Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

GameDesk Opens New Game-Based School

September 4, 2012 | 2:12 PM | By MindShift

GameDesk

By Andrew Miller

GameDesk, an organization that’s developing a variety of game-based learning initiatives, is venturing into new terrain with the opening of a new school and the development of new digital tools, with millions of dollars in funding from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AT&T.

The PlayMaker School, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will open in Los Angeles on September 7, with 60 students in 6th grade, and will operate as a “school within a school” at New Roads, an independent middle school.

Like Quest to Learn, the game-based school in New York, PlayMaker will incorporate principles of game-based learning into the entire instructional model, but with an additional focus on making and discovering. The goal is to engage students in both high-tech and low-tech games and modular, instructional activities. Individual students will work with an “Adventure Map” that will guide them to choose their own path, allowing for students to control how they learn and when they learn it. These modules will be not only individual tasks, but will also include group work. In a unit on kinetic and potential energy, for example, students will watch videos, play games, create digital roller-coasters, and create real-life models.

With ongoing formative assessments tied not only to the Common Core, but also practical digital skills, collaboration, critical thinking, and social emotion learning principles, the focus is meant to go beyond traditional schooling goals. Instruction will focus on providing context for the content, whereby students understand the relevance of what they’re learning. Teachers will play the roles of questioners, facilitators, and reflective agents.

More information will soon be released about the specifics of the program.

SCALING UP

Lucien Vattel, the executive director of GameDesk, said he wants to scale the company’s tools and learning models to schools and other groups across the country. To that end, the company received $3.8 million from AT&T to fund two new initiatives: a learning laboratory called Learning Center, which will include a “classroom of the future” where new digital tools will be developed, tested, evaluated, and aligned with academic standards; and free access to an online portal of Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, AT&T, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, game-based learning, GameDesk, Games, Quest to Learn

Drowning in Student Data? Two Companies Offer Solutions

October 5, 2011 | 9:24 AM | By MindShift

Flickr:dno1967b

By Betsy Corcoran, EdSurge

Teachers who want to use technology in the classroom to its best potential typically face a problem dealing with computers that’s weirdly reminiscent of dealing with a roomful of bright but disruptive students: It can be too much of a good thing.

With sophisticated high-tech tools comes a deluge of data, and for a lot of teachers, finding the right resources at the right moment can be maddeningly difficult. What’s more, the most sophisticated programs, which deliver detailed reports about student progress, don’t share data–which means that teachers can wind up with multiple “data dashboards.”

So educational technology entrepreneurs are starting to offer up a bit of help for both of these programs, according to two reports in today’s EdSurge newsletter.

Combining data from different programs to help teachers avoid an air-traffic-control problem as they try to mix and match the tools they use.

In Mountain View, a startup nonprofit organization, EdNovo, is doing early “alpha” tests of a Google-like search program for helping teachers find exactly the right digital content at the right time. And in San Francisco, a firm called EdElements just got a huge boost of financing to support Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dreambox, EdElements, EdNovo, ImagineK2, Rocketship

$7 Million Grants Awarded to Help Boost College Readiness

June 14, 2011 | 2:03 PM | By Audrey Watters

iCivics

The iCivics web-based game is one of the recipients of the Next Generation Learning Challenges grants.

Today, the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), an education technology grant program funded by the Gates Foundation, announced the 19 winners of its latest wave of project funding aimed at the K-12 level.

Last fall, the Gates Foundation announced its NGLC initiative, a multi-year project to help support programs that boost college preparedness and college completion. The first round of grants, announced earlier this year, were aimed at developing tools for higher education. While those grant recipients aim to address some of the factors that cause students to drop out of college, the recipients of the second round of grants, announced today, tackle the other end of the spectrum: the factors that make students ill-prepared for college.

This $7 million round of funding asked for proposals that use technology to address some of the Common Core materials and to help build both educational content and and assessment tools. The 19 recipients are mostly a blend of private companies and universities. The Louisiana Department of Education – the only public K-12 grant winner in this round – will use the funding to expand its virtual school algebra program. The iCivics program, another recipient, is an online civic education platform founded and led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and its civics and literacy curriculum will be will be further developed.

Although the grant program said that entrants should be able to demonstrate a history of results, there were several “proof of concept” endeavors among today’s winners, including a project by Classroom Inc to build out its Sports Network career simulation module, aimed at at-risk and below reading level students. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Next Generation Learning Challenges

What’s Your College Story?

October 6, 2010 | 1:50 PM | By Tina Barseghian

The creatives at Good have come up with an interesting challenge. Hoping to make a strong case for going to college, they’re asking for submissions from the public for “stories success and frustration as a nontraditional student trying to obtain your post-secondary degree.”

Submissions can come in the form of videos, emails, photos, or any other medium that suits the participant and are due on November 23, 2010. You can email your submissions to projects [at] goodmagazine [dot] com with the subject: GOOD / Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Education Contest.