This was an interesting week in my course. We hit on areas that are near and dear to my work. First off, the idea of “gamifying” education. The last course I took at Marlboro College was all about this, and I have been continuing to find ways to incorporate the best aspects of gaming into teaching and learning.
Here are a few things I’ve created along those lines:
A “breakout” type of game where students have to persevere in finding information and solving tech problems (for example, fixing a misspelled URL) in order to continue. For this, I used response validation and custom feedback in a Google Forms quiz.
A fake operating system that gets students who only know Chromebooks to think about how files and applications work on other devices. Here, I used SVG images with clickable regions to emulate the OS.
A game where the user has to retrace their steps backwards to return to staring points. This was my first project in the previous course and I have yet to try it with students because it still needs work. But the idea is to build algebra equation solving skills by getting students to think about “undoing” steps.
The other major topic this week was digital citizenship. This comes at a time when my colleagues and I are working on #digcit for the schools in our district. I think we’ve made a good start and we will be able to reach all teachers.
We actually kicked off the year with a #digcitcommit Flipgrid, but I made a new pledge this week (typo and all!):
1 Across 