I was perusing Edward Snow's "Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Childrens Games" and impressed with his de-construction of the painting. As a big fan of document based instruction, I got thinking about how much students could learn from a close reading of the work. Link to painting.<br />
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After a search, I found that a group of Belgian students had researched and re-enacted Bruegel the Elder's "Children's Games" (1560) for a class project. I'm reposting it to inspire enterprising teachers and students to try their hand at a reenactment of this (or another work).

Source: here

"Ten-year-old boys completed significantly more work when they worked in groups than when they worked in pairs with another child."

"Boys identify themselves as members of the group, not as an individual in a group."

Source: here

The DKP system is an entirely self-enforcing mechanism; yet its effectiveness among gamers who adopt it runs at close to 100%. This is because it works; because it is transparent and meticulously fair; and because it has been laboriously calibrated over time to prevent collusive bidding or other kinds of cheating.

Neither playing Warcraft nor building a virtual polling booth in Second Life is likely to win many votes for a British political party in 2010, of course. And spending 24 hours a day in either environment is unlikely to do much for anyone's conversational abilities. But it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together.

Source: here

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield …

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

Source: here

Clear processes are also essential for dealing with one of the hard realities of innovation: failure. In this context, innovation can be seen as analogous to baseball—a star player on offense is one who fails about 70 percent of the time.

As Otis’s Diehl puts it, “What’s important sometimes is not how a company deals with success but how it deals with failure. There is a sense in which the best innovators know how to reward failure, as oxymoronic as that may seem. An initiative that stretches an organization, that results in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and of products—that’s something that companies have to find a way to acknowledge, even if it does not result in a breakthrough product or process.”

Indeed, the risk of failure may be the most frequent killer of innovation.

Source: here

The idea behind the project is to use commercially available ‘off the shelf’ computer games that have been built for entertainment and then retrofitted for education. By their very definition commercially available games (due to their high production budgets) tend to be more engaging and cheaper than games that have been build solely for education. The challenge is finding the right games that are suitable for use in the classroom.

Source: here

Mnemonics (pronounced "ne-mon'-ics") is the art of assisting the memory by using a system of artificial aids – rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, acronyms and other devices – all to help in the recall of names, dates, facts and figures.

The mnemonics on this site provide both a quick-reference source for people seeking information or help with specific subjects, and a library of assistance for anyone (teachers especially) seeking information about mnemonics in general. It also tries to include a wider explanation for each subject mnemonic, detailing its use and purpose

Source: here

Mnemonics (pronounced "ne-mon'-ics") is the art of assisting the memory by using a system of artificial aids – rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, acronyms and other devices – all to help in the recall of names, dates, facts and figures.

The mnemonics on this site provide both a quick-reference source for people seeking information or help with specific subjects, and a library of assistance for anyone (teachers especially) seeking information about mnemonics in general. It also tries to include a wider explanation for each subject mnemonic, detailing its use and purpose

Source: here

At the local church hall on a late autumn afternoon in Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, more than 100 wannabe-students are queueing to sign up to a new university. The atmosphere is chatty, tea is being brewed, and there's an air of excitement about embarking on a new stage of life. But this isn't a typical student body. There's barely a hoodie in sight and not a teenager to be seen: this is one of the country's newest branches of the University of the Third Age.

U3A – the older person's lifelong learning organisation – is experiencing a recession-fuelled surge in popularity. More than 20,000 new members joined this year

Source: here

Source: here