I'm such a fan, in fact, that my class's Twitter handle is "Hijole! Pues..." It loosely translates to "Darn! Well..." I really want to stress to my students that we are all going to make mistakes and make them often, but that's absolutely fine with me as long as we learn from them and continue to improve. I also strive to lower the affective filter in class and encourage them to take risks often.
This year in my 6th grade World Cultures classes, I am trying to gamify everything I can think of. I'm enjoying it immensely, and I feel that my students are as well. However, I feel that I've already learned an awful lot from the things that we've tried that would be considered utter failures by just about anyone involved in education. I'm not going to focus on any of those here; I just wanted to remind myself that it's alright to have those fall-flat-on-my-face moments so long as I learn from them.
One of the aspects of my classroom that I really want to focus on this year is having the students create and make the class their own. I still felt the need before the first day to have a motivational poster or two up, but I didn't plaster them all over the walls the way that I did years ago. I also strategically placed various maps on areas of the walls that needed some masking. Even with these attempts to make my class look a bit more like those of the teachers in my new school that stopped by often, it still looked pretty bare. I was happy about that.
The first week of school, I let my students know that I wanted to make our class into a game. I'd had an idea (It was really Shelly Terrell ;-p) that we would call it Around the World in 180 Days. I used our class Cel.ly to poll the students and to encourage them to join it as quickly as possible. I had used a Google Form to find out if my students had any mobile devices or computers available for them to use at home, and if so, what kind of devices they had. I was surprised to see that many of them actually did, though most were not permitted to bring them to school. I asked them what kinds of games they played and which were their favorites. As I suspected, Minecraft was at the top of the list alongside a few others that I'm sure you could easily guess.
We decided that we would decorate the room Minecraft-style, and I let the students know that we would need to create a foundation for our class before we could begin building. I also believe firmly in building a foundation with my students and getting to know them and their interests before we begin to focus on our curriculum in class. To be completely honest, I had fully expected the students to choose Minecraft, and if they hadn't, I'm sure I would've created a new poll using Forms again to choose which style of game that we would use for our class/game. I'm sure that I would've rigged the poll, and that would've been difficult with Cel.ly. I've followed +Joel "MinecraftTeachr" Levin (@MinecraftTeachr), +Diane Main (@Dowbiggin), @MinecraftEdu, @PCSTech, and quite a few others on G+ and Twitter for a while to learn what has worked for them, but I still don't have much idea what I'd like to do in that area. Regardless, for our foundation, I decided that we would create Minecraft blocks using butcher paper to create our bedrock, land, and water. This is one time when things went horribly wrong.
I intended to have students measure their blocks to be a designated size of 12" by 12". I thought it would be simple. After the first class attempted to construct their blocks in their groups, we had as many sizes of blocks as we did students in class. I scrapped that idea quickly, and created a template for the blocks using Google Draw. Maybe I should say that our classes are 45 minutes long, and during this time of year, they were not really even close to that. I felt that we were not getting enough accomplished in that amount of time. Even using the templates, my students ended up with varying shapes and sizes, but I figured that they were close enough. On the blocks, the students wrote their new class/game "gamer tags" that they would use for usernames for their blogs and various tools we will use this year, and they added lots of information about their cultural traits that we were discussing. We were at least trying to cover the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) that my social studies department chair and other faculty were covering, just in a completely different fashion. Being the only dual-language bilingual social studies teacher affords me a bit of leniency in quite a few realms. Thank goodness for that! Our class is also in Spanish ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent is essentially our "rigorous" testing. No comment.
After we laid our foundation and created "gamer tags", I changed our generic labels for our daily activities. I used Textcraft to change our Objectives to our "Missions", Language Objectives to "Select Language", Warm-up/Sponge Activity/Focus/Engagement thing to "Start Game", Class Information and News to "Communication" and too many other labels to mention. We created a place above a whiteboard to place the name of our game "Around the World in 180 Days: A Game", created class "Leaderboards", created avatars for our characters, placed a sign above the inside of the door to say "Exit? (Y / N)", and made a map of our world to place near the exit routes for fire drills. I'm particularly proud of the yellow compass on the ceiling and cardinal directions that we made sure to place in the correct locations with the help of Google Earth projected on the wall as large as possible. I'm sorry, but I hate tiny interactive white boards. Seven times that day I had to climb all over the room placing the huge arrow and N, S, E, and O (Oeste) letters in just the right spot. It was awesome.
We played Spaceteam in class in order to allow the students to have a voice in creating the rules for our class. I wrote a thing about it over here. It was more fun than an Uncorked Security Hypnodish! If you haven't played Spaceteam, I promise you'll have a great time doing so.
We have also been using Habit RPG as our to-do list, and I encourage students to use it to keep track of chores and homework. I've loved it on the web for a while and have been really excited that they now have an Android and iOS app.
I like EpicWin for iOS a lot too, and it serves the same purpose. I just prefer free tools that are device agnostic!
Another tool that we have used in class in Plickers. My classroom has my school laptop, a media projector with a VGA input (no HDMI for my Apple TV, Chromecast, or Chromebook) on a rolling cart, and a document camera that I haven't taken out of the box yet. About 1 out every 6 students has a smart phone; 6 of my 175 students even have iPads! That's awesome, but I also like things that don't require much technology at all. Plickers provides paper clickers for students to anonymously provide near instant feedback to teachers. It's like having students hold up paddles to show their answers to a question, only they can't see everyone else's answers. The app on any smart phone recognizes the codes on the cards and lets the teacher see which students "get it" without "calling anyone out." It even keeps track of each student's responses. I tried it to give an quiz orally while my questions were projected on our wall. This was really cool for me. It graded my students' quizzes for me, and all I had to do was hold my phone up ten times while my students rotated their codes to choose their responses. I could see which students comprehended the concepts completely, and which lacked understanding in certain areas. Most teachers don't have access to the devices that even I have in class or worse, wouldn't even be permitted to use them if they did. We hear a lot about schools that are 1:1 iPads or Chromebooks, but the vast majority of them have little to no access to technology whatsoever. If a teacher has a smart phone, Plickers is a fantastic free tool for them to use.
I fully intend on using 3D Game Lab as our learning management system this year, but the district is trying to get teachers to use Edmodo. I've been assisting many in that endeavor. I love Edmodo, but the whole idea behind 3D Game Lab is to promote gamification. It's a terrific idea. I suppose I'd better think so as I spent a large sum of money on it for the year. I haven't even completed enough missions myself to begin to create my classes at this time though.
I've also been a fan of Zondle for a while and have finally set up classes to monitor student progress and have begun assigning games as homework. I hope to have students create their own games there and with GameSalad, Sploder, Gamepress, TinyTap, Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, Kodu, Gamefroot, etc. in the near future. My school has a subscription to Brainpop Spanish, Brainpop ESL, Brainpop, and Brainpop, Jr. that I am incredibly grateful for. The Game Center has been fantastic for my students already this year, and I love that it's free. I know that the full suite is incredibly expensive, but it really is great. Also, with the amounts of money that Districts waste on junk, I'm fine with the price. I'm also really happy with the Photoseed for Minecraft app for iOS that lets me hide student faces and add lots of Minecraft stuff to student pictures, so that I can share them on our @hijolepues class Twitter and Instagram until I can ask for parent consent to have photos and videos published publicly. My District needs a new release form rather than using the directory information form that even I would decline after reading. Photoseed for Minecraft is fun even if you don't have this issue; I think everyone in my classes would actually prefer to be Minecrafted.
We've also used some of my favorite tools ever, InfuseLearning and LiveSlide by Atlas Learning, a bit in class this year. I definitely prefer to use those and our class Celly (sometimes Chatzy or Google Docs for chatting) for gathering student responses, but we have had quite a bit of fun with the Space Race in Socrative. It's great for group competitions.
One last thing I'd like to mention is the music that we have listened to in class. I love all kinds of music and am passionate about it. I was just introduced to chiptune and the various subgenres of it over the past year. It is basically 8-bit synthesized music that to many of us reminds us of the video games and arcades from our younger days. I've become a fan of BitBurner from researching educators using Minecraft on Twitter (This is how I found him).
Next week, we will be studying landforms, and the students are excited to be using Minecraft to create and share them. This ought to be a lot of fun!
I feel like all this might be a tad too much (for a non-gamer like me anyway), but the kids are learning and are enjoying themselves an awful lot. I'm getting so many Minecraft pictures, cards, foldable "Creepers" and "Steves", and stuff that I don't have the heart to tell them that I've never spent more than 10 minutes playing it. I purchased the iOS app, but... meh. I'm really not into video games. It's all about them and their learning. Thanks for reading more of my rambling ad nauseum! I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how our class can better incorporate Minecraft and gamification in general in our classroom.
These are some of the resources that I will continue to be inspired by:
