I feel I should start this post with a bit of a disclaimer - I am pretty much the target market for gamification and it is so up my alley that I may be a little biased on the topic. Gamification is essentially the application of principles of video game design to other areas of life. How can that not be awesome!? Gamification has already had a significant impact on my own life in the area of fitness and personal health. I don't actually understand how people used to exercise before the invention of digital tracking apps. I have had a lot of success with apps like Fitocracy (very much based on a game with levels, points and badges) and Fitbit (utilises competition with others and a badge system) for keeping myself motivated to achieve fitness goals. Not to mention my all time favourite, and highly gamified, Zombies, Run!
Anyhow, I digress. But I can certainly attest to the fact that applying these principles can have a motivating effect in a real life context. It would follow, then, that it could be an very relevant approach to try in education.
To start, we briefly looked at the Fun Theory, which in essence says "fun can change behaviour for the better". I definitely agree with this! Check out the piano stairs video below:
Gamification is something that is becoming increasingly prominent in our every day lives. I have already cited the fitness world but there are many more examples. For example rewards programmes like Fly Buys, or the supermarket collection promotions like the dominoes. Seth Priebatsch outlined four critical elements of game design in his TED talk:
We also talked about the idea of 'flow'. This is a term used to describe the perfect level of engagement in a task, when it is just challenging enough to stop you getting bored, without being so difficult that you give up. Video games typically are excellent at this in their structure of teaching you how to play the game. This video sums up the concept:
This led to quite a lengthy discussion about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. We looked at a blog post by Kathy Sierra who cautioned heavily against gamification due to it creating an over reliance on extrinsic motivation and children who lose interest in extending themselves. We asked questions like - does extrinsic motivation have a place? Is the learning still valid if it was only achieved in order to receive a reward? Our general feeling was that while of course intrinsic was the ideal, in reality we are never going to be motivated to do everything by ourselves - this is true for adults so why would we have a different view for children? Is my half hour run any less beneficial for my health and well being because I did it to escape zombies? I do, however, think we are right to be a little cautious and reward systems can end up taking over somewhat. It is always a balance and we need to make sure the focus is on the learning and not the outcome.
Badge systems are a particular way to record achievement and learning. Badges have been used long before the digital world, however now that you can create them online a lot more avenues have opened up for their use. It is an area that can be perfect for the classroom, but also for our own professional development as teachers. A couple of websites to check out:
Badges can make it very easy to identify what a student (or anybody) has achieved. Their real benefit also comes with recognising learning that would not normally be assessed or formally recorded. We discussed this within the context of this course and what badges we could design around our learning. Our key point around this was to acknowledge what we are doing outside of the formal, written assessments. For example for doing the weekly readings, having valuable discussions in the sessions, engaging in social media, employing new techniques in our classrooms, and most importantly - remembering to bring chocolate to class!
My Credly design for remembering weekly chocolate:
Gamification is an absolutely huge topic which we only briefly scratched the surface of. It is something I have a keen personal interest in and would love to employ aspects of in the classroom, so I've definitely earmarked it for future research. Fun to be had by all!
The topics for this week's session all interwove really nicely with each other. We talked about problem solving in the real world, or social action, and examined some fantastic young entrepreneurs who had built innovative start up companies to really try and make a difference in the world. We also looked at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, which has made ideas like this eminently more achievable.
We started off by looking at something called a Lean Canvas. This is basically a pared down version of a business plan that allows you to do an overview and think through whether a business idea is likely to be viable or not. This is a tool that is adaptable to education as a means to think through a change proposal you are considering implementing. It is a valuable document that explores things like people affected, time and resources needed, upkeep required and defining exactly what it is you're hoping to achieve. We are going to use this as a basis for our next assignment so it will be a useful thing to explore.
We went on to look at some companies that have social action or enterprise at their core. We defined these as organisations that apply commercial strategies to maximise improvements in human and environmental well-being - which may include maximising social impact rather than profits for external stakeholders. A great example of this is Toms shoes. I had heard of them before but didn't really know what it was about. It is a pretty inspiring example and a great idea, check it out below if you haven't already:
Another incredible example is the young boy who developed an ocean cleaning array and a plan to clean our oceans:
A key message tonight was that kids do not have to wait until they leave school to pursue these ideas, innovations and passions. They can do it now! If we think back to the 21st Century Learning Rubrics from the early weeks of this course, real world problem solving and innovation is one of the key skills that should be developed in the classroom. Real world problems:
Are experienced by real people
Have solutions for a specific, plausible audience other than the educator as grader
Have specific, explicit contexts
If students are using data to solve a problem, they use actual data
Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing
This is a great wee video that outlines these two ideas really nicely. As it says, the concept of collaborating and turning to a large group for help is not new, however these days we are connected globally like never before and we can reach a wide audience so much more easily.
I knew a bit about crowdfunding already and have participated in a few fundraising campaigns online. One main message with this method of raising money is that it is only the first step. You need to think really carefully about the sustainability of your idea once it is up and running.
Crowdsourcing I knew less about and was really excited to see some of the ideas that are out there. We examined some different websites that are drawing on people's skills from all over the world. Two of my favourites were Zooniverse and Open IDEO.
Zooniverse is a fascinating concept - it is a platform for collaborative volunteer research. You can participate in genuine research projects across many different scientific fields. I tried to spot chimpanzees on a wildlife cam and had a go at finding greek characters on an ancient papyrus. Fantastic potential for linking with learning in the classroom!
Open IDEO is a global community that solve real-world problems by collaborating through all stages of the process. You can get a great overview by watching this short video. Such exciting stuff!
Finally we finished the night with this week's 'fun bit'! We were introduced to the game Market Share which is kind of like a grown up, super intense version of Monopoly. It is designed to introduce you to the principles of growing a business. When we first started to listen to the explanation and look at the instructions I was completely overwhelmed and thought it looked far too challenging for that late at night, but once we got started it was easier to get your head around it and turned out to be a lot of fun! Well, if you like losing spectacularly that is. Our group got into two teams and it turned into a religious showdown between the God Squad (catholic school teachers) and the Heathens (us state school folk). I'm not sure whether we just didn't sacrifice enough goats but we got completely and utterly trounced! Fair play to the God Squad who had a far more successful strategy and were definitely the better team on the night. In fact they cleaned up across the whole class by miles! We had a lot of laughs but it was actually quite an effective way to learn a bit about what is involved in developing a business. Fun times!
In this week's session we spent some time investigating what other education systems around the world are doing. As a lead in, we discussed Cultural Intelligence. This can be understood as the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures. It was a nice introduction as we prepared to build an understanding of worldwide approaches in education, and as we live and work in an increasingly global context it is also something that is increasingly important in our everyday lives.
We then had a discussion around PISA testing. This video gives an overview:
PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It is a global, triennial test on 15 year olds that compares the education in OECD countries. Though it is a standardised test, I found it interesting that it aims to evaluate real world application of skills and knowledge. We looked in a little more detail at two high-performing countries, Singapore and Finland. Though they both score well in this test they could not be more different! Singapore had a system that had a high focus on teaching to the test and quite a traditional model of schooling. In Finland there is very little standardised testing and it is a very social model and approach. So what do these two have in common? What stood out the most was the very high societal value placed on teachers. They are highly trained (though not necessarily highly paid) and very highly respected.
This was the aspect we chose to run with for our activity tonight. We were to select one aspect from international education that we thought would make a difference in NZ and make a short news clip set in the year 2020 based on the idea that this concept had actually been put in place. We had a lot of fun with this one!
The digital tool we explored tonight was Kahoot! a fantastic quiz app. Head to the website to check it out https://getkahoot.com/
You can create your own quizzes (or even better have the students create them!) around anything you choose, fantastic for student surveys or a quick pretest of knowledge. You display the questions and options on a big screen and students answer on their own devices, so 1:1 works best for this app. Fantastic, fun tool though. We used it tonight to participate in a quiz about Finnish education - watch the competitive streaks come out!!
Thank goodness I got at least one right!
Assessment
The second half of this week's class centred around assessment, particularly formative assessment.
Three key questions to consider were:
What do you assess and why do you assess it?
How effective is what you are doing (how do you know)?
What constraints determine your assessment practices?
This is a wee video as a bit of an overview of formative assessment:
We reinforced the key concept that assessment is only formative if it is used to modify the teaching and learning.
We moved on to consider digital tools that might be used for formative assessment. Our final task for the evening was to adapt a rubric that would evaluate a tool or app as to its effectiveness as a formative assessment tool. This was our group's effort - thrown together pretty quickly but contains some pretty key concepts that could be worked on further, and certainly some of the things we need to be aware of when considering using various apps.
Robotics
Well we started with the fun stuff tonight and got straight into working with robots! I was really excited to give this a try. Robots are a natural extension to coding, they're a great way to use those skills in a more practical way. Awesome for logic and sequential thinking too - as we discovered in this session! Programming can be quite complicated, but using the programme mBlock is a great way to go. It looks like Scratch and works in the same way, and is a free download - check it out here mBlock.
Getting stuck in with an actual robot was great fun, but hugely frustrating at the same time! It really highlighted some of the valuable skills that can come from these activities - we had to do lots of problem solving and collaboration and we needed a whole lot of resilience! We were asked to do the simple task of programming the robot to move when on white, and stop when it reached the black line (using its infrared sensors). Turns out this was not as straightforward as it seemed, especially when we discovered after about 40 minutes that we'd been given some back to front instructions! But we got there in the end and were very proud to have our group's robot as the one to finally stop when it was supposed to. You can witness our jubilant moment below!
After the fun and games we got into a discussion around the large question of 'How do we ensure education evolves to reflect the needs of today and tomorrow?'
We kicked this off by looking at some of the videos off the portal for this week. Our group had a chat about this one, which is well worth a look (aah having trouble loading it as a video but click the link!)
It has some really thought provoking arguments about the way education is heading and the inevitability of change. A central idea we discussed was the fact that we as educators don't have to change, but if we don't we will become obsolete. Simple as that!
Leading Change
The second part of the session this week focused on the idea of leading change. An early comment was that as participants in this course we need to be 'thought leaders', and that if we graduate from this and go away and don't lead change then the course hasn't achieved what it set out to.
I hadn't really thought about this side of it before, but on reflection I suppose it is true. I knew I would want to share my new ideas, but I hadn't really considered the fact that this goes hand in hand with needing to lead the process of putting these ideas in place. A small example for me in the last couple of weeks has been roping my lovely teaching team into trying some video making for our inquiry projects (which turned out great - thank you for your support ladies!). I guess this is also highlighted by the fact that many of us are now working in collaborative teams - if you want to put something new into action you have no choice but to lead others along with you!
The point was also made that change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that we don't always have the freedom of change - we have to work within a context.
For the activity part of this discussion we looked at a terrible (fictional) example of a principal's email to initiate BYOD, then reworked this into a more appropriate letter to the community. We used a document that has been put out by the PPTA about managing change within a school. This can be found at the link below and is a very valuable tool. Well worth a look!
One final comment, my Twitter addiction is growing all the time and I've had a couple of bleary eyed mornings after staying up too late engaged in awesome chats with other educators. This has been one of the best discoveries of my study so far and I cannot emphasise enough what a fantastic tool it is! Go forth and tweet folks!
As my first assignment was based around flipping the classroom I was looking forward to this week's session. Having set up my maths weebly I have dipped my toe into flipped learning and am really enjoying the results, so I was looking forward to the chance of exploring the concept further.
We started by discussing Blended Learning, which it should be noted does not automatically equal Flipped Learning. As flipping has become more popular, people have started to see the two terms as interchangeable. However flipped learning is just one technique of many. Blended learning refers to having a combination of face to face and online learning and it could fall anywhere on that continuum. A standout quote for me from our session was that it does not mean the addition of technology, it means redesigning your teaching from the ground up to make use of the technology.
This graphic gives a good overview of some blended learning models. Further information can be found here Blended Learning Definitions
We then proceeded to have a good play with Blendspace. This was amazing! It is such a powerful tool, and has a huge range of features available for free. I have really enjoyed using Weebly to design a site for flipped learning, and I do prefer the layout and appearance of my Weebly site over blendspace as well. However, I created the same lesson on Blendspace that I had previously done on Weebly and it took me a fraction of the time. Blendspace is designed specifically for this purpose so everything is quick, easy and very user friendly. You can add any combination of youtube videos, graphics, links, quizzes and text to a lesson. It is also designed for children to log in so you can control what lessons they have access to, and keep track of what they are doing. I haven't yet had a chance to explore this further, but I am very keen to give it a go in class. It has amazing potential and I think it will probably suit my needs better than my current system.
Flipped learning allows you to redesign class time for more active learning and engagement. A good wee overview can be found in this video:
The idea is students watch videos outside class to avoid long periods of teacher talk and enable class time to be spent working on activities rather than sitting and listening. You can also flip inside the classroom, which is what I have been doing with my maths Weebly. This way also avoids any issues with students having limited access to online resources at home.
I think it is a very exciting concept that I am already seeing benefit from in my teaching, even though I have only just scratched the surface. I have been able to redesign my maths rotations and give more teacher time where it is most needed. I do need to adapt it for younger children, and it will always be a modified version as they are less independent, however it definitely still works and I'm looking forward to expanding how I use it in the classroom.
Flipped learning does have downsides, and one of the biggest is probably the initial investment of time required for setup. This is why I was so excited about Blendspace, as the whole process seems like it could be streamlined. I definitely feel the positives are worth it, however I'm already finding it difficult to keep up with my small site and it frequently falls down the list when juggling everything I have to do. This was a reflection from our group on the positives and negatives of flipped learning:
Leading Online Discussions
This part of the session has ended up being so valuable for me, as in the short time since Thursday's session I have become a complete Twitter addict! I never got into Twitter for myself, but opened a teaching account earlier this year after getting the message at every PD session I went to that it was the best thing I could be doing. I quickly saw how exciting a tool it is, and enjoyed discovering resources that would pop up in my feed. However I knew I wasn't realising its full potential, and I didn't really understand how to make the most of it.
We had a practice chat in class last week, which helped me start to see how it all worked, though I still found it confusing and hard to follow. When I got home I downloaded TweetDeck and my whole experience changed! With the ability to set up a column and follow a particular hashtag, I understood how to watch and participate in organised chats and keep track of relevant content. That very evening I tried my first chat and had a go at joining in with #edchatnz. I was quite nervous but was too excited not to jump straight in! I then found myself keenly searching for more and participated in #includEDau and #digitaledchat.
Well a whole new world has opened up now. What an incredible tool that leads to such fantastic sharing of resources, networking, support and collaboration. I figure too that it is a pretty good indication of its effectiveness that it can make me want to engage in school-related discussions at 9pm on a Sunday night!
I have found the parallells between this and what we have been discussing in class fascinating. We have had many conversations around learning happening everywhere and not just in formal teaching spaces, about collaboration between students, and about them being able to access information anywhere, anytime. After one of my chat sessions I commented to my partner that I felt I had got so much more out of that hour than some formal PD sessions I have attended, which also made me consider how I feel about the fact that my Twitter time doesn't 'count' as PD.
This has been quite eye opening considering myself as the student. We have commented that the teacher is no longer the sole source of knowledge and that our job is now to teach the skills our students require. I do feel I will start to have different expectations in my own learning now that I have access to such brilliant networks online.
