The way I see gamification is a tool that we teachers can use as a way to assess students level of understanding through a game. This is similar to playing Kahoot or a class favorite game I play with my students when reviewing for a test called Grudge Ball. On the other hand game-based learning is a way students get more involved in exploring and learning the content through a game. I say exploring because it’s similar to playing video games. To be successful in a video game you have to complete objectives. Also, students go through simulations as they try to “master” certain skills or levels before they can move on to the next level. This is something that was talked about throughout the book Matt and I read in the 792 class on James P. Gee’s book, Good Video Games and Good Learning. Desmos.com or Khan Academy are examples of game based learning. Desmos has more of a game feel to it as students work on math problems and it begins with simple math problems and these math problems get more difficult as they go through the task. Kahn Academy does this as well but it doesn’t have the “gaming” feel to it. A way that I might try game-based learning is to try more technological or online games that work around Math. For example code.org seemed like a really cool website that has students use coding to run computer simulations while learning mathematical concepts. I also saw a case study of this website on Edutopia last year and it seemed really cool on how the teacher had students explore the idea of a slope of a line and how they can manipulate the code top modify the slope of the line from which was being observed from a rocket ship being launched. Another gamification tool that I explored this week and I saw how it can really benefit my classroom is Socrative.com. I noticed they have a bunch of features but I really liked the quiz features, the exit ticket and also allows me to clearly see organized data results from student responses. To me that is really powerful. But after all of these amazing tools, it just seems overwhelming but exciting as I do plan to integrate a lot of what we have explored in this Innovative program for two semesters now. To me, the goal is clear of what I want to do but the challenge is to be able to organize and structure my classroom so students can easily follow along and feel like they are learning. It comes down to what Jane McGonigal said in her talk, “Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world.” This really got my attention when watching the video because this covers, in what I believe, that we are all trying to have our students do with what we are trying to teach in the classroom. If we can do this, I think our students can change the world!
4 Comments
The tools that I chose to explore this week were EdPuzzle, Vibby and Vocaroo. I chose these because first of all they were free. Lol I also wanted to check out another tool similar to EdPuzzle and Vibby was an option. It was user friendly just as EdPuzzle was. I noticed that it had videos that have already been created and one can also search for videos on a category of your choosing. You can also edit those video or find a video on YouTube you like and edit that one. I wasn’t able to create the video I wanted that I think would benefit my students so I went the safe route and used an old Power Point and used Screencastify. I also did this since I was busy trying to finish the rest of the assignments for this class and our other class. I also tried to apply visual strategies from Baggio because this Power Point is an old one so I really made it a lot more simple and arranging text in specific spots and so on. But, the way I applied the video I created for my flipped lesson was to have students take notes on the video and then do some hw problems after watching the video. Which this is a way that I plan to assess students on the video is if they not only did the hw problems that were in the video but also to check for understanding. I can definitely see myself using these tools in the future as it would save time in the classroom because the note taking can be done at home. But then come the issue of equity. Do all students have internet at home? If they don’t, what then, how do we support them? Or if they don’t watch it because they decided not to, what are the consequences? I also mentioned above that I explored Vocaroo. That is a very simple tool to use if you want to record audio. I tried it out but the audio is very “staticky”. So the quality is not that good. But then the other challenge is how this tool can be used or which tools can we insert audio clips from Vocaroo on?
|