Speaker 1: Hi everyone, today I'm here to help you enhance students' learning and engagement with gamification. I'm going to walk you through how to use gamification in your classroom, plus at the end of the video we have a little something for you guys to use in your lessons to help kick-start this gamification adventure. If you're new here, I'm Sarah from Inconew, here to provide you with edtech tips and tricks for your classroom. If this sounds like something you're interested in, help us both out and hit that subscribe button. Now let's get into the main gamification elements and how to add them into your classroom. Each game is different, every classroom is different, and every student is different. So before choosing which gamification elements you want to add into your classroom, survey your students. Find out which games they like to play and which games make them totally lose track of time. That way you can add elements from those games and implement them into your class, and you already know students are going to love having them in the classroom. For example, if your students love Minecraft, you'll want to implement aspects that allow students to be creative and choose their own path. Minecraft allows students to create anything they want, move around in one platform. So one way that you can do this in your classroom is implementing a point system and allowing students, giving them different opportunities to earn points, and giving them a whole bunch of choices on what to do with those points once they've accumulated enough. There are endless ways and opportunities to add gamification into your class, but today we're just going to cover the four most popular. And the good news is, you can pick and choose. You can keep it simple, stay surface level, or deep dive into any of these aspects. Do what fits best for your classroom. Start out easy with a point system and a student leaderboard. So you can turn those daily activities into student progress boards, or you can take it a couple steps further and completely change your grading system. The first level of this is just doing a simple participation board. Points can just be based off student participation, then totaled up and put into a leaderboard. You can display your leaderboard as a slide in your presentation with PowerPoint or Google. You can put it on your Google Classroom banner, or if you're in the physical classroom, just throw it up on a bulletin board. If your classroom isn't really ready for the competition that leaderboards have, you can always assign code names to your students. That way their identity is hidden, plus it adds a little bit of intrigue and mystery. Take it up one level, because just participation points is pretty minimum. So you can add in different activities throughout class for different opportunities for students to earn points, and then you can throw that up on the leaderboard as well. And once a certain number of points is accumulated, students can level up and get a reward. Rewards can be individual, like earning a free time or extra credit, or students can pool their points together as a class to earn a dance party or maybe a pizza party. Providing students with the opportunity to have a lot of different ways to earn points is important, so make sure you have a variety of activities for students to earn these points, because every student can play the game a little bit differently. Okay, now that third level. Turn all of these points into a grading system. So some teachers have actually used this point system as their grades. This way it highlights the importance of progress and making sure that students are earning points towards an A, instead of the look of every time having points taken away and moving farther and farther away from an A. So it's just kind of a shift of perspective. Regardless of how far you want to lean into this classroom leaderboard, no matter what, it's a great way to get students motivated and involved in their own learning objectives. We can also add badge elements into the classroom. Many different games provide the opportunity for different levels or badges to be earned once a gamer masters a certain skill. In the same way, we can incorporate that into the classroom to recognize students' accomplishments and their mastery. So once students have mastered a certain skill or concept, we can create and give them a new badge or it can unlock the next badge or badge level. That way it shows that they have mastered that skill. These badges can then be displayed on a bulletin board or leaderboard like we mentioned before. They can be combined with your point system leaderboard. That way everyone can see, everyone can cheer each other on, have a little bit of camaraderie, or a little bit of competition. You can also give out these badges digitally and put them on students' profile on your LMS. Students can also help you to create these badges. They often have a lot of good ideas, they're pretty creative, and this gives them the opportunity to practice goal-setting. Students can go ahead and create their badge, determine what is needed to earn that badge. Alice Keeler has a great short tutorial on how students can create their own badges that I've linked down below. Next, we can create quests or game-like tasks into the classroom. These are all really fun and there's lots of different ways that you can implement it. One idea is to do a scavenger hunt or a hidden task. Scavenger hunts are always really fun to add into the classroom and it's gamification already right there. For this, you could use it as an assignment to have students search for a particular information in a reading to make sure that they fully understand and they read what they were supposed to. For these hidden tasks, let's say if a certain achievement is made and students are on a level 5, maybe at the end of a quiz there is a bonus question that can be unlocked for the level 5-ers to answer and earn some bonus points. This can be done all right through a Google Forms with a password-protected question. Idea number two here is quest lines. So similar to a role-playing game which allows gamers to choose their path and has different outcomes based on their choice, we can also give this opportunity to students. So for example, they can choose their own adventure for a book report. So you can give them the option or the choice to choose fiction or nonfiction and then broken down into genre and sub-genre after that for them to choose. Idea number three here is a current event task or questions. So students can be on the hunt for particular information on a current event or something that's going on in your subjects community. So students are on this hunt because maybe every day you ask a question on this topic so that students can earn a little bit of extra points. You can even add in bonus points or bonus questions to questions that you post in an LMS or on social media and if students answer those on those other sites they can also earn some bonus points. Then at the end of your semester or the end of the year, the student with the highest amount of points can get a reward. Idea number four here is mission QR codes. So you can go ahead and place or hide some QR codes around the school grounds to get students outside of the classroom learning a little bit or doing this learning when they're not in your classroom. It continues on that learning progress and every time they scan a QR code it's a different digital activity or game or something for them to learn. So you guys have to remember that we want these activities to be really fun but also doable for students. It's not gonna have any effect if they're too simple and too easy and students get bored and don't want to do it or they're too hard and they become too anxious to even play in the first place. Our goal is to have students be inspired to take on a new challenge when they play these games and different activities. The last way that we have for you guys to add gamification into the classroom in this video today is with classic or digital games. So we are getting a little bit into game-based learning territory here so let me know if you specifically want a video just on game-based learning. We can use classic and digital games in the classroom to help continue students practice and learning like vocab bingo or Yahtzee or any of the digital games like bamboozle, fun brain, Minecraft for education or any of the other digital games that you find online can totally be used. Another game that you guys can play is the Wikipedia link game. So this is going to help students understand the connection between different things. So in your leaderboard maybe you choose the top student to pick two random topics. Then students need to go on Wikipedia and connect in the fewest links possible how one topic gets to the other. So you can have students write out a sentence explaining how one link leads to the next link so that you know they're not just aimlessly clicking around Wikipedia. At the beginning of the video I did promise you guys something you can use to help kick-start this gamification adventure in your classroom and that's actually going to be a PowerPoint template that's linked down below with a whole bunch of different ideas that we mentioned in this video plus a couple more. So go ahead and download that in the link below. With all these helpful tips I hope that you guys have as much fun adding gamification into your classroom as your students have participating in it. There are many different opportunities and ways to do it so go ahead and have fun and do what works for your classroom. Hopefully you'll have more engaged, motivated and confident students after all of this.