Replacement+Ideas

=**Questions to address in this section are:**=

**1. How might this resource replace outdated elements and/or provide a more engaging and motivating learning experience?**
Jacobs (2010) provided a rationale for 21st century tools which benefit learners by: “1. Providing a visual and organizational tool that enables them to make meaning in ‘concrete’ ways that they can also control with immediate access; 2. Stimulates visual reflection through a highly visual profile; and 3. Increasing engagement because of immediate excitement, control, and interactivity” (p. 22). These days, more and more students carry communication devices around with them. What better way to integrate a student’s personal item with educational learning platforms?
 * A)  __Assistive Technology (AT):__ **

Gaming has been used in educational circles since at least the 1900s. With the evolving of computers in the 1980s, the use of educational games in the classroom became more popular. However, these games were criticized that they do not provide a new learning experience. It was simply a repetitive traditional way of practice learning. The early 2000's saw a rise in different types of educational games such as the Leapfrog which combined an interactive book with a cartridge and allowed kids to play games and interact with a paper-based book. Today, Serious Games became in the form of software applications following a game-like design.
 * B) __Serious Games:__ **

What differentiates a serious game from any other is its focus on the specific learning outcome to obtain a measurable change in performance of the learner. Designers of these games focus on the changing of the skills, beliefs or behaviors of the players without losing the entertaining aspects of the game

Interactivity is a property of serious games that allows the players’ engagement through behavior and cognitive processing. The player participates in playing with increased interest which allows for more active learning to take place. Players can provoke their deep thinking through dialogues, decision making, and analysis of the situation which is not applicable in any television programs. Multimodality is another property of serious games. It allows players to be involved in a rich environment that requires a combination of visual, auditory, haptic, and other sensory modalities. Research has shown that such environments are needed to achieve learning satisfaction and better test scores. Relative to noninteractive learning conditions, learners in the context of interactive environments will achieve more effective learning outcomes.

Clegg (1991) argued that the kinds of cooperative and collaborative learning activities embedded in game play are important elements of the gaming experience. Also game simulations can motivate passive students more than a traditional learning environment. Video games motivate learning by challenging and providing curiosity, beauty, fantasy, fun, and social recognition.

Simulations can increase engagement and deeper learning. Learners engage in critical situations whereby they generate hypotheses, develop plans and strategies, observe their results, and readjust their hypotheses. Also, the motivating spirit of the game that fosters cooperation in some cases helps develop independent social individuals. It is obvious that learners are more likely to achieve if using a preferred learning environment.

How can education through games be achieved?


 * Knowledge level:Education at the Knowledge level is associated with memory and reasoning. In this learning process we observe concrete information (physical items) or abstract information (text or visual metaphors) and process and store this in our memory. We also learn how to combine this information to create new aggregate information and we learn how to do thought experiments (simulations) on the basis of this information. This makes us capable of planning ahead. Serious Games can aid in all parts of this process: they can provide a virtual environment that can present better (closer to reality) metaphors of the information we need to store. This reliefs us from first processing abstract information (e.g. reading and interpreting and visualizing text) and transform it to information that we can store in our memory. A Game can also offer a playfield where we can do our though-experiments by simulating different applications of the knowledge we have.
 * Skill level:This is about processes that we do without thinking, like riding a bicycle, driving a car or operating a machine. Another way of describing it is to train our reflexes. By repetition we train our brain and central nervous system to perform certain actions based on certain sensory inputs and our higher level goals. Serious Games can provide a safe and efficient environment to repeatedly train these skills. Think of a full flight simulator where pilots learn how to stabilize an aircraft.

Of course Serious Games can provide education on both levels at the same time. These educational games commonly require the use of logic, memory, problem-solving, critical thinking skills, visualization, and discovery. Moreover, the use of these gaming technologies requires that users manipulate virtual objects using electronic tools and develop an understanding of the complex systems being modeled. Generally speaking, these educational games seem to be effective in enhancing motivation and increasing student interest in subject matter.

Active learning through the immersion of games is showing positive impact on the “Net” generation. As opposed to passively watching videos, students are actively learning content. Further, through an integrated database, teachers are able to ascertain real-time data from student decisions in the game they created.

Zune will replace texbooks in the districts. Also, Zune will SAVE districts money and it will count down on paper. This software will allow you to download books/audio books to listen to to the text. At my particular school students who are absent for performaces or those who are out sick will have the opportunity to download that particular assignment at home. Zune will open up a new learning experience for many students today; especially those who are technology savvy.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">C) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Promethean Boards:__ **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yugma will replace outdated elements of group work that constraints students to working with just students in their classroom at their school. This resource will be more engaging and motivating for the students since they would have the opportunity to work with another student their age some other place in the country or in the world.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">D) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Web/Video Conferencing:__ **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Edmodo can replace having to take textbooks home. It can also replace traditional classroom assignments. It helps teachers alleviate having to make a lot of copies. Students can take all quizzes and test via edmodo. Edmodo will save the school district time and money. It also modernizes and makes the traditional classroom a little bit more fun and really modernizes everything because everything is becoming paperless now & this helps with the transition.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">E) __Edmodo:__ **

**2. Provide an explanation of the kinds of outmoded practices this technology might replace.**
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jacobs (2010) cautioned teachers as to what content we should keep and what content shows “signs of maturation” (p. 31). Additionally, Houston (2010) stated that we should “teach the way kids learn”. Twenty first century student outcomes involve information, media, and technology skills. As teachers, we need to prepare these students for tomorrow’s workforce. We need to develop and enhance technology skills. In using assistive technology, an outmoded practice for the Tech Integration Project Budgeting Basics 101 is pencil and paper. The application contains a template that the students follow to develop their budget. The use of pencil and paper would involve starting from scratch. Even if a teacher develops a template for the students to follow, the time involved to create the budget by hand would exceed the time it would take to develop the budget on a communication device.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"> __Assistive Technology (AT):__ **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Serious games create a virtual learning environment that is learner-centric, highly individualized and aimed at encouraging exploration of a large body of content. It provides: >
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">B) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Serious Games:__ **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Exploration in learning: Games can have a single player or multiple players; players might need to organize teams before or during play. Because of this, multiplayer online games can have players across the globe from many time zones and speaking different languages. E-mail and chat are used to facilitate the interactions, communications, and logistical coordination among players.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Virtual lab: In an underfunded school what little laboratory equipment they have is expensive, delicate, and difficult to replace. Teachers fear losing their resources in the classroom, which prevents students from having complete and open access to hands-on lessons in the sciences. Innovation, cannot adequately flourish in this environment. So what’s the solution? With a virtual lab, students could perform any experiment without fearing failure. Meanwhile, parents and teachers would not have to fear injury as a result of a lab experiment. While in a real world classroom students would not be allowed to use a Bunsen burner alone, in a virtual environment the same students could mix any number of chemicals and see the results, both the desired and the undesirable. An example mini-game created in the “Wolf Den” allowed students to enter the laboratory and test water samples through microscopes and use the chemicals that they would have used in the traditional setting. This not only is a safe way of performing potentially dangerous science activities, but also begins to answer the question of how science can be delivered from a distance while giving the students authentic laboratory experiences.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Virtual worlds: Game developers have created a number of educational games for diverse audiences and even beyond the traditional K-12 system. For instance, the 2011 CODiE winner <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">[|Hospitality and Tourism Interactive] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">uses an interactive and online virtual world to encourage college students to explore career paths in the hospitality industry. Serious virtual worlds (SVWs) represent a great opportunity for learning and should embed a lot of high-quality contextualized information so that the player can take the most from his or her exploration of the environment. SVWs enriched with embedded educational tasks. Tasks are simple trial activities that embody units of knowledge. The player can discover them in his or her SVW exploration and interact with them in order to construct meaning, build lasting memories and deepen understanding of the featured item(s). Providing the player with a ‘sense of place’—typically by the use of photorealistic 3-Dcmodels, weather effects, surround audio, graspable virtual objects, natural lighting effects, etc—is important to support credibility of the learning topic. In such environments, players can explore the context, acquire information and manipulate objects, practicing skills and constructing knowledge in a natural way.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Assessment : Another aspect of serious games in contrast to traditional methods of education and training is that a computer game that can provide embedded assessment. The collected data from the users’ actions can be used to derive information about the user.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Other teachers have used their games as homework assignments or unit reviews

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Video games in the classroom are not a replacement for good teaching. They are a supplement that engages students in the content and provides an avenue for them to learn difficult concepts of the real world in an environment in which they are comfortable.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Promethean boards will replace over head projectors, white boards, LCD projectors, and chalkboards. Whatever you did on a projector you can do on the board. Students love the large screen and they are engaged right away. This tool will allow students to have interactive lessons through whole group, small group and individual instruction. In my classroom, the promethean board replaced my dry-erase board that students did not enjoy. Imagine not having to print transparencies anymore, just pull them up on the screen. Don't make a transparency of maps to show students; use google maps to pull it right up. Also, students can have the opportunity to interact with the games.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">C) __Promethean Boards:__ **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Yugma will allow students to learn from other students that might have a different perspective on a topic. Since the students can instantly share the information on their computer screen they can see the joint work being created as they create it or if one student/a group of students are giving a presentation to another set of students (in China for example) about the effects of climate change the other students would be able to see documents, graphs and pictures as the students in the US were talking.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">D) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">__Web/Video Conferencing:__ **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Edmodo can replace constantly having to go to a computer lab to complete assignments. Teachers can assign readings and the students can have taken the quiz or test before they even come to class. It helps the class move at a faster pace as well as allows the teacher to determine if any reteaching is necessary. This also gives the students a chance to interact with other students from other schools to get help with assignments. Sometimes it's easier to seek advice from those you don't know that your classmates that you know whom the student may feel embarassed to ask for help.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">E) __Edmodo:__ **