Tag Archives: teachers

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…

This post originally appeared on Common Sense Education and appears here with permission.   Watch a group of preschoolers working in a garden. It’s cute, right? But it turns out they’re learning more than you’d think. According to our new NSF-funded report, STEM Starts Early, co-published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and New America, there’s growing evidence that very young children from all backgrounds — even children from birth to age 8 — learn important science, technology, engineering, and math…

On March 29, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, New America, and the Erikson Institute presented a webinar on integrating STEM into early childhood education to the STEM Ecosystems group at TIES, The Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM. TIES focuses on STEM school design, STEM curriculum, and instructional support for schools. As our country’s leading STEM innovator, TIES brings STEM design services to districts, states, private philanthropies, corporations, federal agencies and many more. The STEM Ecosystems Initiative is made up of nearly 40 communities of…

On May 31-June 1, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America co-hosted Fostering STEM Trajectories: at a two-day event in Washington, DC. Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education and former Vice President of Asia Society, delivered these remarks on how an international perspective on STEM education for young children may benefit our research and practices.   FIRST: Why thinking internationally ought to be part of our national research agenda in STEM and early learning. Most American educators know that on…

A Collaborative Experiment On January 23, 2015, researchers, educators, and digital media professionals spent the day at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school) to imagine how to better support the needs and interest-driven learning of families with children through digital media. The “Designing Media for Underserved Families” event, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program, continued in the cross-sector collaborative spirit of the LIFE Center and the Families and Media consortium, in…

I spent last weekend on a camping trip with extended family.  Having just completed a report on the use of digital games in the classroom, I was more than a little eager to consult with the kids in the group about their use of digital games inside and outside of the classroom.  Given the popularity of Minecraft, I started there.  “Do any of you guys play Minecraft?” I asked.  Instantly there were three kids with three devices surrounding me, each…

When twelve-year-old Amy O’Toole spoke at TED last fall, she took the stage as one of the youngest people ever to have published a peer-reviewed science article. Amy’s inspiring article, which she wrote with her classmates as part of a playful participatory science program, is perhaps the only peer-reviewed science article to begin “Once Upon a Time”; it is both good science and a good story. As Amy’s article and TED talk show, play helps students learn science, and storytelling…

A new study, called A-GAMES (Analyzing Games for Assessment in Math, ELA/Social Studies, and Science) has been funded by the Gates Foundation to study how video games support teachers’ classroom formative assessment practice. If you are a K-12 teacher, you can help shape and inform the research by completing a survey.   There is growing support for the use of digital video games as part of K-12 teachers’ classroom routines. As with all educational technologies, the most frequently asked question…

This post was originally published on the Fred Rogers Center Blog and appears here with permission. This week my colleagues at Education Development Center and SRI International and I are releasing findings from our Prekindergarten Transmedia Mathematics Study. This research is part of Ready to Learn, a partnership between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS. The basic premise of Ready to Learn is that it marshals public media resources in support of 2- to…

This fall, students across the country walked back through school doors. Each child undoubtedly had his or her own unique summer, possibly filled with camps, vacations, or just time to relax with friends and family. However, it is very likely that one shared element of each child’s summer vacation was ample time to spend with media and technology, whether it was the television, smartphones, tablets, or computers. While one might assume the end of the summer means students spend less…