 Playstation Game that went Platinum I just read an article about “education should be like video games“ which of course I’m in rampant agreement with so long as the right lessons are learned from the video game industry, not the wrong ones.
First, Clayton Christianson and Michael Horn, welcome to the party. We like the exposure that you bring, you are mostly on track, it would be great if you could stay awhile and go from “passing through” to “deeply committed” to education. I’ve posted about Disrupting Class before.
Since I’ve actually gone platinum as a game producer and now spent most of the last decade in education, I bring some insight to the discussion.
The best insights from the game business to take into educational software is how we build challenges, direct attention, manage pace, encourage risk taking, and reward success. Grades can work as a motivating factor. So can silly music, happy animations, access to higher levels. Frankly, set up a meaningful challenge and provide a reward for achievement, most kids are very self-motivated.
How do we teach in the games business? Experientially! We don’t provide manuals or lectures. We let kids try and learn. Sega use to teach developers that the average game player liked to touch a button three times a second. The computer sets the expectation of interactivity. Break lectures, if necessary into 90 second segments. Brevity is everything. If you transcribe many lectures, you find the substance takes up a fraction, say a third or a quarter, of the content. Conventional pedagogy is to tell them what you are going to say, say it, repeat it, and then tell them what you’ve said. I think todays students respond much better to a different mantra. I’m only going to use ten sentences. Understand them. Period. No repetition. If you don’t get it, replay it.
Better yet, check first to see if they’ve got it and then only if they don’t, let them get access to some info. If they get something wrong, they die and get set back. How far do they get set back? Well, that is the magic and art of video games. Setting them back too far is frustrating. Just give them the same question and it encourages random button clicking.
Oops, this is turning itno a sponteneous magnus opus, bad idea. I’ll just reference a few items I’ve written before. I’ve quoted and written on Todays Kids, Engage or Enrage Me, and about learning games generally. If you want this finished….leave me a comment.
|
For many homeschool parents, teaching writing is a major source of frustration and friction. Why? For starters, there’s the question of their parents’ ambitions for them. Many homeschooling moms planned and dreamed about how they would mold their children’s mind by teaching them in two big areas: a love of reading and of writing. The reading will open their children’s minds to an endless supply of fiction and fantasy to learn about history, science, our world, religion, and ideas. In writing, they hope their children will learn to express themselves elegantly while exploring their own thoughts and creativity.
While I don’t have any statistics, I think it’s the writing area where most parents get really frustrated. While some percentage of kids have trouble learning to read, a much larger number have trouble learning to write well. And, frankly, the parents probably are less skilled and patient at teaching writing. Also, when kids learn to read, they are younger and I suspect many parents start running out of patience as the kids get older. And the nature of teaching writing makes it very difficult for parents.
Also, many parents are concerned that they themselves do not write well. Sometimes without reason, sometimes justly so. So their insecurity creates some tension. Many parents are confused by the twin goals of teaching writing. On one hand, like drawing and other artistic forms of self- expression, one goal of writing is creativity to draw out thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, teaching writing also involves mastering how to structure sentences, paragraphs and essays for clarity and efficiency. In teaching writing, the student should show a mastery of sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling with all its nuances of plurals and possessives, and of grammar. So should a parent who is teaching writing focus on creative expression or GUM (Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics)? Many parents are clumsy in handling these two often-conflicting directions.
And, when the students start to succeed in learning to write well, oddly, the writing lessons can sometimes get even more tense. Remember, in teaching writing, there is no answer key. Who is to say if a student’s word choice or sentence structure is optimal or not? Who is to say if an essay is unnecessarily wordy or beautifully lyrical? If Hemingway and Mark Twain’s writing style is so different, how is a parent to guide a budding seventh grader writer in questions of style? And the kids, proud of their creative efforts, tend to be overly-sensitive to any discussion of their writing style. Many students emerge as writers in early adolescence and of course, that does not help reduce tensions.
I have no cure-all for these issues. I created Time4Writing.com as a resource for homeschool parents who want some help teaching writing. Oddly, I too tread some of this ground in creating this writing program. Here’s a few examples.
- I started with ambitions of teaching creative expression such as story-telling and exploring thoughts. Once I launched the courses, I found that the overwhelming need brought to us were students who needed help with basic sentences and paragraphs. Even teaching essay structure was too ambitious for the level of many of our first hundred students. I redirected our course development towards writing mechanics to help students at not just elementary but also middle and high school level, with writing mechanics.
- I found that it wasn’t just homeschoolers who signed up, but many students in schools that weren’t getting the hands-on feedback that they needed to improve their writing skills.
- Sensitivities. I started the course by hiring only experienced licensed writing teachers who had a deep interest in helping students write and were well-aware of the sensitive nature of teaching writing. Nevertheless, I found that many students and their parents are very sensitive to anything other than positive feedback and that the teachers, some new to online teaching, needed to build a new awareness of how feedback can feel in cyberspace. The students take their teachers feedback very seriously. We had some vigorous in-house discussions in which we struggled to build an online teaching methodology that balances the need to maintain a positive relationship while also identifying and correcting writing errors. Many of the same questions of the arbitrariness of formal writing styles and the methods of interpreting them were evoked.
Many parents find that teaching writing is difficult and it’s often a good idea to shift tactics and do some delegation. Time4Writing.com is a set of online writing courses taught by professional writing teachers. These teachers are specialists in their areas. The courses are eight weeks in length and reasonably priced. Time4Writing has been created by Time4Learning, whose integrated K-8 online home school curriculum is indepth and priced at a surprisingly affordable $19.95 per month. Many parents were initially skeptical about the quality of Time4Learning given the low price. Thousands have now learned that quality can be affordable. Time4Writing too has a surprising amount of substance packed into one eight week $99 course. If you have questions about Time4Writing, you can ask in our parent community about Time4Writing or on your choice of parenting homeschool forums such as those managed by Homeschool.com and the Homeschool Swap.
|
I largely salute the Obama administration’s approach to education although I don’t like the overly simplistic approach to teacher rating based on test scores. It’s just too simple and statistically meaningless.
I’m very curious if any of the states submissions for Race to the Top Funds included any meaningful effort to include innovations on education using a homeschooling model. The largest effort so far that I’m aware of in the public sector are the California public homeschool charter schools. And I quote:
In California, there are different types of charter schools. Some are run by school districts and they are “in school” charters. Then there are charter schools that are homeschool based. We have used this route for all the years we have been homeschooling. The homeschool based charter school provides a teacher once a month to collect attendance and work samples. They are also there to bounce ideas off of and place the purchase orders for curriculum, field trips and classes that the charter school offers. The funding offered by each charter school varies so interviewing each school is a must to see what they offer for the money provided. There is also a different rate for high school than for elementary which is considered K-8 for the purpose of funding. The constraints are no religious materials, you have to use their vendors, and testing is required by the school. Now I use “required” loosely since you can opt out of testing just by writing a letter stating you are opting your child out.
|
