My Gaming Project will be Focused on Just One Learning Activity

Okay, so I learned two things in Week 2 of my gaming class:

1. I am way over my head and do not have enough pockets of time to do this course justice.
2. Thinklink is a very interesting education tool that I need to explore further; essentially you take any image and turn it into an interactive experience for students. Hmmmm maybe the basis for my gaming project?

Also I must mention that Week 1 has a serious case of TMI- too much information! too much read and too many videos to watch. Two videos and two or three articles would be sufficient, the rest should go into an optional folder because as a "newbie" I am unsure what I should address and what I can safely ignore.

Since I have already decided that an entirely gamified course is way beyond my skills, abilities, creativity, allotted time and budget, I am going to try and focus on gamifying just one activity.  My computer fundamentals students need to learn how to search the web efficiently, finding the best sources in the shortest amount of time; I think this learning activity can be turned into a game that will make achieving the objectives more engaging for them.

The most useful resource in our course that I found to help me begin my project is the gamification chart which I think is a good starting point because it is simple enough to get me thinking about parts of my project.

Gamification Chart

Finally, I will need to look more closely at ways to assess my project without reading an entire book on the topic! Let's see what Week 2 brings...

Turn Images into Interactive Lessons with ThingLink

Well, the course wraps up this week and I most definitely fell behind in creating my SCVNGER project, I did, however, get it on paper and have the general idea of what I plan to do so I will get 'er done eventually. One thing that I did accomplish was to to make a ThingLink which I would still like to improve with audio and that's another task that I will get done eventually :)

ThingLink is a website I came across during my Game Elements 4 Learning class that I took during the summer of 2013. It was an excellent class because I could set my own learning goals and move at my own pace over the course of a month. I did not delve too deeply into the course but I did read much of the handouts provided and picked up a few ideas and tools for my students and for faculty.

This website is a great resource for a flipped classroom. You will notice that as you point to each video related resource logo in my creation, you can click on the URL to the resource and it will take you to the website where you can learn about the tool. I plan to add a short audio blurb about each tool so faculty will know which tool might fit their needs. Then the Office of Innovations can use this to inform our faculty about some of the resources supported by Innovations in Teaching & Learning.


So take any picture, any picture at all, and you can make it interactive just by adding what they call "tags"-try it OR have your students try it as an assignment. You can browse for many more examples to get some ideas. Also here are some that could be used by elementary students, these were created by my classmate-she is very clever, huh?

Clara’s Thinglinks

ABC Phonics Poster

My Farm

Solar System

Can you believe that July is almost over and for those of us in education, August will be super busy; I will be doing several faculty in-service workshops. But that means I should have several new topics of interest to my readers by the start of the fall semester!

Making the Paradigm Shift

Since last week was "Week 0" in our Game Elements for Learning (#GE4L) MOOC, this is "Week 1" when we will start getting into the real course content. I have already learned quite a bit about how the typical course, in any discipline really, could be more interesting by incorporating elements of gaming. For example, students might choose from a variety of "quests" and achieve new levels and accumulate experience points in...anything. My favorite part of the class so far though is Jane McGonigal's TedTalk which I highly recommend as motivation and understanding for making the paradigm shift from traditional learning to game-based learning.

Game Elements for Learning

Last week I began following the Faculty eCommons, this week I received an email with information about a MOOC that was just starting, Game Elements for Learning.

Since I usually try to take some kind of professional development course in the summer, I registered for this one on a whim. I believe strongly that we can do a much better job of reaching students and helping them to develop their special talents and be successful people as well as successful students so I am open to trying anything that might help them succeed. This will be my second MOOC, if you recall last fall I took the BlendKit 2012 course so that I could experience what my hybrid developing faculty would experience. Like that MOOC this online course is free and pretty much self-paced.

Research is showing us that games are a good way to learn most anything and many teachers are taking that to the next level see The 5 Hidden Powers of Gaming for Learning for some examples or visit the master of gaming for learning himself, Marc Prensky, or his site http://games2train.com/

At minimum, I can get some new ideas to share with online and hybrid faculty or for improving my own online course. Actually I have already taken one idea from the course! The instructors asked us to introduce ourselves by creating an avatar and share our blog/twitter/whatever social networking links so we can get to know each other. PERFECT! Why don't I have my students create an avatar? They are free and easy to create and will probably make our introductory discussion much more fun and engaging. Oops, now I will have to work on the rest of the course...I'll be back.