Tag Archives: mindshift guide to games and learning

Back in January, I joined the Joan Ganz Cooney Center as a Senior Fellow. It is a perfect fit. I’ve been a fan of the Center’s work for a while, writing regularly about its research reports for my Forbes Blog. Many of the folks at the center have also been fans of my work—in particular, the Mindshift Guide to Digital Games and Learning that I created in partnership with the Cooney Center back in 2013-14. I wrote that guide to…

How can games unlock a rich world of learning? That is the key question behind a new resource that aims to help teachers successfully incorporate games in the classroom. The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning is the culmination of a series of blog posts authored by Forbes contributor and professor Jordan Shapiro, and tackles many of the most pressing questions that teachers and parents have about using digital games for learning. Featuring a foreword by Katie Salen, the…

Part #20 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning Series Even for educators who are excited about using games in the classroom, questions inevitably come up around the very real obstacles to implementation, and strategies for overcoming them. A recent survey from the Games and Learning Publishing Council asked 700 teachers to identify and rank the major barriers to using games in the classroom. Here are the top 10 obstacles they list and ideas about how to overcome each one. 1.…

Part 19 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning By now, you’ve probably read enough to be convinced that it’s worth trying games in your classroom. You understand that games are not meant to be robot teachers, replacing the human-to-human relationship. Games are a tool that teachers can use to do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently. Games provide a different approach to developing metacognitive skills through persistent self-reflection and iteration of particular skill sets. Games offer experiential contextualized…

Part 18 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning To make sense of the broad and complex world of games and learning, we’re inclined to create neatly organized lists and categories. The truth is that there are so many different kinds of learning games, it’s difficult to break them down into clear-cut categories. Especially in an atmosphere of ed-tech entrepreneurship that aims to disrupt our habitual way of thinking about education, familiar classification structures can sometimes hold us back more…

Part 17 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning Many teachers are excited about trying games in the classroom but don’t know where to begin. The landscape of learning games is vast and confusing — and it’s growing and changing rapidly. Moving at the pace of the software industry, games are often updated and iterated so that new versions replace familiar ones before you’ve even had a chance to implement them in your classroom routine. And teachers have busy schedules.…

Part 16 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning The textbook is a problem that consistently plagues classrooms. At best, textbooks are innocuous, offering simple summaries of a very broad subject area. At worst, they oversimplify things, providing less information than an encyclopedia article without enough nuance or context to make it meaningful. One study showed that when students read textbooks, they tend to retain “absurd” details, but fail to “grasp the main point.” Susan M. Hubbuch writes, “The trouble…

Part 15 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. Most people agree that implementing game-based learning makes sense for older students, but what about really young kids? Do screens have a place in early childhood education? How young is too young for screen time? If you have small children, you know that this is a hot topic among new parents. Some moms and dads believe that screen time will ruin their children. Others see tablets as an exceptional parenting gadget,…

Part 14 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that today’s technologies will one day be obsolete — we shouldn’t be too enamored with any particular educational tool. Teachers will always play the most important role in the classroom. Although ed-tech has a lot to offer, even the most interactive, adaptive software cannot provide the social and emotional benefits that a good teacher can. Early psychoanalytic research already made it clear…

Part 13 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning. In education, it seems as if innovation and revolution play like the song of the Sirens in a culture of perpetual obsolescence. It seems as if we’ve got an unhealthy fetish for new-ness, indiscriminately choosing the convenient disposability of shrink-wrap over the sustainability of the well-worn. Digital games can be amazing tools, but only when used to make it easier to contextualize the gifts we’ve received from Shakespeare, Socrates, Euclid, and…