Playing Video Games = Learning? Shocking!! (except to those of us who have actually watched kids play video games)

From Playing Video Games Offers Learning Across Life Span, Say Studies

In one paper, Fordham University psychologist Fran C. Blumberg, PhD,
and Sabrina S. Ismailer, MSED, examined 122 fifth-, sixth- and
seventh-graders' problem-solving behavior while playing a video game
that they had never seen before to show that playing video games can
improve cognitive and perceptual skills.

...

Findings from the student studies confirmed previous research on
effects of playing violent games: Those playing violent games were more
hostile, less forgiving and believed violence to be normal compared to
those who played nonviolent games. Players of "prosocial" games got
into fewer fights in school and were more helpful to other students.

Check out this article - Could Violent Video Games Reduce Rather Than Increase Violence? - for more information on this topic. It is highly debated and studies have been inconclusive; contrary to what this article implies.

Other studies involving students showed that those who played more
entertainment games did poorer in school and were at greater risk for
obesity.

Read the rest of the story at Unbridled Learning

Cable in the Classroom

Don't forget to check this month's Cable in the Classroom guide to see what you want to watch/record. Here's what I don't want to miss.

Ancient Mysteries on A&E
Digging for the Truth History Channel
Gold! on the History Channel
The King's Highway: El Camino Real on the History Channel
Lincoln 200 Years on C-SPAN
Sports Figures on ESPNC
Biography - Charles Darwin on A&E
Forecast Earth Hurricanes on the Weather Channel
How the Earth Was Made on the History Channel
The New Explorers on A&E
The Wrath of God on the History Channel
American Politics/Road to the Whitehouse 2008 on C-SPAN

Millions of Maps

Thanks to ilearntechnology for pointing out this site.

From the site:

A sampling of the Library of Congress Geography
and Map Division’s 4.5 million treasures has been digitized
and is available in Map
Collections: 1500 - 2003. This activity introduces historical
maps from the American Memory collections. A graphic
organizer, for analysis and note taking, and a set of guiding
questions for each type of map have been provided.

Cross-posted at Rational Homeschooling

learning with poker

High Stakes for Poker as a Learning Tool

A Harvard
Law School professor and a group of his students formed an organization
this fall — the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society — dedicated to
demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They argue that the
game, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment,
situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective
teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law
classes.

“I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as
sixth grade, when they’re dropping out of math,” said Charles R.
Nesson, the Harvard Law School professor who began the society with a
group of his students. “I’m thinking of kids who are into their video
games but instead of Halo-3
and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that has
real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather than
snuffs it out.”

Although I completely disagree that games like WOW lack intellectual depth (the Harvard professor obviously does not play video games), the benefits of poker listed here are intriguing. In my experience kids aged 10ish and up tend to really enjoy poker, and the more they learn about probability and human behavior, the better at it they become.

Of course, Christian conservatives disagree. From Focus on the Family,

“Kids are extremely vulnerable to gambling addiction,” said Mr. Hills,
who likened poker to a “gateway drug” that leads to the harder stuff
like craps and slot machines.

Who said anything about kids gambling? Playing poker doesn't have to involve chips at all, but even if it does the chips don't have to be connected to anything of value. People play for matchsticks, for paper clips, for plastic poker chips, for pennies, for absolutely nothing. This is slippery-slope fear mongering.

From Arnold I Barnett, who teaches mathematical modeling at the MIT Sloan Management School:

“I’m not saying poker should replace algebra,” he said. “But you
have problems to solve in poker, and for students to see how
mathematics can help them in real-life situations seems a whole lot
smarter than having them determine the volume of some strangely shaped
object.”

He added that he could see the educational value on the
graduate level, too, because the game involves not only figuring out
your own hand but also deducing your opponents’ cards — skills, he
said, of use in law, business or real estate.

Cross posted at Rational Homeschooling

Notebooking with Powerpoint

Benefits of Notebooking in general:

• Can be used with any style of homeschooling
• Creates student ownership of content
• Inspires creativity
• Easy review

Benefits of Notebooking on the computer:

• Completely free (you already have the computer if you're reading this
• No printing unless you want to archive the finished product
• No scissors, glue, or irreversible mistakes
• Less time-consuming (well, it can be)
• Student pride in professional-looking product
• Works for non-crafty as well as crafty; non-visual as well as visual; non-computer geek as well as geek
• Multimedia can be added! Recordings of dramatic readings; photos; videos of actual events in history; videos of experiments; live links to web sites
• Easily sharable via the web, email, print
• Ready for sharing with your family, homeschool group, 4-h club or scout group (excellent public speaking opportunities!)
• Paper copies are easily printable
• Professional quality archives can be had for pretty cheap!

The queen of electronic notebooking, Tammy from Moore Homeschool Adventures, has a Yahoo group and a free online course on how to get started. Before I ran into Tammy last year I had been using Powerpoint for notebooking for my kids. This is my 2nd year homeschooling, and I came from a background teaching middle school. My students loved making Powerpoints for presentations and reports. So I brought that into my homeschooling, and my kids loved it too. Tammy tends to use word processing programs for her notebooks, and offers templates, ideas and inspiration all for free.

I prefer using Powerpoint most of the time. When I talk about Powerpoint, I would like to add that if you use a Mac and don't have Office, Keynote has the same basic functions. If you have Windows and don't have Office, you can get OpenOffice.org for free, and use the Impress program to do the exact same things! Here's why I love to use Powerpoint.

• Powerpoint is meant to create content that will be viewed on the computer; this makes layout a no-brainer (important for me as a very non-visually-gifted person)
• Powerpoint is also meant to be printed, and there are many different print options.
• Anything you can do on a word processor can be done in Powerpoint; the opposite is not true
• Multimedia can be set to play automatically at a certain point in the project without needing to be clicked
• Powerpoint can export as images, web pages, or self-contained presentations that people can watch even if they don't own Powerpoint. On a Mac, it can be exported as pdf or a Quicktime movie as well.
• Audio narrations can be added to go along with the display.

Here are some notebooks we have done with Powerpoint.

This is a History notebook on Ancient Rome by my 7y.o., Ben. This powerpoint was exported as .jpg files and stored at flickr.

Since it is stored at Flickr, you can click on each photo to see a larger version. If I choose to, I can display each slide much larger, like this:

Or even like this:

Here's another History notebook by 7 y.o. Ben. This one is on the early Middle Ages in Western Europe.

I have exported the above powerpoint as a web page as well. The links for navigation are created automatically by Powerpoint. See it as a web site here:
Early Middle Ages notebook

If I wanted to print this notebook myself, there are several options. I could print one slide to a page, like this. I could print 2 slides per page like this. I could print 4 slides to a page like this. In fact, I could print up to 16 slides to a page (although that would get a little hard to read, if the purpose is just to keep a paper index of notebooks, this would be a great paper saver).

At the end of the year, I can print all of a student's notebooks into a professional bound book that will last a lifetime using a service such as Blurb for as little as $12.95 (for 20-40 pages) up to 440 pages for $64.95 (that is definitely cheaper than ink and supplies for regular notebooking or lapbooking an entire year!) Once the book is created, grandma and grandpa can even order their own copy from the site effortlessly.

Here are a few more examples of notebooks we have done. So much more can be done that we have not even delved into yet (this is only our 2nd year homeschooling after all). The options are endless.

Presidential Timelines - by Kevan, 11 y.o. at the time
Earth's Surface - by Kevan, 11 y.o. at the time
Fables - by Ben, 7 y.o.

Century Books
We are going to be starting Century Notebooks a la Charlotte Mason. I have set up some Powerpoint templates that we will be using to create these century books. They are already set up and hyperlinked, which took quite some time, so I welcome anyone that would like to try it to use them. If you pass them on, please mention where they came from. So far I have created the 17th-20th century. These are blank .ppt templates.
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century

Powered by ScribeFire.

History of Science

In asking Kevan what he wanted to learn about "next year", his eyes lit up and he said "History!" I asked what kind of history and we talked about it a little bit. I asked him how he was feeling about his other subjects and he mentioned that he was still finding the science pretty boring. I tried to interest him in the next section of study, which was weather and he was far from interested. He learned about weather last year and didn't want to hear about it.

I remembered that I had discovered Joy Hakim's new "The Story of Science" book Aristotle Leads the Way at the library a few months back. He has really enjoyed the History of US series that she put out, and I wondered if he would like to learn science from a historical perspective. He was very interested when I mentioned the books (I think there are 3 of them out now with more on the way.) As it goes through history, starting in ancient times, it discusses the science as it was learned, which seems to me a logical way to learn it. I ordered a couple of the books from Amazon and picked up the first one from the library in the meantime to start planning. I also picked up the Teaching Company History of Science from Antiquity to 1700 lectures in audio to work in. I'm going through the first book now and kind of deciding where to go from there so I figured I would post what I'm doing so somebody else doesn't have to reinvent the wheel

Here is Chapter 1 so far: Birthing a Universe. I outlined the chapter with added resources/activities to look at. I will post more as I complete them.

Winter Solstice and Christmas

Science -
Learn how the earth moves - make a model of the earth/sun system with a globe, thermometer and strong lamp to see how the angle of the light affects the temperature.
Point out that the southern hemisphere is experiencing their summer solstice.
Look at how the date of the solstice changes year to year here
Simple explanation of the solstice written for kids by National Geographic Kids
Build your own Stonehenge! Directions here
Suite101 has some Awesome Christmas science, including What was the star of Bethlehem, what are frankincense and myrrh, and exactly how fast does Santa have to travel?

History -
Read together from http://www.candlegrove.com/solstice.html
Learn about the evolution of Christmas at http://www.oldandsold.com/articles03/santaclaus4.shtml
Nice overview for younger kids here - http://www.brownielocks.com/wintersolstice.html
Wikipedia has a pretty good history overview of how our Christmas celebration came to be here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
Most comprehensive listing of various cultures'/religions' winter celebrations at Religioustolerance.org
History of Christmas from the History Channel

Math -
Make a graph of the sunrise and sunset over the next few weeks to observe the shortening and then lengthening days.
Fractals of Christmas

Celebration ideas -
Great things to think about and ideas here!
Don't be put off if you are Christian! The ideas and sentiments here are great!

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