Virtual Memories Show:
Matt Farber – The Magic Circle
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“You don’t want a generation of children to be content consumers. They need to be the next generation of content creators.”
Educator (and high school pal) Matthew Farber joins the show to talk about his new book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning
. We talk about edutainment’s bad rep, developing good games for students, getting getting buy-in from faculty, administration and — most importantly — students, the subjects that benefit most from game-based learning, and why Pandemic is the best game he’s ever used to teach. I also vent about how primitive the technology was when Matt & I were in school, compared to having 3-D printers in the classroom nowadays. Oh, and we get around to dismissing Roger Ebert’s claim that games are not art! Give it a listen!
“A project isn’t good if it’s each student doing his own thing and glue-sticking it to poster-board.”
We went out for pizza after. There are perks to recording a podcast at Chez Virtual Memories!
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About our Guest
Matthew Farber teaches social studies at Valleyview Middle School, in Denville, NJ, and is the author of Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning. He is a blogger for Edutopia and KQED/MindShift, a member of the GlassLab Teacher Network, and has playtested for the Institute of Play and BrainPOP. He is a past recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Teacher Fellowship, which sent him on an Earthwatch expedition, and the North Jersey Director for the New Jersey Council of the Social Studies. Mr. Farber holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology from New Jersey City University, where he is currently an Educational Technology Leadership Doctoral Candidate. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Laura, son, Spencer, and Weimaraner, Lizzie. You can find him on twitter @matthewfarber.
Credits: This episode’s music is The Glass Bead Game by Thievery Corporation. The conversation was recorded on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
feeding into a Zoom H5
digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photos of Mr. Farber by Amy Roth.
