Listen and learn: Ed talk 
Recorded Session
Participants will know:
- The strategies commonly used by video games and other digital mediums to hook and sustain engagement
- The brain-based principles that make those strategies effective (the science of learning)
Participants will be able to:
- Implement similar practices in their own classrooms to heighten student engagement
- Extend their understandings to the implementation of digital tools (i.e. what makes some digital tools more effective or engaging than others)
- Understand why the effective classroom practices or strategies that they already use ARE as effective as they are
- Use new understandings to improve lesson design, to better engage individual students, and to provide feedback to colleagues (using these principles as a lens)
The presentation will be divided into six parts, reflecting the six "principles" that video games employ to engage players. Each part will consist of three phases:
(#1) What do video games do?
(#2) From a neuroscience perspective, why is this effective or necessary?
(#3) As educators, what can we glean from this? What classroom strategies can we implement that achieves a similar result?
We will spend approximately ten minutes on each principle, bringing us to a full sixty minutes.
The audience will be asked to engage, brainstorm, and share their thoughts during each "phase #3." Strategies for this will include peer-to-peer interaction (turn and talk), as well as opportunities for device-based response submission.
All strategies that are shared in this session are supported by research.
Books such as James Paul Gee's "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" is a good example of documentation that supports the importance of this session topic.
Books on brain-based learning and neuroscience informed instructional practices, such as Eric Jensen's "Brain-Based Learning: Teaching the Way Students Really Learn," are also good examples documenting the importance and relevance of this session.
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