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Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes

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T EC H | 8/19/2013 @ 10:34AM | 2,890 vie ws

Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling
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Im downright cynical about the current education system, said Susan Crown, chairman and founder of the Susan Crown Exchange. It is a knotted up mess. She and I were talking about Graphite, a website that helps teachers choose and evaluate digital learning tools. Graphite is an exponential model of the Susan Crown Exchange/CommonSense Media rating system.

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I am full-time father of two little boy s and also an academic. I teach in Temple Univ ersity 's Intellectual Heritage Department. I lead efforts to bring more EdTech and game based learning to humanities education at the univ ersity lev el. Learning ratings was the first flag in the sand, Graphite is the second one, I'm engaged in a scholarly research that looks at Also On Forbes she continued, It is an iterative process, were learning as we go technology and popular culture from the perspectiv es of Jungian & Archety pal along.Graphite comes out of beta this week. The web platform is a resource + show more psy chology and phenomenology & Heideggerian

The 7 People Who Never Succeed At for teachers and a new venture from Common Sense Media. Graphite Work The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions
provides crowdsourced, or teacher-sourced, listings and ratings of educational apps and games.
expres s ed are thos e of the w riter. J O R DA N S H A P IR O S P O P U L A R P O S T S

It Only Takes About 42 Minutes To Learn Algebra With Video Games

Jordan Shapiro C ontributor

Graphite aims to help educators discover, share, and use the best edtech tools. Said Seeta Pai, Graphites VP, Research & Digital Content. Great educational technologies have the potential to deliver great learning for all kids, make teachers jobs easier, and even change the way we think about and structure education. We want to make it easier for educators to find and use them, and we want to raise the bar of quality in the marketplace. Apps and games are the future of education. Edtech is no longer just a gimmick. Games and apps are poised to completely restructure the way we think about learning. Sure, the alarmists worry that tablets and computers will automate teaching. They shudder with science-fiction-fears of kids being

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Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes

taught by robots. Their worries, however, are misplaced. On the contrary, Im pretty sure that edtech, games, and apps will put real human interaction back at the center of the learning experience. No more boring practice drills, pop quizzes, lectures, or powerpoints! Any information that can be disseminated using technology will be. Class time will be reserved for the kind of Socratic dialogue and mentorship that requires face to face interaction. Im describing what some educators call: the flipped classroom. Envision a learning experience in which apps are the equivalent of the handouts, but much more efficient. The teacher filters Graphite ratings by subject matter and age level, looking for the perfect app. Perhaps he or she discovers that Dragonbox+ is a mesmerizing step-by-step puzzler that sets the foundation for algebra. There are editorial reviews and comments from other teachers. All are overwhelmingly positive. So, the teacher assigns the students to play Dragonbox+ for one hour over the weekend. The game adapts to each particular childs ability level. Students feel like theyre just playing the equivalent of Angry Birds. Some students master the game (simultaneously mastering the basic skills of algebra). Others make it 80% through. Some start to struggle about halfway. But every student makes an appropriate incremental improvement. Nobody fails. In class, the teacher works with the students. It is a participatory process. Theres no need for the teacher to lectureto teach to the testthat stuff has been done at home. Instead, teaching time is reserved for human to human interaction, for the kind of thinking and discussion that cannot be reduced to diagrams and bullet points. The only things edtech can automate are the ways of teaching that humans were already doing on auto-pilot. Apps can do that more efficiently. And teachers can dedicate their time to doing what they do best: mentoring, guiding, discussing.

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Im describing a learning experience in which learning is personalized, practice drills are playful, and homework is a pedagogical tool instead of an assessment. But this is not a classroom experience. Lets avoid the word classroom. Using the habitual language of education will keep us tethered to old ways of imagining schooling. Instead, I choose the phrase learning experience because new digital tools enable us to transcend the boundaries of brick and mortar. Teaching is no longer confined to the classroom. And Graphite helps guide teachers to make this leap; it
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Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes

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 the outdated educational conventions of the 20th Century. During the last century, schools mastered the process of brick and mortar teaching. Students learned to line up against cinderblock walls and follow rigid schedules. The school day mimicked the work day. Children sat in rows and responded to bells. Practically automated like a factory, teachersexpected to act more like foremen than educatorsherded kids from classroom to cafeteria, from gym to playground. Skilled teachers were reduced to attendance-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 its golden age. So presumably, at some point the United States envisioned our rich way of living modern life and, perhaps unintentionally, we created a training 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-yourplace kind of education. It reinforced a world of haves and have-nots. The education system is essentially a socio-economic class system, said Susan Crown. Schools teach not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also cultural and social behaviors. The prioritization of cognitive skills, test scores, and easily quantifiable information only veils the even bigger achievement gap 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 also illustrated how ways of thinking can be confining. He used the image of prisoners chained in a cave in his discussion of the essence of education. He wrote about the inherent tensions of schooling, between creating good citizens rather than simply creating good conformists. Is teaching about igniting the passion that comes from within the individual, or putting in place the social conformity that is a prerequisite for civilization? Both, of course. Plato defined education as that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen. Almost echoing Plato, Susan Crown points out that if we want to succeed as a society, the workforce will need to be high tech and high touch. She recognizes that individuals need to know how to connecthuman to human online and off. We need to be proficient with tools we create to make individual 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. Websites like Graphite can help. It put teachers in control of reforming education.
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Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes

To reform is literally to re-shape or to re-structure. Graphite is tool that helps teachers re-imagine and re-vision what it means to teach.

Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.

7 Great Educational Apps And Games

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DragonBox
A game almost as addictive as Angry Birds, DragonBox combines first rate art design and smooth game mechanics to teach the basics of algebraic thinking. At first glance, it seems like DragonBox is tricking kids into learning algebra. Its not. Kids are actually 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 algebra. IOS & Android. (Text by Jordan Shapiro)

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Games And Apps Will Push Social Skills Back To The Center Of Schooling - Forbes
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