Human behavior

Such a clever way to incorporate gamification, Heeweon! As an EVA or if I were an educational institution rep, I would absolutely consider investing in your venture. You incorporate student engagement, collaboration, and new technology (VR) into a product that could realistically benefit learners. As a follow-on venture, you might even want to think about developing a software package that users could develop their own escape rooms (Although in doing so you might be creating your own market competition...haha)! Just a thought! I also enjoyed the website design; you and Kate both really have a knack for well designed, organized and professional web sites! The simplicity of the product made it really easy for me, a prospective EVA investor, to understand its value in addressing your noted pain points. You very clearly indicated what the venture investment would be used for, and have a clear plan for both product and market growth. From the student perspective, your active learning and collaborative pedagogies used in your rooms combined with fun problem-solving puzzles will undoubtedly engage and improve student achievement. I'm excited to see VReakout disrupt the educational markets! Very well done! -Reg

Social Media in the classroom can take so many forms that don't necessarily come to mind first. Simply websites like Google Classroom, Socrates, and Weebly have the ability to foster a social platform for students to engage, collaborate and share ideas and work with each other. The use of social media in the classroom can highlight and enhance learning in so many ways - it provides an outlet for those students to share in the conversation "online" when they would not otherwise feel comfortable sharing ideas, it provides enhanced accessibility, allowing students to use it from home and elsewhere, and it is simply an additional platform engaging students with different learning styles; all of these factors greatly increase participation and thus learning from each other.  All the while, educators can promote responsible use of social media, as its use outside of the classroom will certainly be part of students' every day life.

I am looking at Microlearning from the unique perspective of a teacher whose student population struggles with learning disabilities and/or behavioural difficulties, and as such, think that Microlearning is, and will continue to become an even more effective way of teaching our students. In my experience, these students have so many things to focus on in a given lesson - the anxiety stemming from the text in front of them, the fact that they have to remember 2- or 3-step (or more!) instructions from a teacher before beginning a task, the fact that they have ADHD and are easily distracted by various external stimuli as it is, etc... Microlearning can help alleviate some of these anxieties and help students retain more information, particularly those who struggle with attention. More and more classrooms are seeing the effects of overstimulated and highly distractible students, thus I do believe that this topic is important not only in the special education classroom, but in the mainstream ones as well. From my experience teaching grades 2 and 3 in a class full of students struggling with dyslexia, ASD, and ADHD, lessons that go over a 10 minute mark of strictly instructional time results in a quick decline in student attention, interest, and thus retention. I would be very interested to learn more about the field and find ways to weave it into my teaching practice on a more consistent practice. I know Microlearning seems to have the goal of providing lessons/learning experiences for those who are busy and always on the go, but I think it can have a two-fold goal by also targeting distracted learners.