Tag Archives: teachers

Technology may promise to disrupt. Yet, all too often in education, tech tools simply digitally replicate the ways we’ve always gone about teaching and learning. From gradebooks to slide decks, to gamified learning, many ed tech offerings tend to be fancy window dressing more than new approaches.  XR– or “extended reality,” the umbrella term for immersive tools including virtual and augmented reality– has the potential to be truly different. These emerging technologies can unlock learning opportunities never before known in…

Technology can be a transformative learning tool in the classroom. According to The National Education Technology Plan (NETP), technology has the potential to “affirm and advance relationships between educators and students, reinvent our approaches to learning and collaboration, shrink long-standing equity and accessibility gaps, and adapt learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.” While these are lofty goals, to be truly effective, educators need to have the skills and support to take full advantage of technology-rich learning environments.…

When schools across the U.S. shut their doors in March 2020, families were confronted with the reality that our educational systems were not designed for remote instruction. Lack of access to the internet or devices, variation in teacher preparation, working parents, and uncertainty of how to best engage learners presented a range of obstacles. Adapting to the demands of learning from home required significant flexibility and resilience on the part of families, and the ways in which they were able…

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting…

This is a moment of unprecedented transition for the United States–and for the world more broadly. Reopening schools requires decisions based on incomplete information that must be made in an environment that, at best, would be described as uncertain. But while it might seem unlikely, our oldest form of connection, play, may be one of our best hopes for helping us to navigate this uncertainty. Play has everything to teach us about managing risks, generating new possibilities, dealing with the…

At the XR for Change Summit in New York City in June 2019, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center hosted a cross-disciplinary panel of experts to discuss the potential impact and pitfalls of virtual reality (VR) in the classroom. Michael Preston, the Cooney Center’s executive director, kicked off the session with a call to take advantage of VR’s relative youthfulness to ensure that content and hardware developed for learning are beneficial and safe for children. The panel was moderated by David…

Do you use immersive media like AR or VR with students in 1st through 8th grade? Are you interested, but haven’t been able to try it out yet? Or are these technologies not for you? The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop would like to know more about teachers’ decisions whether or not and how to use immersive media with their students. Please take this survey—and share it with all the teachers you know—to help us gain a better…

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Lisa Castaneda, Co-Founder and CEO of foundry10, shares an optimistic view of VR’s potential to shape learning experiences in the future.   Foundry10 is a research organization working across many domains, and we have been studying VR and students for several years. Today, students…

Last month, researchers AnneMarie McClain and Lacey Hilliard presented some exciting findings from a a study they conducted around classroom media and socio-emotional learning among elementary school students at the International Communication Association Conference in Prague. We invited them to share details of the project as well as the findings that emerged from their investigation.    At the May 2018 International Communication Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, we presented some findings from our longitudinal study, the Arthur Interactive Media (AIM)…

I recently met Paul Darvasi and Aleksander Husøy at the annual UNESCO Forum on Global Citizenship Education in Ottawa, where we were on a panel hosted by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. The subject of our panel was a debate on the topic, “Innovative pedagogies for ESD and Global Citizenship Education: Is game-based learning the future?” Both Paul and Aleks use games in the classroom often when they’re teaching and I’ve been creating them for the past nine years, so frankly, there wasn’t all that much debate…