“Quest to Learn [a Manhattan-based school] is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration.”

“Salen and Torres are at the forefront of a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists who believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun.”

“With video games, kids will go back and do it a hundred times. They’ll fail until they win. Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It’s completely aspirational.”

I encourage parents and teachers to read the article, even though it is pretty long. It really does offer a new way of integrating the new digital world into the classroom, for the benefit of students.

Development, the march of invasive species such as the Asian Longhorn beetle and climate change has battered the woodlands in the south, Miller said. “There are simply not enough trees being planted to replace what is being lost.”

Arbopals plants trees through Trees Ontario, so when you subscribe to Arbopals you are helping plant trees in Ontario!

The city is the only Canadian location that will get a sapling from the tree’s cuttings, said The Globe and Mail.

The chestnut tree that Anne Frank made famous in her diary.

The Jewish teenager wrote about the tree in The Diary of Anne Frank, which describes her life as she and her family hid from the Nazis during the Second World War. In her diary, Frank described going to the attic many mornings to look at the tree, and the tree was one of the things that gave her hope and happiness during the time she was in hiding.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer with the Institute for the Future, and a speaker at this year’s TED Conference in Long Beach, California, says people today spend a collective 3 billion hours per week playing online games. She wants us to play more.

McGonigal says that in online games people tend to behave better than in the real world. In the digital space, people tend to collaborate to help each other solve problems. They don’t give up as easily. And they almost always feel they have a chance of winning. Their skills are well matched to the challenges set out before them.

She is currently working on a new game called Evoke, which is produced by the World Bank Institute. It pairs up mentors in the developed world with players in Africa. The goal of the game is to inspire a generation of young, African entrepreneurs to chase their dreams—by making them think they’re playing a game that’s fun and collaborative, and where the chance of success is realistic.

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