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I’ve been working in Chatham, New Jersey, today, for their Education Foundation. The organization has invested a lot of money in the schools, including a cyber center in the high school, a section of the cafeteria where students can lounge and have access to laptops for surfing and working together — social learning.
I’ve been doing my thing about video games as learning engines for parent groups and teachers. My presentation is followed by Deborah Evans, who is a self-professed gamer. What impresses me is that she is almost my age. She started with a Commodore 64, on which she and her kids played Zork. She said she would never forget that Christmas.
After that, her children started using educational games to master math facts. But things got interesting again when they discovered SIM City. Deborah went on to adventure games but is now entrenched in World of Warcraft. She makes the point, as she shows a typical WOW scr
People with a British Accent are so smart!
Eric Yates, the district’s K-6 tech integrationist, then talked about his experience of brinking Nintendo DSes into his elementary classroom. He got the idea, when he first ran across Brain Age. The Education Foundation invested in ten DSes and Erik has learned a lot about using them in elementary classes. One of the best features of the DS, he says, is that it is wireless, and multiple devices can communicate with each other.
He is basically using them as a learning center. As groups are doing differentiated activities, one of the options is using the DS and math software.
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