Gamification is the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. Gabe Zichermann states that games are wired to produce pleasure and that it provides an intrinsic reinforcement where kids want to keep seeking that activity. Since gaming is learning, Zichermann suggests that we identify what it is about the games that keeps kids so interested, what kind of skills can they learn. Gamification analyzes those skills that could be learned from a game and apply it to their lessons. The difference between game-based learning is that game-based learning actually uses games to enhance learning and engage audiences. Zichermann gave the example of Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego as gamification, but I would consider that game-based learning because you actually get to play a game to solve problems which helps support your critical thinking skills. Jane McGonigal pointed out that World of Warcraft is a great game to learn from because it provides the player an opportunity to collaborate, create, think critically, and communicate, all four c's of common core! I think both can be useful in helping engage your students and provide another mode of learning.
I used to be someone who was obsessed with video games, mostly role-playing games such as Bioshock and Runescape. In fact, I still play Runescape... I play to pass the time but I definitely have to think critically in order to pass quests or to ensure that I am utilizing my time the best way so I can maximize on how much I am making. I know for a fact my students are playing fortnite because they talk about it all the time and try to sneak on it in class. I've never played myself so I don't know how it works but I can bet it's teaching them critical thinking skills. They also love to play random online games that they are thinking through to get to the next level. I slightly use gamification in my classroom already in a very minor form. I, being the huge Harry Potter fan, have all my periods as different houses. Since my school site focuses on PBIS, we do use a reward system so they get house points for good behavior and participation. For now, I'm ok with this use until I become more familiar with how to apply some critical thinking skills found in games into a real world context. I think I could use game-based learning to help students get more engaged in the content. An article I read on how we can use video games in an English classroom suggests using games as a text. They suggested using Republia Times. In the game, you are editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Your job is to use your influence to sway public opinion. You earn points by increasing readership and manufacturing more citizens that are loyal to the state. This would be perfect for our persuasive writing and advertisement segment! I also plan on using quill, and vocabulary.com at least once a week to just help increase their basic English skills which is really lacking in today's students. These actually do excite me to use in the classroom. I only wonder if maybe I'm trying to take on too much considering I want to use a lot of these new tools I am learning about.
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I use Twitter often but find it difficult to follow along with hashtags because sometimes the tweets are relevant and useful and sometimes it has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What I did find were a couple of new things I can try to implement in my classroom. I really like the idea of digital storytelling that someone posted. This is a great way to enhance the assignments that my students already do. It will give a chance for my more artistic students to learn a skill online and my less artistic students to possibly do better than they would drawing it out. I was also really excited to find out some improvements with Google Classroom such as creating an area for classwork. I think that organization will help keep things separated and allow students to easily navigate to either their homework section or classwork section. That's why I liked using Google Sites in conjunction with Google Classroom because I was able to keep the sections separated, now I need to play around with this new feature. Overall the ISTE conference looks like there would be a lot of information to take in and take back and I would love to see how I can attend next years conference!
I already use Google Forms quite often for assessments. I find Google Forms to be incredibly useful and time saving for having my students take quizzes. It grades it automatically and putting it into a spreadsheet lets me input the grades a lot easier. I also like to use Google Forms as an exit ticket which allows me to go through their responses quickly and assess what I need to re-clarify the next day. Learning about the add ons that Google Forms has I can now see myself using it a lot more for filling out forms. I can see this as a great way to quickly formulate a discipline letter for parents. I often spend so much time writing personal emails to parents that this would allow me to personalize the important parts while having a generic response. I also would like to get something set up for the start of the year to have a personalized letter for all parents, which Google Forms can make happen with ease. Meg Conlan's idea to use Google Forms as a rubric is something I never considered but the way Google Forms has it set up, I think it would work very well and save me a lot of paper since I always tend to print them out so I can circle where they are in each category.
For my capstone project, I would use Google Forms as a survey to get an understanding of what knowledge my students have of using technology. I would also use it to give them a pre and post test to see if the variable I added does have any effect on students. And since I already use rubrics, I now want to try to make a rubric through Google Forms and see how that differs in use. Reading through Matt Miller's "20 practical ways to use Google Forms in class, school" article, I am willing to try some of his suggestions such as a check in/check out system for my class library. The one that seems the most interesting to try is to create a "make your own adventure" form. I think that would be really engaging for my students and can see that being used for some of the short stories we read in class. I've been using social media since its existence. I was on MySpace, on Twitter when it first started and continue to use it, took longer to join Facebook but I'm there, I had an Instagram since it's conception and SnapChat as well. What can I say? I'm a true Millennial. Over the years, what I have posted has drastically changed from my MySpace days. I cringe at a post I clearly remember posting and am ultimately so glad MySpace died and with it that post. Now as an adult, as an educator and a leader, I am more cautious about what I post or am more private with my posts. I have a personal Twitter and Instagram that I keep private and only close friends can follow me as I do have a strong opinion about things. While I haven't quite used it, I do have a public twitter account that I always had the intention of creating an online community that consists of my students, their parents, and other educators. I follow a lot of political Twitters and see how they collaborate with each other to spread credible information and build on the conversation that is being had and I can see that happening in an education setting. I've been to a professional development that showed the importance of using social media to build a following. If we're trying to teach our students how to be part of a 21st century world then we need to be part of that 21st century world ourselves and that includes immersing ourselves into the social media world where there is so much information to learn from. What I like about Twitter is that it allows for a whole dialogue to be said in so little words and the participants are from all over the place. You get perspectives from all over the world right there in the palm of your hands from topics such as lesson plans to classroom management. It's a discourse that never stops because people keep adding to it. While it's a great tool, there are a lot of things to be cautious of. I have a personal twitter that stays on private because I have a strong opinion about things, but would I say that on my public twitter? Nope! As a professional, it's important to keep an image and that includes what you say online. Just as the article "6 ways to avoid social media landmines" suggests.
If I saw one of my students post something inappropriate online outside of school then it would depend on what the post was about. If it was something that could cause harm to another student or that student then I would report it as I am supposed to and also confront the student. If it's a post about something minor such as inoffensive language or something like that then I would simply confront the student about the negative effects that can cause. If it continued to happen I would then involve the parents. I would not involve the parents at first though because then that would lose any trust the student could have in me, I think kids don't really think about these things so it's best to approach them from a place of well being and not as an attack. I currently use Google Sites with my students. I first started using it as a tool that would help with my research for the previous semester. As a class we use Google Sites as an e-portfolio where I get to post all the work students need to be doing and when and where students get to store all their work in one site and share with others. I was introduced to Google Sites during my student teaching where my Master teacher's seniors were going to post their Senior Project through Google Sites. It took me a couple hours to play around with it and then I was ready to teach the Seniors how to create their own. This year when I thought of using it again, it took me about 2 hours to set up my whole site with all the links I wanted and would continue to add to it throughout the coming weeks.
Overall, it was a great portfolio and made grading their assignments a lot easier because I could check off what they had and find everything in one place. Some of my students had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to use it but I take the blame for that since we had to rush through the start up process since it was on a short time schedule. The students who figured it out actually liked that they could customize the sites to be more personal and liked writing their journals online instead of by hand. One issue I did have was that not all students listened when I asked them to make sure their links were viewable by me (Scott, I know how you feel and apologize if mine are ever an issue!) I had to spend a lot of time ensuring that I could access their links and some students did not get their assignments graded because they never gave me access. Going into the next school year, this is something we're going to be doing from the beginning so I expect there to be far less issues with this. I think Google Sites is great to use as an online portfolio because it easily stores all their work in one place with easy to use features. I personally like it a lot better than Weebly. I've been trying to figure out how to incorporate a blog aspect to Google Sites and that seems to be the only negative that I have encountered. The other reason I like Google Sites as an online portfolio is because I have my students use all Google products so it's really easy for them to find their assignment from their drive and add it to the page they need to. Once I figure out how they can respond to each other's posts, then I will 100% love Google Sites and would even recommend this program to switch over to it. It does seem daunting to have something added to our plates to teach this coming school year, but when you think about the world we're in and how everything is evolving, it's important to teach students digital literacy and digital citizenship. If we want students to succeed in a 21st century world then they need to know the do's and don'ts of the the internet. Luckily, there are already so many resources that can help us incorporate this into our lessons so that it doesn't seem like we have to learn something new or take away from our already busy day. I think I could easily incorporate digital literacy into my curriculum because it already goes hand in hand with things we do in English, such as research.
The KQED website had a great article "What Writing Wikipedia Entries Can Teach Students About Digital Literacy" that showed how and why it is important to combat misinformation on the internet. There is a program that Wikipedia offers to professors that allows their students to create or edit an existing Wikipedia. The purpose is to make it as accurate as possible and fix any inaccuracies that were previously written. Little things like this are important to teach our students because with so many false stories out there, it's important to be the one putting out credible information. I was actually considering doing something very similar to this to first show students that any information can be written on Wikipedia and to be very wary when using any facts from there. This showed me another way I can use Wikipedia to show them the right way to write credible facts. These websites and articles can be used easily in the curriculum as a weekly "digital literacy day" where we explore new articles that continue to teach them and help them make better decisions on the internet. An example on the Common Sense Media website is an article called "Teaching Kids Media Smarts During Breaking News." This article could easily be annotated by my students as a class and in turn will teach them how to stay cautious about the news being delivered to them. Since my school is restructuring our Wednesdays to be shortened days, a digital literacy day would be perfect for those days as we get to still learn the curriculum but it isn't taking away from our regular English curriculum since that day is meant to be an intervention day. I teach 7th grade English so digital citizenship is incredibly important in my classroom. My school is in the middle of going 1:1 and by next school year all my 7th grade students will have their Chromebooks that they can take home with them. Being a good digital citizen means to demonstrate and practice safe, responsible, and legal use of technology. A good digital citizen is someone who understands the rights and responsibilities that come with being online and someone who uses technology in a positive way. Since I have approximately 35 students in 5 different periods, it is incredibly hard for me to keep track of what all my students are doing and so I can only hope that by teaching them how to be a good digital citizen it will then translate to being responsible on their Chromebooks in class. Additionally, because we collaborate in class together on many assignments, it is important for them to be good digital citizens so that they know how to communicate with each other digitally.
With my students there tends to be a lot going on behind the scenes online. Maybe not so much when we are in the middle of a lesson, but from what my students often tell me, the students are not being good digital citizens when they are not in the classroom. There is a lot of online bullying that goes on with my students. Just the other day I had a student suspended for the rest of the school year for bullying a student online. So in this aspect, I think it would be incredibly important to teach students how to create an online positive community and understand the consequences of online bullying. A lot of my students are big fans of "13 Reasons Why" (even though I don't approve of their age group watching it, oh well) and so some do understand the importance of creating a positive community online. Using what they know from the show and under recent events, I believe students would take to learning about digital citizenship and specifically bullying. In this day and age, it is incredibly easy to post online to their social media sites or to text their friends, or to just post online in general. Kids have access to communicating with anyone from around the world at any time. While this can be beneficial it can also be incredibly dangerous for the kids. My students have had online pen-pals from Spain and they enjoyed talking to someone abroad, but I was there to facilitate it and to ensure that who they were talking to were all from another school. This is why I think it would be important to teach them how to be good digital citizens when communicating in an online world. They may not understand that there are unforeseen consequences or because they could easily have anonymity they could easily behave irresponsibly, cruelly or unethically. Because of their connection with communicating with others abroad, teaching them how to properly communicate online is necessary. A competency-based education seems very promising. I really like the idea of personalizing instruction for students and letting them go on their own pace. In one way, it is very much like that in my classroom where students are given a hard due date and given the assignments that will lead them to a final product and can work on it on their own pace as long as everything is due by the due date. With some students who understand, this is great for them because they can get it done without having to worry about waiting for everyone else. With other students who don't get it, this also gives me an opportunity to help them individually. But I don't think this is what competency-based education really looks like.
It would be hard to have this in my own classroom, the way it is intended, because there is not a lot of independence with my students. They often have to be walked step by step in order to do something. As this is my first year, I feel bad for the advanced students because I could not handle creating various levels of assignments and many of them sped through these activities. Technology can help by allowing me to create additional lessons online for students to continue to follow. Technology also allows us to vary what the students are getting. In a PD I went to, I loved the idea of having three levels of an assignment and assigning them to specific students on Google Classroom. I think with more time on my hands, creating these varying levels would be something I would definitely do. I also think Google Sites would be a great way to allow students to work on assignments at their own pace. |