peruse it, then come back and tell us what you think.
I referenced IDEO Design in my August 17 post What Makes An Effective Learning Space, and in my August 21 post, Design Thinking for Educators, so I thought that I’d post some videos that introduce you to the powerful way practices human-centered design. IDEO Designs human-centered solutions to world problems in all industries, both for-profit and not-for-profit.
To learn more about the IDEO Design design process, here’s a segment from Nightline published December 2, 2009. They will design a shopping cart.
This video condenses an innovative work week at IDEO Design into two minutes:
On August 17, I posted a link to a video of a presentation that IDEO Design Learning Lead Sandy Speicher gave about what constitutes an effective learning environment (not just about physical space layout) at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival. In that presentation Sandy referred to a website called Design Thinking For Educators. Already familiar with IDEO Design’s exciting user-centered design process, I thought I’d go check out this website.
IDEO Design created a way to apply and teach their own human-centered design process to the K-12 education space. At their website www.designthinkingforeducators.com you can learn more about this innovative way that educators can shape the kinds of learning experiences that will enhance students abilities to learning. The website elegantly and simply showcases IDEO Design’s work with Riverdale Country School. There are several videos that quickly explain their concept of Design Thinking from the perspective of the teachers at the school.
There is a connection to games. When you visit the website, scroll down the page to the Case Studies section. Click on the Motion Math link. Motion Math is a game app that the teachers created using Design Thinking! Motion Math was designed for children to teach and test mastery of math concepts.
By the way you can download a free copy of the Design Thinking For Educators Toolkit. I will talk about the toolkit in the next post.
In the mean time, I highly encourage you to visit this site and prepare to be inspired.
At the Aspen Game Festival, Katie Salen, co-founder and executive director of the NYC game-based learning school Quest to Learn talks about the school. She shares examples of the type of instructional strategies the school uses and student reactions. To give you an idea: Coursework is presented as hard problems that students don’t know how to solve, but are motivated to seek out the information the knowledge and skills they need to complete the course.
Here’s a link to the video for the festival: Katie Salen at Game Changers: New Ways to Teach Our Kids
Cool stuff! Watch the video and let us know what you think!
2012 Aspen Ideas Festival strikes again! Sandy Speicher, education lead at IDEO’s Design for Learning domain, presents some ideas that can transform the classroom learning environment into a learner-centered environment that provides them the tools and support and motivation they need to improve their ability to learn.
Click HERE to watch the video.
As you watch this 15 minute video, see if you can identify any similarities to strategies that a well-designed game might employ? And when you’re done watching this video, we’d love to hear what you think: Is Sandy Speicher suggesting gamification without using the term “gamification”?
Tina Barseghian at Mindshift posted three videos in her August 9 blog post What Makes Educational Games Work?. These videos are snippets of Constance Steinkuehler, Senior Policy Analyst at the Office of Science and Technology in the Executive Office of the President, at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival discussing the roles of educational games and what makes them work.
The three videos talk about:
They’re not log videos and definitely worth your time to watch.
And as always, we’d love to hear on our blog what you think about Constance’s ideas.
Want to learn about gamification? Want to learn about the different components of gamification and how to apply them? Wanna learn this for FREE?
Well you’re in luck! My alma mater is offering a FREE six week course on this very subject starting August 27. The course is called “Gamification” and is being taught by Associate Professor of Legal Studies at The Wharton School, Kevin Werbach.
To learn more about the course, including how to sign up, click here.
The World of Cheddar website just published reviews of three more games:
You can read these reviews at www.worldofcheddar.com.
We’ve included links to the games, so go play them yourself and then come back here and tell us what you think!
Do you have first hand experience using these games with your students or other young people? If so, please share your experiences here.
…. are not just an Easter treat!
Michael DeHart received a much appreciated and well deserved bag of beans when he won the first annual Jelly Bean Angel Fund Innovation Award through Project SEE. Project SEE, was a seven day intensive entrepreneurship program for high school students offered by the SSIC — South Side Innovation Center, located in Syracuse, NY.
The SSIC, a business incubator, is a project of The Whitman School of Business at Syracuse University that provides services and training for budding entrepreneurs.
World of Cheddar founder, Vicki Brackens has been adding a lot of jelly beans to a fund she established at the CNY Community Foundation called the Jelly Bean Angel Fund. The fund aims ” to catalyze the development of innovative ideas through the partnership of entrepreneurs and academic institutions.”
Money. Moolah. Jelly Beans. Cheddar. No matter what you call it, it’s vital to support innovation and entrepreneurship. And World of Cheddar founder Vicki Brackens is committed to using it to support community-driven enterprising ideas.
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