Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about ed tech tools to gamify learning. I have a whole plethora of different game tools to show you. So it's really going to be just full bore, learn about all kinds of fun, engaging games that you can play with your students, and also talk about ways that you can do things like gamify your entire class. So I want to start here first by talking about what it means to gamify learning. Know when I first heard about gamifying learning, you know, initially what comes to mind is this idea that you're playing games in class, right? And of course, gamifying learning can mean playing games in class, but it also can mean that you are taking elements of your class that might not typically be a game, say your day-to-day activities, group work, even just your behavior management system, and you are gamifying that. So essentially you're turning it into a big game. I'm going to start today by looking at how we can use tech tools to play more traditional type games that we might think of. Then I'll also move into looking at some specific programs that are built just to play games in and to have some game-based learning. Then we'll also move into looking at some personalized learning game-based platforms where you can essentially set students up to work on their own, learn through their personalized path, and play an engrossing, engaging game that they would be playing conceivably for the whole year. There's also a field that is growing. You wouldn't be surprised to hear, I'm sure, of games that really emulate video game type experiences for students. And I'm going to show you one that was on Common Sense's top list for tech tools for the year, actually, where students are essentially fully immersed in a game to learn about ancient Egypt, and it was actually designed by the people who made Assassin's Creed, but it's an educational game. So I'll show you that. We'll talk about digital breakout games. And then I'll close out today by showing you how you could use some digital tools to gamify your entire class, where you actually have essentially your whole class is a role-playing game for the entire year, where you're assigning experience points and gold, and students get to build a character for the whole year and things like that. Last week, what I talked about was some different models for blended learning. And I actually want to make a connection here to today's show, because some of the different games that I'm going to be talking about might be more appropriate to do as a whole group. And so this would be in this model, if you're in blended learning, which I know a lot of people are doing right now, where you're kind of trying to emulate what a regular in-person class would be. You are just proceeding through a lesson in a linear, vertical fashion. In the case of blended learning, you might have some students who are coming to that class remotely, while you also have some students in class physically. There's also the model that I talked about last week of stations-based horizontal planning, where you are building stations and you're having students doing different activities in those stations. The teacher in that case could potentially be moving around to those different stations or kind of parked at one station doing small group instruction. I talked last week about some of the different models for what this could look like in terms of groupings and things like that. And so one of the types of games that I will also be showing will be more like these types of games. And in fact, I'm going to show Prodigy a little bit more today. These personalized learning, adaptive learning games that students can play on their own. Another model that I showed, which is also just, this is a great blended learning model in general, does not have to be just for blended learning or it could be for just any learning model. This particular model would have some students working on some self-paced work and then some other students would be getting pulled potentially into a group or coming over to you to get some support. And so a lot of these self-paced games will work really well if you're having students in this type of situation too. I'm going to start by showing you some awesome game templates that you can get from Slidesmania. Slidesmania puts out all these awesome templates that you can use for, you know, kind of traditional type games that we would play with students, trivia games, things like that. But whereas before you might've had to go build your own Jeopardy board, you don't have to do that. She has all these awesome templates, you know, things like two trues and a lie. She has a, well, actually this one up here is brand new. This trivia game template that you can fully customize and make into your own. Flowcabulary. I highly recommend that you get a trial. One of my favorite games to play with students is the Flowcabulary vocab game. The idea, if you're not familiar with Flowcabulary, they have these really engaging videos. The way that I would play this game is by either teaming them up, have an individual whiteboard, and what they would be doing is they would be writing the answers on their whiteboard as they show up on the screen. And then I'm managing it by essentially making sure that everybody has the correct answer and then helping us move through the game. Here, what this is, is it's a build a beat game. So as students are playing it and it's going to start playing some music. As you're playing the game, students show the answers. So I make it a whole thing where I say one, two, three, show me, and every kid has to show their answer on their mini whiteboard. Again, majority of us get it right. Then we're going to drag the correct answer in and keep going as we build this beat and kids are all like dancing and things like that. Another one that you can do with students, you can also get this program for free. Quizlet is a really easy way to have students make their own flashcards to review, but you can also build these flashcard sets, essentially, that students can study. They can also play games and compete with each other. So they have different games that, like this gravity one, very popular, where basically what students are doing is as these are coming down, they're going to be answering the question. And then as they fall, then they're losing points. They get up on a leaderboard, they can play against each other. Typing is super important for students as they're incredibly important foundational technology skill. Typing club is awesome for this also free and you can have students progress through all these different lessons, you know, and then they have these little fun games that they would be playing as they are typing. Next, this is a program called Breakout EDU. Breakout games have traditionally actually were done with a kit. You can still get a kit where you actually have a physical breakout room kit. Breakout EDU, definitely the program that you want to check out for breakout room kits. Breakout EDU also has digital kits. So you can see on Breakout EDU that they have all these different subjects and you can also choose if the game is digital or a kit. This is actually a faculty meeting. This is supposed to be for team building for teacher PD. You know, you would essentially assign people a team. And then they would be breaking out of their room by opening these different locks, right? And so each lock has a different puzzle. They're all intended to be, you know, sort of difficult here. You like look at, for example, this page and you see here, you see how you have these different people, right, who are speaking and each of these is supposed to represent a different opinion essentially that they are expressing, right, about a student. And then that has been put into this, this word. We have some of these different comments are shown with slightly larger words. So engage, which is blue, that's the bigger word, fun, which is slightly smaller. So that's the next in order. So that's purple. And then we have challenging in red for the next level. So that opened that lock. So you can see how each of these has these different locks that you would be opening and some of them are pretty tricky and they have all these obviously for academic content here. Quiz is, is another very popular quiz game. If you're familiar with a program like Kahoot, similar to Kahoot, you can start in quizzes by going here to quiz, go to create, you can make your own quiz. Okay. That's one option. You can also look and see what's already been made. So you would open it and then you can either assign it to be something that's live or you can assign it to be homework. So here I'll do a live quiz. We're going to do, I'll do class at pace here. We'll start this quiz. They will do that by going joinmyquiz.com. Then they will enter a class code. This game we have now students coming in. I see somebody else came in to play and we're going to start the game. Gimkit is also a multiple choice fill in the blank style game, except Gimkit has a much more built out game inside of a game component. The way Gimkit works is that you build a kit. A kit is just basically a set of questions. Let's say for example, that you're going to do a geography lesson. You are going to here have students answering different questions about different geography. So what you will do is add these questions and then those questions will come in. There'll be a part of your kit. You can click finish kit. Then what you can do here is go play live. You'll have all these different options for different types of games that you can play. You can see that you can start with all these different settings, enter the class code. Here you can see that on the student end that I have just a basic question. So here there's a question that I am going to be answering on this side. And then on the teacher end, I can see all my students, right? All my students are coming in. And as my students are coming in, obviously I can see their names here and I can start to see their progress through the game as well. So if you get them correct, then you're going to start to accrue cash. You can go in and you can shop for things. So if you go to the shop, you'll see that there are things here, upgrades that you can make. Games in game kit have different types of rules where you can do different things like sabotage other people. You know, there's teams like humans and zombies and they're trying, they're attacking each other and restoring each other's points. So that's what I mean by game within a game. Blue kit is also a game within a game. It's continuous. So students are not just logging in with a single login and then like losing their progress. They can build throughout the whole year and they get to collect different items and power ups and things like that. Just like game kit as well. Blue kit has all these different game types that you can play. This by the way is a student dashboard where you can see how they can see cash that they've won from previous games, all this stuff about, you know, all of their different stats over time. Okay. So here we see, we have a power up. So like this power up that I have, right, it's just like Mario cart. So I can hit that when I am back, you know, on, then I can choose, Ooh, sorry, who's winning? Ooh, sorry, winner. I'm going to knock you back. I can go to the market and I can purchase things. So I, you know, this is something that's going to stay with me and you know, I keep all of this in my account as a student and you can buy these different blukes that you continue to keep over the course, you know, of the, the whole school year, ST math is not traditionally a game per se. What it is, is really a personalized learning platform where you can either assign students to practice math on a personal path so that they are practicing skills that you need them to practice, or you can set up what's called a class path where essentially, you know, you have them doing work that is on their level. Students just have to figure out how to do things. And so the idea is that they're building conceptual understanding of math. Psychology is another math game that is, it's a adaptive math game. That's essentially like a role-playing game. So if you've played Zelda when you were a kid, has a very similar look to that. And what you do here is you can set as the teacher, certain skills that you want students to practice in this game. And then it's this whole role-playing type environment where students are, you know, basically playing a character. They can even choose their avatar. This part of the game, this is in the beginning of the game where they choose a pet that's going to be their companion. And then the way that pretty much everything works in the game is that they have these different battles and things like that. In these battles, they're going to be practicing skills. What you're going to do is essentially attack or take hits, things like that, as you are playing the game. This is kind of another area where games are going. I mentioned this in the beginning where it's actually really video game style games that are educational. The last one that I want to show you here before I show you common sense is class craft. Class craft is a gamification tool that's going to allow you to do gamification with elements of your class that are not necessarily game-based. The general idea is that you're going to have all your students here. These students will basically be accruing all these different points over the course of the year. You can assign experience points. So the way that that would work, you know, is that, let's see, and you can set these up to be fully customizable. And then they also all have individual powers that they can turn on, that they can use to support teammates. You can also do things like create quests. They have prebuilt quests, and then they also have quests that you can essentially make. In addition to quests, they also have different things like boss battles. So boss battle allows you to preset questions, and then you can match teams up, and it's like a formative assessment tool where they're answering questions and accruing points for that. Last thing that I want to show you here is common sense. They have incredible reviews. So if you go to EdTech Reviews on Common Sense, it's a great place to find out about new tools. So if you search games, you'll see that it has things, for example, like most engaging games in class. They have different subjects, so you could search, you know, I know some people were asking for math-specific games. You can look for that. It'll pull up lists. And then you can get reviews of them. You can see how much they cost. You can see whether they're for tablets, for, you know, if they're web-based. All right, everybody, thank you so much for coming to the show today. Really appreciate it.