Quizlet

Just wanted to share quickly a site called quizlet.com. My boss passed this on to me as a useful tool for our APT tutors at the Learning Center on campus. I haven't had too much time to explore it, but it looks like it can be beneficial (with appropriate teacher screening - checking the validity of the flashcards) for some students. Let me know what you think! When I get a chance to explore it and the way the Learning Center plans on using it I will let you all know.

Nobel Prize Educational Games

If anyone is interested nobelprize.org has some educational games for middle - high school level. I haven't gone in to play them because my concentration is childhood but they look like they have some potential. Categories include chemistry, physics, war and peace, literature (there's a Lord of the Flies review game). Let me know if it's useful!

And Article Two...

The second article I read was Computers and Young Children by Jan Lacina. After focusing on upper elementary for the last article, I wanted to look into young elementary grades for this one.

While I found this article to be an interesting read, I don't believe the author has conducted studies/experiments of her own. She has analyzed others studies' from the ninties to 2007. It would've been nice to have her reflect on more studies in the 2007 time frame than the 1994 one.

To sum up the article, children should be exposed to computers around the age of 3 or 4 - when they are developmentally ready. Children will benefit by having positive attitudes about learning, and advanced spoken language. Another study found that kindergartners and 1st-graders access to technolgy led to higher academic achievement.

The author includes several links to websites that these younger students could benefit from. Many of them are literacy site and relate back to my post on e-books. Are they really books if they're animated???

Hope everyone's enjoying their weekend! See you tomorrow!

Quick note

Note: In order to get to the article on my last post you must, click the link, then click the article link and use your plattsburgh network id and password.

Article one post

I read Do students benefit equally from interactive computer simulations regardless of prior knowledge levels? by Seong ik Park, Gyumin Lee and Meeyoung Kim. I chose this article becuase it dealt with elementary (5th grade) aged students. The study took two groups of students and split them up based on their prior knowledge of physics (they used a multiple choice test, example questions can be found in section 3.2). They then took each group - one high level prior knowledge (HL), and one low level prior knowledge(LL) - and split them into two. A section of the HL and LL would be exposed to high interactive computer simulations, while the other section of HL and LL learners would be exposed to low interactive computer simulations.

The study found that the HL group exposed to high interactive computer simulations had better comprehension, a lower cognitive load (see section 3.2 for how this is rated - it basically reflects how much of a mental effort they had to put in) and therefore higher learner efficacy than HL group exposed to low interactive computer simulations. The HL group that was exposed to low interactive computer simulations experienced a detrimental effect on their comprehension, cognitive load and learner efficacy.

At the other end of the spectrum, those LL learners benefitted from the low interactive computer simulations because they were able to go at a slower pace and move forward when they fully understood each step.

If you have time, you should check the article out for the graphs. I am a visual learner and this definitely helped me organize the data. In addition, its a pretty interesting article and it proves that as educators we need to be aware of where are students are at in their learning and what software will they benefit from. One of the authors is also available to email if this peaks anyones interest. Enjoy! My second article post will be up shortly...

E-books and Children

This is an interesting blog post from the NYTimes.com "The Medium" blog. It discusses e-books, a topic of discussion from last night's class, and a child's perspective ("It's not a book").

http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/click-and-jane/