Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

A school is more than just a building. It’s an ecosystem, as delicate and as in need of balance as the ecosystems of the natural world. They way that a school is designed dictates the success of its mission to educate children and prepare them to become active and engaged citizens. To this end, teachers, administrators, architects, parents, concerned community members, and students themselves are innovating classroom design to create healthier environments conducive to effective learning. The American Institute of…

January 10, 2013 marked the kick-off for Phase II of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Games and Learning Publishing Council. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Council aims to expand the role of games and gaming in the educational lives of children by providing new research and analysis of the field of games-based learning. In its first year, the Council has expanded research and set forth a rigorous agenda for future work. Representing the diversity within the…

In March, Michael Levine presented “Gaming Education Reform: Starting Points for a Digital Revolution” at the 2012 Early Education and Technology for Childrenconference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

As I have described in my previous two posts, the Hispanic-Latino Families and Digital Technologies Forum, held June 8th in Washington DC, yielded rich discussion among the researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and media producers convened by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), Joan Ganz Cooney Center (JGCC), and National Council of La Raza (NCLR). One recurring call from forum participants was for more, and more appropriately designed research to surface greater understanding of the role of digital technologies in the…

This past spring, TIFF Nexus hosted a series of conferences and creative jams to explore new ways of creating media in Toronto, in which our own Carly Shuler participated. We invited Jam Leader Mark Rabo to tell us more about what sets TIFF Nexus apart from other conferences about youth and media. TIFF is known primarily by its unabbreviated namesake, the Toronto International Film Festival, which attracts a worldwide audience and fills the city with stars and star-gazers for two…

Earlier this spring, Carly Shuler presented the findings of the iLearn II report at a lightning talk at the TIFF Nexus Conference in Toronto, Ontario.  

In my first post from the Hispanic-Latino Families and Digital Technologies Forum, I described participants’ commentary regarding the importance of digital literacy for advancing equity and the need to ensure high quality content and engagement in order to optimize the enormous educational potential of digital media. Numerous participants in the forum also stressed the constant need for respect, understanding, and learning from the intricacies of a culture as rich and as the growing US Hispanic-Latino population. In this post I provide…

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to hear from “one of the most influential women in technology,” the creators of “Zombie Yoga,” aNASA research scientist, the founder of Atari AND Chuck E. Cheese, a classroom teacher working in Hong Kong, the White House’s “video game czar” and a bunch of 12 year old girls designing their own math games in Brooklyn, within the span of a couple of hours, without leaving a 2 block radius. How on earth did I manage to do…

On June 8th, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (JGCC) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) convened more than 50 of the nation’s leading scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to discuss the state of our knowledge of the role and implications of digital technologies in the lives of Hispanic-Latino families. As a graduate student intern at the Cooney Center, I helped conduct a literature review and write a corresponding background paper for the Hispanic-Latino Families and Digital…

For the second year in a row, I packed my necessities and headed into the wilderness for the Canadian May long weekend. OK … well by necessities, I mean my iPad, and by the wilderness, I mean the stunning Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California.  Yup, that’s right, another App Camp has come and gone. When I get back from App Camp, the first response I usually get from people is usually “That’s awesome!”  And then they follow with, “What’s an…