Paperless Is Not A Pedagogy
As a high school math teacher I have a wide variety of abilities in my class. When teaching a lesson inevitably the material is going to be too easy for some of my students and too hard for others. If I start a lesson with the basics to introduce the concept I am boring…
First let me thank Lucas Gillespie for creating the Minecraft Challenge and sharing it under a Creative Commons license. If you’re not familiar with Lucas’ work in Game Based Learning I highly encourage you to check out his website: http://edurealms.com/ Lucas shared the Minecraft Challenge with me as a Google Doc. It is a list of…
If you have a smartphone I challenge you to install the Minecraft app on your phone. Minecraft is available on iOS or Google Play. Tell Your Students Install Minecraft and tell your students that you did. See their reaction and their enthusiasm to want to help you with it. Minecraft How do you get started…
If you want to get started using Gamification in the classroom there are so many things you can try. Giving students choice, using badges to recognize student accomplishments, providing a narrative or theme to assignments and units are a few ways to get started. Start Small It is easy to get overwhelmed. Whatever you do…
These are the slides, resources and notes for my presentation at BETT 2015 in London on “Gamification of the Classroom” Click Here to link to my slides. Click Here to level up your gamification of the classroom Click Here for a sample XP list Click Here for a sample quest list. Click Here for a level up to…
If you have thought of creating your own badges here are the steps I use in Google Draw to create them. Create a Drawing From Google Drive create a Google Drawing. Resize the Canvas Use the File menu to choose “Page setup…” Choose “Custom” for the drawing size and choose 300 by 300 pixels. Draw…
Want to learn how to search Google Drive? I am presenting at the NJECC Conference in January. I thought I would use this as a chance to try out gamified Professional Development. One of my sessions is on “Searching Google Drive.” For this I utilized the template I posted earlier for having PD participants level up…
Sometimes choosing a theme for a unit can help students get into their learning. I suggest trying a Minecraft theme. Even if you do not have Minecraft or MinecraftEDU for your classroom you can still create Minecraft themed activities. You could theme a math unit around the Minecraft blocks or ask students to do fictional…
Gamification and badges are something we see in many settings outside of school. Essentially a badge is micro certificate to visibly recognize accomplishment of something. In the classroom, badges can be used to recognize students mastering content, to reinforce classroom behaviors such as timeliness and homework completion, and for encouraging students to extend themselves beyond minimum…
If you are providing a professional development workshop you may want to consider trying to gamify the event. I have created a template using Google Sheets that allows you to create a list of activities the PD participants will engage in. Assign a difficulty level, XP points and a badge to each task. As the…
Last week many classrooms are participating in the hour of code. Even Kindergarten teachers are doing the hour of code! Exposing students to programming provides them not only with a valuable skill but enhances their critical thinking skills. There are many ways you can get your students started with programming. For younger students check out the…
Thinking about adding badges to your class? There are many ways to award students badges including using Class Badges. If you would like to organize your own badges here is a system you may want to try that uses Google Sheets. Google Drive Create a new spreadsheet in Google Drive (http://drive.google.com). Create a list of…
Players of video games learn how to strategize and how to perform sometimes complex actions in order to achieve a goal. I believe we can all learn to engage students through studying video games. Here are 5 things we can learn from video games and adapt to the classroom. 1) Players Do Not Read Directions In…
If you have thought about adding an element of gamification to your classroom, having students level up might be fun to do. How do you do this….. The answer is always a spreadsheet 🙂 Create a Spreadsheet In Google Drive (http://drive.google.com) create a new Google Sheets. New Tab In the bottom left of Google Sheets…
Second Life is a 3D virtual space where each player has an avatar that has the ability to explore the world. Second Life is free to use, although you are able to purchase virtual items within the space. Second Life is a tool that could be utilized in the classroom. A caution is the required bandwidth…
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