Although I didn’t call it by this same name, gamification has long been a part of my classroom. Gamification happens in a classroom anytime a teacher sets up a management system with rewards, points, team efforts, levels of achievement. For example, where I did my student teaching, the entire school had a gamified system for math fact fluency. Every classroom did a 5 minute speed/accuracy math facts quiz daily. When you achieved accuracy and fluency you leveled up to the next quiz. Quizzes were grouped in sets and the students on that set belonged to a level named for an animal. After mastering a particular set of quizzes you moved to the next animal group. Many teachers gamify their classroom management system. Fred Jones has a system he calls PAT (Preferred Activity Time). The class begins with a certain amount of PAT time and can increase or decrease their time by meeting behaviorial or procedural goals. For example, a teacher has given the class multi-step directions on how to move into small groups and prepare for team projects. She wants to minimize the transition time and discourage dallying. She tells that class she thinks the transition will take 4 minutes. If they can be ready in less, the extra time is added to the PAT time. Shazam! Gamified! Often, PAT time, the reward, IS time for learning games. Which begs the question… how are games for learning different than gamification? Gamification is the system for incentives. Learning games incorporate this incentive but dive deeper and include content knowledge. Their goal moves beyond motivation and active participation. It’s purpose is mastery of content and/or a skill. One particular experience comes to mind when I think of the power of learning games. One of the courses I took for my K-8 credential was Teaching Math. Thankfully, the course content included the idea that playing math games was a valuable practice. I tried out a game with my students that was simple yet powerful. The game is used to introduce place value units. I’ve now tweaked this game for use in 5 different grade levels. Let’s call the game “Make it Greatest” or “Make it Least”. The object of the game is to make the number with the greatest or least value, you pick or alternate. Players all draw one digit card or roll a die to get a digit. They must place the digit into a place value frame. This can be as low tech as lines on paper, and you can choose to what place value they play. For example, first grade students would begin with ones and tens while fourth graders might play to the hundred thousands and one millions places. Students must all draw digits simultaneously and place them into the frame before drawing another digit. Make the game more complex by including zero as a digit. After creating their numbers, they read them out to one another and discuss who has the greatest/least number. So simple. I found that playing this one game caused the students to experience at least 4 or 5 of the lesson concepts from the unit. Effectively, they practiced actively the concepts that were meant to be instructed over the course of 4 or 5 days of direct instruction. And they had fun doing it. So did I.
Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on how gaming can make a better world highlights these strengths of gamers. As a gamer herself, McGonigal makes a very convincing argument for teaching and learning through extensive, multiplayer games. She makes the case that the qualities gamers cultivate will be valuable assets for our future need to solve problems. It’s easy to see the distinction between gamification and gaming for learning. Gamification is part of learning games, but gamification alone does not always result in learning. This is not to say that gamification doesn’t have a useful purpose in school. It’s a fun motivator. It’s uses as a motivational tool are not just useful in school. Look at the world around us and you see gamification everywhere. Rewards cards at retail and service providers is a form of gamification. Earn points by more purchases, get more purchasing power. Retailers are playing the game to get your business. Many work places incentivize by gamification. A local resort tries to motivate safe work place practices by entering every employee into a Bingo game board for every day that there is no accidents reported in the work place. Employees have a greater chance to win for every incident free day and the cash winnings increase for every “safe day”. There isn’t any harm in using gamification to grease the wheel of classroom management and systems & procedures, just make sure that if your goal for a game is actual content mastery, that you choose the correct game to provide deep learning.
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EdPuzzle: I used EdPuzzle to add to a video I found on YouTube. I chose the cropping tool to shorten the ending. I did not choose to use the audio track or to insert audio notes because the soundtrack for the video was already expertly done. I did choose to insert quiz questions that had to be answered in order to continue through the video. I can see how this tool is very useful to assure that students are actually watching the videos with a certain level of interactivity. The teacher gets a summary of the students’ answers and a time stamp for when the student watched the video. You could actually use this feature as an assessment, of course, in the context we were exploring you wouldn’t use the quiz feature as a summative assessment. It could, however, be used as a formative assessment. I really liked this tool because you can find already vetted videos and adapt them for your more specific use. Jing/Screencast: Jing was a very simple (and free) screencasting tool to use. You can simply take snapshots of any portion of your screen and copy them into a document or share them using Screencast. You can also take video and voiceover of your screen. I liked this tool for its simplicity! It’s an easy starter tool for those of us just beginning our journey into screencasting. I used this tool to do a demo for my students on how to use an interactive plot diagramming tool on the ReadWriteThink site. WeVideo I chose to try WeVideo because I’m looking for a way for my students to make their own videos or storyboards for books they read. WeVideo provides a basic video editing platform. It seems most suited for uploading and editing photos and videos you take of real footage. It provides some basic themes, a few overlays (like POW!), sound effects, and music background. You can splice together 2 tracks. Storybird: Continuing on my quest to find a site for students to make their own versions of a story, I found Storybird. This is a website for making and publishing your own storybook, short story, or illustrated poem. The user brings their own text and uses illustrations provided by users, both amateur and professional. The site seems to begin at the premise that the image is the beginning of the story. When designing your story, you begin by choosing images. The illustrations are varied, grouped by themes and by illustrators. The interface is simple - select and drag the image you want for the page, type in the text. Add the next page. In my opinion the artwork is of good quality. StoryboardThat Of all the storymaking sites I explored, this was my favorite. For my capstone project, I want my students to interact with their favorite books by storyboarding. StoryboardThat lets you choose how many frames you want and select and drag the elements into each frame. Provided for the user is a multitude of backdrops, characters, dialogue bubbles, and the ability to upload your own. All of them are able to be layered, positioned, and edited in multiple ways. Though there are MANY options for editing, the interface is amazingly easy to use! There is a certain style to the outcome, but the storytelling tools are vast and rather easy to use. The site also comes with sample lessons already created. As always, when using digital technology, student access to devices and the internet can be an issue that must be considered. Another aspect to take into account is that each tool takes time to learn. Just my own surface investigations of these sites took hours of time. When giving assignments that incorporate making videos or storyboards, the time commitment involved must be taken into account. I also think it would be wise to stick to one or two platforms to give your students (and you) time to master it and plumb the depths of its capabilities. Before joining NVUSD this past year I was not a Google suite user. As I’ve progressed through the year, I’ve become familiar with the suite, but by far do not consider myself a fluent user. Surprisingly, I had only been asked to fill out about a dozen forms surveys over the course of this last school year. This was my first attempt at creating my own Google Forms and I am excited to see where the adventure leads. Since my students work predominantly from home, I wanted to create a survey meant to discover what their home access is to the internet and to what kind of devices they have access. My first question was a yes/no answer. Depending on the answer, the student would or would not have to answer a few more questions. I recalled my frustration in taking a couple surveys when my answer should have eliminated the next questions but didn’t. I did a little searching around, and to my delight, found that Forms has a function to create sections and to jump to a new section depending on the first answer. So, for example, when a student responded NO, she did not have a cell phone, she was not required to answer questions about the functionality of that nonexistent phone, but skipped to the next section on home access to internet/devices. My students come to school once or twice a week. If they are absent, they still have to turn in work in order to get their attendance credits. If a student is unable to get a ride to school, this presents a problem. I made a form that enables students to submit work from home. The next step is for the student to schedule what is called an “intervention” meeting. The students find a list of available times to schedule. The add-on Choice Eliminator will take a time off the list when a student chooses it. Choice Eliminator can be used for scheduling, sign ups for parents, students choosing topics for projects when you don’t want more than one group/student doing the same topic. The next form I created was done mostly to track when students check out and check in books from the class library. Mosty I did this one because I wanted to play around with Autocrat, which is a mail merge add-on. When students check out a book, a spreadsheet is formed and a letter is emailed to the student with a confirmation and a due date. You create a folder in your drive to collect the individual letters, so they can be emailed again or emailed to the parent if the book does not come back. I kept it simple for my first run, but I can see how an email could also be sent when the book is checked in. I would like to use forms and the autocrat add-on to have parents check in on orientation day, when they give us basic necessary information. I’d like to find out their preferred method of contact and to send a welcome letter to them from that information gathering. How can/Should social media be used to help you develop/collaborate/communicate as a professional? What are the critical issues to consider? When I first began teaching one of the Go-To resources for teachers was Harry Wong’s First Days of School. I still keep my copy and believe most of what he proposes is valuable for classroom and education practices. I’ve read the book several times, watched the video series and its spin-offs, listened to the audio, and attended several workshops around the content of this book. One of my favorite catch phrases cemented in my mind from this experience is that when it comes to developing as a professional, teachers “beg, borrow, and steal” the best ideas from one another. All my best tools, lessons, and classroom management strategies have come from other teachers. A 35 year veteran teacher I know volunteers his time to serve on a WASC team, just so, he says, he can stay fresh (after 35 years) and get into other teachers’ classrooms to get some good ideas. Getting around physically to see other teachers in action is, needless to say, a challenging proposition. After all, we’re all in class at the same time! Finding time to attend professional development workshops, conferences, even a coffee date with a fellow teacher - that’s not always in the schedule. So how do we experience one another’s little microcosms? We use social media. Student aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the use of social media. In Steven Anderson’s Blog on Three Untapped Social Media Resources for Students, he cites a Pew Internet Research Study from 2016 showing that of all U.S adults,
I have no hesitation in using social media to connect professionally with colleagues. I do think it wise practice to create separate accounts that are used for purely professional reasons and are never intermingled with personal accounts. One critical issue I think we need to consider is the “unfiltered” aspect of using social media for sharing ideas. In Darrell West’s article How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education, he points out that social media can tap into the expertise of the general population. He calls it democratizing the flow of information. “There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner.” West does not state it directly, but implies that it is a positive shift that we do not any longer have to rely upon experts to inform us, we can all just weigh in our thoughts without any mediation nor filter. But we must keep in mind when wading through the vast array of ideas available through social media that mediation can provide judgements of accuracy. Peer reviewed articles are more reliable than unfiltered thoughts. Increased, expedient participation via social media is certainly a good thing, but not at the expense of quality. Not all participation is equal in merit. Just as we are trying to teach our students digital literacy skills, such as how to weigh the credibility of an internet source and how to apply critical thinking to what they read, we as professionals must be savvy about applying these same digital literacy skills to using social media for communicating, collaborating, and developing as educators. What would you do if you were to come across an inappropriate post made by one of your students outside of the school. Currently, I wouldn’t probably come across an inappropriate post made by a current student because I very purposefully do not follow, connect with, snap, chat, or gram any of my current students. My understanding of the school district email and social media policy is that teachers are supposed to conduct all communication with students using NVUSD email addresses. Appropriate communication with students and parents by teachers is absolutely essential in this litigious age. Aside from directives from our superiors, it is simply wise to be prudent in how deeply we interconnect our professional and personal lives when we’re role models, mentors, and sometimes a highly scrutinized adult presence. We are teachers… it’s our calling to instruct our students, and that does involve caring about who they are as people. Yes, we need to know their interests and maintain a warm, inviting, safe emotional space for them. Yet we still need to draw a boundary between being a caring mentor and being friends, buddies, or...social contacts on social media. Once students are graduated or I have changed schools, I do occasionally connect with them or their parents over social media. The day will come when I will stumble upon a comment on social media by one of my own students that is inappropriate or harmful to another student. Especially in the latter case, I would feel it my responsibility to speak with the student and the parents. If necessary, I would involve the principal to mediate any restorative steps. In Patrick Larkin’s example (What do you do when you see inappropriate social media posts?) the comment is not directed at another student, so he advocates taking the approach of a teaching moment rather than disciplinary steps. I agree that showing a student WHY not to be so careless with his digital footprint is more valuable than an extrinsic negative consequence. Show the student the natural consequences that may arise from public consumption of what might have been a thoughtless, impulsive social media post that doesn’t show him in the best light. What is the opposite of a digital native? A digital immigrant? I guess that’s what I am. I didn’t really decide to move to this new country, in fact, I moved reluctantly and only adapted as was necessary. I looked fondly back on the simple days back in the old country. Sure, many tasks took longer and you had to commit more to memory, but I knew my way around it and how to get the job done with the available tools. So now, here I am, realizing that I will never be moving back to the old country - it does not even exist anymore. It’s time to learn the language, culture, and tools of my new digital home beyond just surviving and barely keeping pace. Time to become fluent. In fact - it’s far past time! So to the task at hand - to review a digital tool I’ve used in school that is not a GSuite app nor one we’ve discussed in class. Embarrassing to admit - I got nothing! Probably the most significant reason I decided to enroll in the Innovative Learning masters program was to push my own comfort zone and force myself to learn more technology tools. At this point I am still soaking in the knowledge of others and trying out the tools that have been suggested - I have not yet reached the stage where I am the innovator. For the sake of having something to contribute, I’ll review a digital learning platform introduced to me at Credit Recovery Summer School. APEX is an online learning platform used by the Adult School and now the district’s high school credit recovery program. I have four different English semesters running concurrently. Students come in every day and access their online course. The full, Common Core aligned course is available to each student. This course is prescriptive, meaning that each unit is preceeded by a pre-test. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a part of the material, that lesson is taken out of their personalized learning plan. Each student progresses self-paced through a series of readings, activities, videos, quizzes, projects, and writing prompts. As they demonstrate mastery of each part, the program opens up the next unit. Most assessment is done by the program with a couple teacher assessed parts (usually the writing) in each unit. Conceivably, a very motivated student could move through a course quickly by logging in from home. The teacher’s role from the perspective of the use of the program is to maintain the classroom dashboard: enroll students, manage the class content, monitor students’ pacing through the semester to ensure completion, unlock tests so students can only access them from a proctored environment. From the perspective of instruction in content knowledge, the teacher supports each individual student when he or she encounters difficulty. Already I’ve plopped down next to a few students to help them through difficult concepts or writing prompts. It took me 2 training sessions to feel comfortable navigating the platform - the first session was in person for 2 hours and the second was an hour long webcam training. I find the teacher platform very easy to navigate, and I am also very impressed with the content and tools given to the students in their portal. This is a very appropriate and effective tool for this job. Students have only 17 days to complete a semester and receive their credits for the course. It’s also helpful to the instructor because you can run several courses simultaneously without having to create your own lesson plans and assessments. One of the challenges the students face is staying engaged when they’re working at a computer for 3 ½ hours a day with little peer interaction. We have to take breaks often. I’ve also kept a constant circulating presence to make sure they aren’t just surfing the web and also to discuss the content of the course with individuals. As a whole, though, I am very impressed with APEX learning’s course design and online platform. Finding time to instruct digital literacy in a full curriculum is certainly challenging. The minutes in an instructional day are limited. I know all teachers face a time crunch. Here’s a snapshot of my week. I give this not to complain or use it as an excuse not to face the task of teaching digital literacy, but in the hopes that you, dear reader, might have ideas to assist me in being a better educator. Two heads are better than one… and the more, the merrier!
My possible schedule for a week could include any grade from K to 8th. Typically it is rare to have students enrolled in lower elementary, and currently, if there were students in every grade level, they would need to be paired up in multi-grade sessions because we have only two teachers for K-8. Think of me like a coordinator for a homeschool student who has the advantage of having classmates and a teacher with whom he gets to check-in every week. For the K through 5th, I teach all 4 core subjects: ELA, Social Studies, Math, and Science. For the 6th-8th I teach ELA and Social Studies. My schedule is set at 25 instruction hours per week with an extra 7 hours set aside for prep and meetings that include 1-1 student meetings, IEP meetings, parent conferencing, team meetings, a weekly meeting with the principal, and professional development on Wednesdays. Let’s take a typical Tuesday: 8-9am IEP meeting, 9-10am 7th grade ELA, 10-11am 7th grade Social Studies, 11-12pm 2nd grade Math and ELA, 12:30-1 pm one-on-one with student who was absent yesterday, 1-2pm 5th grade Social Studies and Science, 2-3pm 3rd grade Math and Science. Bear in mind that is the ONLY hour that week that the student attends that class; the rest of the learning and work is done at home through independent studies. Students receive 3 hours per week of class time. This year we expanded 8th grade to 4 hours. Our classroom is a little bit traditional and little bit flipped. During the hour a week per subject, we go through what the student studied at home to assess learning and preview and frontload the next week’s content. It is very fast paced and bare bones. The students and parents are truly in control of their own learning. So you can see that when I throw around the idea of teaching digital literacy, I will have to also think outside the box and think about putting the learning in the hands of the learner. That being said, I think the best approach is to integrate the instruction into the existing curriculum. Rather than think of digital literacy and digital citizenship as a separate lesson that needs to be taught as a stand alone lesson, or teaching technology for its own sake, I’d like to take the approach of truly integrating technology and digital use into the learning. For example, let’s take a 3rd grade learning unit where the students’ end result is to create a slide show for an animal report. In the research portion of the lesson the students would learn about efficient ways to search for online information, critical thinking skills to filter information, how to identify legitimate academic sources versus sources that are not credible sources. When the students move to writing their paragraphs and presenting information, they would learn how to cite sources and give credit to others. When creating slide, they would learn how to use images that are in the public domain and to give credit to the source. If they chose to purchase an image, there would be learning around internet commerce and safety. Effective digital visual design could be a mini-lesson. When sharing their slide show with the class or publishing it to the web, learning around appropriate collaboration and digital communication could occur. One of the aspects of teaching digital literacy that I would like to explore this semester is non-teacher-led lessons, or asynchronous, student accessible lessons. My students need to be able to access effective and engaging learning units from home, not just for digital literacy, but for ALL of their content areas. As their teacher and the one ultimately held responsible for “teaching” them, I need to find a way to motivate the students to seek their own learning and a way to hold them accountable to putting in the effort and time from their “classroom” at home. Here are three ways to teach various aspects of digital citizenship in a personalized way for the students.
Digital Literacy In my teaching context at Independent Studies, we already have a blend of classroom time (teacher/small group time) and independent learning time. Any given student is in the classroom only 3 to 4 hours per week. Students could be more involved in learning content online. This would allow me to flip my classroom by using web based programs to create content for the students that they can access away from the classroom on their own schedule. Ideally, this content could even be personalized for individual students. Also, students can increase their digital literacy by searching out apps, sites, or programs that keep them interested in the material. I could even have the students fill out a survey about their favorite apps so far (educational or otherwise) and then as the year progresses, expose them to more and as an assignment have them find and use their own favorites. Digital Health and Wellness “ But even beyond the physical aspects, adults need to be aware of the amount and type of technology used by students… digital health and wellness issue...becoming addicted to the Internet or to video games and withdrawing from society” (Ribble). I hear many of my students talking about their gaming. One student spends about an average of 4 to 5 hours a day gaming. I was thinking about how little time that leaves for other activities that should be included in a balanced, healthy lifestyle - exercise, socializing, plenty of sleep. I think it might be a good activity to promote awareness of time usage . Brainstorm on a padlet the student’s ideas about what daily actions and choices keep a person healthy, happy, and form good habits for a lifelong habit of health and wellness. Then have each student log their days and come up with pie charts representing time allotted to various activities each week. Compare the brainstormed list to the ways students are actually spending their time to see how we fare. Digital Communication From reading Luvvie Ajayi’s article “How to Keep Your College Admissions Letter” I got an idea of how to make appropriate digital communication personal to each student. I’ll call it the JumbTron Lesson. Ask students to find a textstream to a friend and take a screenshot of it. Now ask them to post it to a class padlet. Many are likely to object claiming it is too personal or private. It makes the point quickly that nothing is private when posted to the internet or even sent digitally from person to person. Someday, that text stream may be retrieved and used to show your choices and character. Would you want your text streams or your instagram account or your Facebook page on a JumboTron in New York City? Another quickie to try with students to make their internet presence apparent to them is to have them Google themselves and see what comes up. Likely most students have done this already. The person held responsible for making it happen will usually have a different perspective than the people looking in from the outside. So I chuckled at Katie Varatta’s blog, “Teaching in a Competency-Based Education Environment”. Of course the general reaction to the idea of all students passing through their education with mastery of their learning targets is a positive one! As Ms. Varatta says, though, the teachers (where the rubber meets the road, so to speak) ask some very good questions. First, my ponderings and questions… then the ways technology integration might be able to offer solutions. Competency Based Education (CBE) aims to individualize learning targets to each student so he can grow from current understanding (where he is now) through a learning goal. The proposition is that the student is the center of his education and his learning goals are personalized to him. Also, in CBE, the student has choices for demonstrating what they’ve learned - assumably it can be performance tasks, tests, presentations, projects. Ms Varatta ostensibly dealt with the questions from teachers of needing to write multiple lesson plans and managing all the levels. She indicated that multiple lesson plans were not necessary and that logistics would help manage the levels. Admittedly, the answer left me a little dubious. One way I can see technology assisting in the “logistics” is in the most basic elements of tracking of learning goals. Leaving aside my ponderings about who makes the learning targets (are they like standards? State mandated? Truly decided by the student?) and who provides the curriculum for those standards… let’s assume there’s a web-based program where a data base can be accessed and a set of learning goals assigned to each student. Teacher, student, and parents could all have access to facilitate a team effort. The teacher could update the progress, or even better, the student herself could do it, and the parents could have anytime access. Proponents of CBE point out that students pass through learning targets and ideally, would not even be tracked by grade level. Again, leaving aside the massive overhaul of the U.S. system of education that would need to happen to truly achieve this goal, I wanted to examine the idea of mastering one learning goal before progressing to another. One website points out that in the In traditional school settings, students can move through grade levels even if they only understand 60 percent of the material. From my experience, social promotion in the elementary and middle schools means that some students are progressing onto more difficult material with even less of 60% understanding of material. A 5th grade student only understands 55% of the math concepts presented that year, gets to 6th grade, and is expected to begin on gaining proficiency in 6th grade math concepts. The label of being a “5th grader” or a “6th grader” determine what learning goals, or standards, a student will be given to tackle. There is no information other than a final grade from the previous year passed on to the next teacher. The new teacher spends weeks or months just figuring out the gaps in each student’s learning. Technology could help by having a database that tracks individualized learning targets. The information would follow the student and she could pick up where she left off. Realistically, this would also mean that the curriculum, lessons, and some evaluations would be at least partially computer-based. This summer I will be teaching in a credit recovery program (summer school). I will be using a program called APEX. The learning goals, curriculum, quizzes, activities, and exam for a course are all accessible through this self-paced, web-based program. Students only progress to the next unit after having “passed” the previous unit. The administrator for the school site sets the level at which students pass through each unit - in this case 70%. The teacher has access to all the materials and can even modify the requirements for each student individually (ie: include or exclude certain parts or teacher-grade or teacher-pass a section). Students can work as quickly as they want and retake portions until they achieve mastery. I am interested to work with this program to see it in action. It could be a viable option for technology integration for CBE. |
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December 2017
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