Using the Internet to teach

This title and image are from the tutorial here that was created to refute the historical accuracy of information about Jesus and the Christian Church in the movie “The Da Vinci Code.” This digital tutorial was prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It uses digital expressive tools and techniques to teach facts and ideas.

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Games and learning

Lots has been written lately about video and computer games and learning. It’s obvious that these games engage many students in a way that school doesn’t, so naturally people wonder if the two could be combined in some way. Some teachers actually use games in their classrooms. The question is, do games actually teach, and what do they teach?

I think the best thing games teach is problem-solving strategies. In a project-based classroom, games can be a great vehicle to help students “puzzle” out strategies that they can use in many subject areas. Let’s look at an example.

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Aggregating Student Blogs in Google Reader

This isn’t much different from doing it with SuprGlu (in fact it may not be as elegant) but since it’s the first use of a public Google Reader page to collect a classroom full of student blog posts that I’ve seen, here’s a link to it. The posts are from a 6th grade social studies class whose teacher Mike Hetherington is “mother blogging” here and offers up some pretty good “rules for blogging,” a wiki, and some podcasts (though nothing recent.)

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