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Tuesday evening was the moment that the teacher, now student, becomes teacher again. While I spend all day teaching Grade 6-8 students, it is another thing to "stand up" in front of your peers and lead a class. My topic: Interactive Games To do this I wanted to develop a more interactive presentation to match the topic. My new passion (or obsession) is the Breakout EDU concept. Building on the escape room trend, Breakout EDU uses a locked box or digital document that requires the solving of a number of clues to unlock the game. In the process there is a great deal of gamification and game-based learning happening. While exploring a digital break out that could be done I came across the Sound of Music Digital breakout by Goh Boon Jin and Stephanie Foo Tze Wurn. The deck.toys.com platform was used to create this digital breakout. Try your hand at it and see how you do. You can comment on my post and I will message you privately with any hints that you might need. Following someone in a cosplay costume has a way of making the nerves get a little worked up. What if it doesn't work? What if it isn't enough? What if it is too much? What if the content is correct? After a short preamble, students were asked to log into the Interactive Games deck.toys. Having run the demo and actual presentation on iPad, laptop, iPhone, PC I was familiar with how it worked as a student, but didn't know what it would look like as a gamification/teaching platform. What I saw was a nice platform that allowed me to see where each of my fellow classmates, turned students, were. The little initial icons floated between activities. As a teacher I could quickly see that one person was stuck on the first technology match up question. I suspected one of two things: a) confusion with the terminology or b) issues with the technology. Within 2 minutes the student moved onto the next area and was able to get into the rest of the material so I didn't need to interrupt their learning process. In a classroom situation, I would have been able to go over and help problem solve with the student and determine if it was a language, content or technical issue. At one point there were students at the beginning and nearly the end of the material. I may also check in with those that finished first and ask them some follow-up questions to ensure understanding of the material. It is possible on some of the stages that people clicked through without watching the videos and thus might have missed some of the information. As the students reached the Breakout EDU activity they were locked until they figured out the password. For students to figure out the directional lock they needed to use the prompt to go back to the brain map and look at the path they had taken (e.g. Up, Left, Up, Diagonal, Right, Down). I saw several students get stuck at this point and as I approached the end of the class time I started to take questions in the general chat area. Several admitted getting stuck, others were interested in more of the features that existed behind this learning platform. All in all it was a successful lesson on gamification and game-based learning. I had hoped the LINOIT would get practical examples from my fellow teachers. The problem with technology is keeping up with all the latest developments. The best resources have come from word of mouth and perhaps those reading this blog will consider going back to add to it.
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Games vs Game-based Learning vs Gamification
Click to view the complete infographic. | Infographic by Upside Learning
Gamification ads a level of the familiar to student learning. They extrinsic motivation of earning points, badges or levels may be the motivating factor to encourage involvement. We live in a game-based society and anyone with a basic smart phone and a data plan can access games instantly.
Game-based learning involves using the mechanics of a game to help learn, consolidate or reinforce certain information. If games are used with specific intention and purpose they can be critical tools in the learning process. What are teachers up against?
The final lecture that I was in attendance for at UOIT B.Ed was the credits for Lord of the Rings. Over 15 minutes of tiny names scrolling past the field of view. This, we were told, was what we were up against. Massive teams of individuals that work together to produce 2-3 hours worth of entertainment. The consumption of media, games and products that stimulate to this degree is staggering. Incorporation of some of these elements into the classroom setting is a way to capitalize on what they love and turn it into a learning activity.
References
Marczewski, Andrzej (2012, April). Gamification: A Simple Introduction (1st ed.). p. 3. ISBN 978-1-4717-9866-5. Retrieved 2012-11-25.
Kapp, Karl. (2014, May 13). What is Gamification? A Few Ideas. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqyvUvxOx0M
In Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson points out that creativity is often seen as a spark that comes quickly and spontaneous to the genius. He instead points out that creativity is borrowed from our past experiences and that inspiration comes in various forms.
What Value is there in Creativity?
One of the recent concepts that I have latched onto is teaching for the 21st century and focusing on the 5C's: creativity, critical thinking, communication, cooperation and community. These concepts seem to answer all sorts of problems that I began to see with the education system. If we take on Ferguson's view that creativity is not magic and that nothing is truly new, but rather borrowed and remixed from endless sources then what value can we actually place on creativity?
As teachers, we often have creativity as a rubric category in our success criteria. Is this truly fair? Perhaps we should look at capability or capacity (sticking with the C theme) of students' ability to work with, reimagine and rework the information they have been given and/or can find. The ease with which people can get a vast amount of information is mind boggling. You can now even tap a Bluetooth combadge and connect to your smart phone to get answers via a web search. Our ability to truly create something "NEW" seems even further and further from possible. Celebrating the capacity to accomplish the given goal may thus be more important that putting value on creativity or "newness" Taking something we are familiar with and juxtaposing it against something unfamiliar or new is a tale as old as time. Stories can be considered “popular culture artifacts” (PCA) –a variety of written and visual media that emerge from the social contexts of our lives (Callahan, Whitener, & Sandlin, 2007). In grade school I remember these 6 minute animations about Fractured Fairytales - they took something beloved and treasured and turned them upside-down making you think about the original story and the world around you. The classic tale of Snow White consists of a young girl with white porcelain skin and bright red lips. Tormented by the jealous, Evil Queen she escapes to live as the fairest in the land in the forest with the 7 dwarves. In the Fracture Fairytale from 1959, the Evil Queen is taken advantage of by 7 enterprising dwarves. They capitalize on her narcissism and the cost is her crown, jewels and castle. Snow White appears at the end of the short story and is not what we might expect her to look like. The dwarves also capitalize on her narcissism. Having students rewrite classic tales in new ways provides an opportunity for critical comparison and commentary on important issues. ABC has come out with their own take on fairytales in Once Upon a Time. Filled with as many different fairytale and Disney characters as they could muster up. In this iteration of fairy tales, Storybrooke is home to a cast of characters. In Storybrooke, the Evil Queen has taken the memories from everyone and trapped them in the town. The saviour, Emma Swan, and her daughter, Snow White, are tasked with saving the memories of the town in Season 1. Each episode focuses on a character backstory making you rethink what you once knew about these characters. Often times the storylines are blended together in a fractured, rebuilt and fractured again tale.
Jenkins and Kelley (2013) note that when we allow writers the opportunity to get in there and rework our old stories we create a participatory culture that reduces barriers. In their book Reading in a Participatory Culture they interview playwright Ricardo Pitts-Whiley about creation of the play Moby Dick: Then and Now. The remixed story features a female lead and a drug addiction that killed her brother. She seeks vengeance for her brother against the "WhiteThing" cocaine cartel. The story of Moby Dick provides a jumping off point and brings the themes of that story into context with modern characters and situations. It allows the reader/writer to participate in a way they can't from simply reading the text. Fans participate with their beloved storyline and characters in a way that goes above and beyond in some ways. They dress up, act and talk like the characters they look up to. From Trekkies to Whovians to manga characters, fans immerse themselves with head, heart and soul. In stories like Glass Slippers are Illogical and Sleeping Spock: A Star Trek fairy tale, fans are able to participate with the characters, create their own storylines and bring two common elements together in a new piece of fiction. Jenkins and Kelley (2013) urge schools, libraries and other public institutions to promote and create equitable opportunities for individuals to participation. They urge literature teachers to help students make sense of mixed media, develop as consumers of literature and take ownership of new media literacy skills. In this way our students create new pieces of work that tap into their personal interests and strengths. Resources: Callahan, J. L., Whitener, J. K., & Sandlin, J. A. (2007). The art of creating leaders: Popular culture artifacts as pathways for development. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 9(2), 146-165. Jenkins, H., & Kelley, W. (2013). Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom; Ed. By Henry Jenkins. New York, Teachers College Press. The reading this week revolved around the participatory culture of the documentary. In a much smaller scale we are documenting our journey together in the classroom this year as a new form of communication, community and collaboration. In the past the method of communication for myself and parents has been the telephone call. Parents and teachers alike often dread that phone call. There are times when this still happens, however, the majority of the communication is done on a public basis these days. As such, we look to highlight the major accomplishments, the fun learning and engagement and the process we have taken to get to where we are. We document the struggles, the victories and the life of being a student. This year I communicate via webpage, blog and Twitter. We used this process as a platform to learn about digital literacy. We educated ourselves on proper use and etiquette while creating a presence on the internet. Together I modelled the process with students and starting this week turn it over to them. As November begins the students will now become the curators of their own digital presence. The scaffolding process was an designed to lessen what Jenkins calls the "participatory gap" (in Ratto and Megan, 2014). Students watched and were encouraged to help before but weren't given the responsibility to participate. Now they will find they take turns curating the school Twitter account www.twitter.com/WIDWildcats and the class account www.twitter.com/kmackay_hdsb. They will also take over writing the weekly Blog update to parents. The one thing that I have noticed about the process has been better documentation of the process and successes. We have begun to explore different formats for these updates - both video, text and photo. Next step is to explore Snapchat, Instagram and whatever other new methods of social media that become popular with the students. Perhaps it is a weekly summary using Lego stop motion animation, podcast or regular old phone call. The choice will be theirs - allowing them to be writer, producer and star (if they so choose). References Ratto, M., & Megan, B. (2014). DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. |
AuthorI am a teacher in Halton and have spent 12 years dedicated to learning about and working with students who have special learning needs. I have been teaching since 2005. I have 4 kids (2 + 2 step), I play bagpipes, ride a motorcycle and love being outdoors. Archives
August 2017
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