For my entire teaching career, I have been walking down a path that leads to creating gritty, self-sufficient learners. Every year I reflect on my experiments thus far and try something new. For the past few years, those experiments have coalesced around a line of best fit that I call gamification.
Now I did not invent the term gamification, but in my grad school research, I have found that I use the term differently than anyone else I have come across in the literature or in the conversations that I have with other educators. To better explain my class, I started to write a blog post. As I was doing that, I realized the post was becoming too unwieldy, so I decided to start breaking the post apart into more well-defined segments.
What you will find on this page is a breakdown of all the different technologies, theories, and teaching strategies that I have assembled into a learning experience for my students. This is essentially the playbook to creating what I argue is the best learning experience a student can have. I know that is a bold statement, but I wouldn’t want to work on anything less.
What is Gamification?
Why Gamify?
How Can I Do This in My Classroom?
How a Website Works
I love talking about my gamified class! Whether it is a conference presentation, a county PD, or talking to teachers in a small group, someone wants to know how to do the same thing in their class. When I start talking about that, I inevitably have to explain how the internet works. Here is my oversimplified version of how a website works; this is intended to give a teacher the vocab they need to know to move forward with setting up a gamified class.
Quizlet
“Memorization” is not a dirty word in education. However, it should be technology (not teachers) helping students memorize facts. Honestly, Quizlet is probably better at it anyway. Read this post to find out why you should be using Quizlet in your classes and how I have implemented Quizlet in mine over the past three years.