I recently hosted a webinar with Greg Toppo from USA Today, who wrote the book The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. He discussed the power of gamification in the classroom and shared lots of terrific resources.
Greg spoke about the idea of “hard fun.” Gaming is often about challenging yourself and great education games are often engaging, engrossing and tough. The productive struggle may be the most powerful learning catalyst. During the webinar, Monique Choyce from LAUSD described the way that students are treating in-text assessments, which they encounter while reading on LightSail, in a game-like fashion. Students are shown their increases in Lexile measure each day, and they are seeing these increases as earned “points.” This surprising outcome is a great reminder that gamification doesn’t always look like a game, and that student motivation from gamification can be surprisingly powerful.
You can watch the entire webinar here!
cross posted at classtechtips.com
Monica Burns is a fifth grade teacher in a 1:1 iPad classroom. Visit her website at classtechtips.com for creative education technology tips and technology lesson plans aligned to the Common Core Standards.
