games and apps will push social skills back to the center of schooling

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10/1/13 Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes

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T E C H | 8/19/2013 @ 10:34AM | 2,890 views

Games And App s Will PushSocial Skills Back To The CenterOf School ing

Im downright cynical about thecurrent education system, saidSusan Crown, chairman and founderof the Susan Crown Exchange . It is aknotted up mess.

She and I were talking aboutGraphite , a website that helpsteachers choose and evaluate digitallear ning tools. Graphite is anexp onen tial mod el of the SusanCrown Exchange/CommonSenseMe dia rating sys tem.

Learning ratings was the first flag in the sand, Graphite is the second one,she continued, It is an iterative process, were learning as we goalong. Graphite comes out of beta this week. The web platform is a resourcefor teachers and a new venture from Common Sense Media. Graphiteprovides crowdsourced, or teacher-sourced, listings and ratings of educationalapps and games.

Graphite aims to help educators discover, share,and use the best edtech tools. Said Seeta Pai,Graphites VP, Research & Digital Content. Greateducational technologies have the potential to

deliver great learning for all kids, make teachers jobs easier, and even change the way we think aboutand structure education. We want to make it easierfor educators to find and use them, and we want toraise the bar of quality in the marketplace.

Apps and games are the future of education. Edtechis no longer just a gimmick. Games and apps arepoised to completely restructure the way we think about learning. Sure, the alarmists worry thattablets and computers will automate teaching. They shudder with science-fiction-fears of kids being

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Jordan ShapiroContributor

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I am full-time father of two little bo ys and a lsoan academic. I te ach in Temple Unive rsity'sIntellectual Heritage Department. I lead effortsto bring more EdTech and game based learning

to humanities education at the university level.I'm engaged in a scholarly researc h that looks attechnology and popular culture from theperspectives of Jungian & Archetypal

s c holo and heno meno lo & Heide erian

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Jordan Shapiro , ContributorI write about edTech, game-based learning, and depth ps ychology.

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taught by robots. Their worries, however, aremisplaced.

On the contrary, Im pretty sure that edtech, games,and apps will put real human interaction back at thecenter of the learning experience. No more boringpractice drills, pop quizzes, lectures, or powerpoints! Any information that can be disseminated usingtechnology will be. Class time will be reserved for

the kind of Socratic dialogue and mentorship thatrequires face to face interaction. Im describing whatsome educators call: the flipped classroom.

Envision a learning experience in which apps arethe equivalent of the handouts, but much moreefficient. The teacher filters Graphite ratings by subject matter and age level, looking for the perfectapp. Perhaps he or she discovers that Dragonbox+ isa mesmerizing step-by-step puzzler that sets thefoundation for algebra. There are editorial reviewsand comments from other teachers. All areoverwhelmingly positive.

So, the teacher assigns the students to play Dragonbox+ for one hour over the weekend. Thegame adapts to each particular childs ability level.Students feel like theyre just playing the equivalentof Angry Birds. Some students master the game(simultaneously mastering the basic skills of algebra). Others make it 80% through. Some start tostruggle about halfway. But every student makes anappropriate incremental improvement. Nobody

fails.In class, the teacher works with the students. It is aparticipatory process. Theres no need for theteacher to lectureto teach to the testthat stuff has been done at home. Instead, teaching time isreserved for human to human interaction, for thekind of thinking and discussion that cannot bereduced to diagrams and bullet points. The only things edtech can automate are the ways of teachingthat humans were already doing on auto-pilot. Appscan do that more efficiently. And teachers candedicate their time to doing what they do best:mentoring, guiding, discussing.

Im describing a learning experience in whichlearning is personalized, practice drills are playful, and homework is apedagogical tool instead of an assessment. But this is not a classroomexperience. Lets avoid the word classroom. Using the habitual language of education will keep us tethered to old ways of imagining schooling. Instead, Ichoose the phrase learning experience because new digital tools enable us totranscend the boundaries of brick and mortar. Teaching is no longer confinedto the classroom. And Graphite helps guide teachers to make this leap; it

This Guy LeftGoogle To Put ThePower Of Big DataInto SmallClassrooms


How to Invest inGame BasedLearning


Beyond DesignThinking InEducation AndResearch

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points them in the direction of the digital tools so that instruction can happen both at school and away. Games and apps begin to unchain us from theoutdated educational conventions of the 20th Century.

During the last century, schools mastered the process of brick and mortarteaching. Students learned to line up against cinderblock walls and follow rigidschedules. The school day mimicked the work day. Children sat in rows andresponded to bells. Practically automated like a factory, teachersexpected toact more like foremen than educatorsherded kids from classroom to

cafeteria, from gym to playground. Skilled teachers were reduced toattendance-takers and grade-stampers. The lines between schooling,conditioning, and brainwashing remained fuzzy and ambivalent.

In 1954 Michel Foucault wrote that in its education a society dreams of itsgolden age. So presumably, at some point the United States envisioned ourrich way of living modern life and, perhaps unintentionally, we created atraining program to make it a reality.

And one could easily argue that it worked perfectly. Private schools nurtured budding executives. Magnet schools crafted bright kids into middle managers.The rest of the institutions catered to the labor class. It was a know-your-

place kind of education. It reinforced a world of haves and have-nots.

The education system is essentially a socio-economic class system, saidSusan Crown. Schools teach not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but alsocultural and social behaviors. The prioritization of cognitive skills, test scores,and easily quantifiable information only veils the even bigger achievementgap in interpersonal and intrapersonal skills.

Michel Foucault also asked, Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories,schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Foucault wasnt the only one who noticed.

After all, in The Republic , Plato alsoillustrated how ways of thinking can beconfining. He used the image of prisonerschained in a cave in his discussion of theessence of education. He wrote about theinherent tensions of schooling, betweencreating good citizens rather than simply creating good conformists. Is teaching aboutigniting the passion that comes from withinthe individual, or putting in place the socialconformity that is a prerequisite forcivilization? Both, of course. Plato defined education as that training inexcellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be aperfect citizen.

Almost echoing Plato, Susan Crown points out that if we want to succeed as asociety, the workforce will need to be high tech and high touch. Sherecognizes that individuals need to know how to connecthuman to humanonline and off. We need to be proficient with tools we create to makeindividual survival more efficient. But we also need to develop the skills of human citizenship.

Apps and games will bring humanity back to the center of schooling. Websiteslike Graphite can help. It put teachers in control of reforming education.
http://www.graphite.org/


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7 Great Educational Apps And Games

DragonBoxA game almost as ad dictive as Angry Birds, DragonBox combines first rate a rt design

and s mooth game mechanics to tea ch the ba sics of algebra ic thinking. At first glance, it

see ms like DragonBox is tricking kids into learning alge bra. Its not. Kids are a ctually

doing algebra from the moment they start the app. Trials have shown that, on

average, DragonBox takes about 42 minutes to teach kids most of the operations

involved in middle school algeb ra. IOS & Android . (Text by Jordan Shapiro)
http://dragonboxapp.com/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2013/07/01/it-only-takes-about-42-minutes-to-learn-algebra-with-video-games/http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fhjg45fdef/wuzzit-trouble-4/http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fhjg45fdef/dragonbox-4/


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games and apps will push social skills back to the center of schooling

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