Beginning Gamification with Classcraft

My goal in gamifying our blended learning rotation during reading groups is to increase motivation and engagement when students are working independently. Since students are working on their own, and not in a whole group setting, I was in need of a sophisticated gamification app to both deliver online content and assess student learning. 

While I like the idea of being able to customize game settings to best meet the unique needs of my learners, I really needed an app that is easy to use for a complete novice in the gaming world (that’s me!). Classcraft is a perfect fit. It’s really great, guys! I can easily customize settings for my class, and it has online support via chat, community forums, and all kids of video tutorials. All those resources made it really simple to get things all set up for my class. 

Basic Features

I created accounts for my students and assigned teams in only about 10 minutes. Once that is done, individual students are able to create their own character. Student teams work together to gain points, protect one another from possible negative events, and ultimately, level up in the game. This collaborative aspect of the game provides an extra layer of motivation through peer accountability. As the gamemaster, I can assign students or teams points or damage based on their class behavior, very much like Class Dojo. All this is free for teachers! 

Teachers can view student profiles and add points from
 a computer or smartphone. 

Delivering Lessons and Assessments 

It gets better! What I’m really excited about is quests. I decided to pay for a premium account so that I would have access to this feature. Quests are a series of lessons and tasks that I create for my students. This is how I deliver online lessons and assessments. Each task is accompanied with a story, where I write a narrative of what is happening in our fictional world of the game, and what characters must do to complete the quest and win. 

This map outlines the seven tasks students must finish to complete the quest.

As students work their way through each task, they reveal a new part of the map we are playing through and earn rewards for their character and team. When students earn enough points, they level up, making their character more powerful and acquiring new skills. Students can also use the gold pieces they have earned to get a pet for their character or buy new accessories to make their characters look extra awesome. 

Personalized Learning 

Another great feature for quests is that I can personalize learning for my students. Within each quest, I can create multiple paths for students to reach success. If Student A is completing tasks well, she can continue on the normal path, or even choose a more challenging path. When Student B shows that he has not mastered a skill, I can set up the quest so that he automatically follows a separate path to receive reteaching and extra practice before progressing to new skills. How great is that!? 

After a bit more practice, I plan to start creating quests with these more complex paths to personalize student learning. Here is my first attempt. The yellow path is the most direct route and requires basic mastery of skills. The red detour includes reteaching and remediation activities, while the purple detour challenges students to apply their learning in new ways. 

This map shows multiple learning paths for success. 

Initial Implementation

We have been using Classcraft in our reading groups for about two weeks now and we LOVE it! My students are so engaged and motivated. When students have failed at a task, they have asked to try again so that they can further develop their character. They have even asked if they can "play" Classcraft at home. Wow!! This is winning!

My next goal is to maintain this motivation after the honeymoon phase wears off. I can’t wait to see how my students learn and grow using gamification! 

Leveling Up: Gamifying Instruction to Increase Engagement

I told my students that my goal for 2018 is to have fun. I stopped straightening my hair, my husband and I set up a 15 foot trampoline in our family room for our kids (no really, we did that), and I committed to gamifying part of our instructional day. Let the fun begin!

Gamification Basics

I was introduced to the concept of gamification during my graduate course work last semester. Gamification is a fancy term that basically means using game design principles in a non-gaming context. It can be as straightforward as transforming learning activities into games or a more subtle application of game design principles to learning tasks. Game design principles include concepts like cooperation, competition, point scoring, genuine challenges, and character development.

Gamifying your classroom can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. Some teachers choose to make their own game for their classroom in order to customize features including backstory, characters, rules, and objectives. At the same time there are many user-friendly apps that you may already use in your classroom:

• Kahoot A quizzing app allowing students to compete against classmates when answering questions.
• Quizizz A quizzing app that can be teacher or student paced.
• Class Dojo An app focused on building positive classroom community through teacher feedback.

Student Benefits

Playing games is part of our culture, and students can be highly motivated by game-based learning opportunities. Honestly, not of all my students are motivated by the grades they earn, but most are willing to spend hours working to beat a challenging level in their favorite video game. Pairing student motivation related to game playing along with learning tasks has the potential to increase student engagement.

Like with coding, failure in gaming does not usually result in immediate frustration like we so often see when our students are given a challenging educational task. In gaming, failure is an opportunity to gain immediate feedback on a mistake and try again. This type of growth mindset goes a long way in helping students develop perseverance and problem solving skills. If incorporating game design into learning tasks helps my students view challenging academic tasks in this way, then I’m all for it!

My Goal

My goal for this grading period is gamifying the blended learning portion of my reading groups.

I use a blended learning model for my guided reading groups because I want to maximize student learning when they are working independently. Last year, I created online lessons for students to complete independently. When we met face to face, I would provide instruction to further their progress based on their achievement so far. We experienced so many benefits of blended learning, and I found that my students were highly motivated to complete their online lessons at first because it was something new for them. There were also excited to have the responsibility of working independently on their Chromebooks. Unfortunately, when the initial excitement wore off, some students tended to stall out, and they lost interest in making progress.

My answer to that problem is using gamification to prolong student motivation and engagement while working independently. I’m looking forward to trying this with my students, and I’ll be sharing our experience in the coming weeks!

If you’re interested in learning more about gamification, watch this interview with gamification guru James Paul Gee. He makes some great points about teaching to meet the needs of today’s students.

Blended Learning & Math Workshop

We are wrapping up quarter one and I could not be more pleased with our math workshop.One of my personal goals for this year was to begin math workshop with my students and eventually incorporate blended learning. We are well on our way, and I’m pretty convinced that I never want to teach whole group math again!

Logistics

The original plan for math workshop was to have students work with a teacher each day (either myself or my co-teacher) and rotate through three other stations. With 33 students, we felt like we were losing too much time in transitions. To solve that problem, we decided to simply list independent tasks to complete for the day and allow students work through the daily list from their seats.

An added benefit to this update is that our groups are much more fluid. We are not confined to a timed schedule so that all students have equal time for each task.  If one group of students only needs a few minutes of review, then we can spend more time with students who need more time with us. When a student missed days instruction due to illness, we were able to keep him with a teacher for two rotations and skip independent work for that day.

We typically group in one of three ways. First, we have our general math groups based on how quickly students typically master math content. We also group students according to specific skill data from pretests and quick checks. Finally, we sometimes group students so that they have a partner to work with independently. Partners are chosen so that students who need coaching are paired with a peer who can provide support while working away from the teacher.

Heading Toward Blended Learning

We have been using our Chromebooks to practice math skills during independent time through xtramath and iXL all along, but last week we took a major step toward blended learning in our math workshop. The difference between blended learning and tech integration is the connection between online learning and face-to-face learning. Initially, we integrated technology to allow students to practice math facts and review previously taught content. Now, however, we are able to connect our online learning content directly to our small group lessons.

With the use of my new document camera provided by a grant through Donor’s Choose, I started creating simple teaching videos for my students who are working independently. So far the videos I have created provide additional guided practice for my students. I work through a series of problems while my students follow along by solving problems with me. The connection between online learning and face-to-face learning is strengthened when we use data to determine student needs and respond accordingly.

This student is practicing mixed number and improper fraction conversions.

I saw a handful of benefits last week including students working at their own pace- pausing and replaying the video as often as they needed. Students could also choose to work with me on the video, or pause and solve the problem, then watch it to check their work. Looking forward, I’m really excited about a few added benefits like students being able to access these teaching videos from home. Parents will be able to see how we are practicing in class and better support their learners. Also, students who are absent can review material from home, or after they return during independent time, meaning they miss less instruction.

Every student said that they enjoyed practicing through video. They commented that it was like working one-on-one with the teacher because other students did not distract them. They also commented that they liked working at their own pace. Some students said that they liked not feeling rushed, while others said they appreciated that they could practice independently when they no longer needed help. Many of my students challenged themselves to solve problems on their own, and they felt so accomplished because they could see their progress.

A Moment of Perfection

My co-teacher and I were amazed at the efficiency of our math block after just one day of incorporating teaching videos with our students.

We used a quick check to determine which students needed more support with certain skills. Some students didn’t meet with a teacher at all that day because they didn’t need to. All the other students had the opportunity to work on the same skill in three different ways: face-to-face with a teacher, blended learning through videos, and digital visual models through iXL.

These learners are using visual models online through iXL.

She has paused the teaching video to take a moment to
think about how to solve the next problem. 

Here's the most amazing thing. The group that I met with second had already worked through the teaching videos before I was ready to work with them. I asked them to solve two quick problems when they came to me, and only two of the seven students in that group still needed my face-to-face help. Five students met proficiency from the digital practice and self-reflection they participated in online. Automatically, my group of seven was reduced to two, and those kiddos were able to have all my attention for intense intervention.

Seriously, I’m never going back to whole-group teaching during my math block. While we have a lot of room to grow in the variety of online content we provide for our students, we are certainly heading in the right direction!

Increasing Accessibility with Google Read and Write

Misty is our occupational therapist. In her role, she helps our students with disabilities in a variety of ways. She provides sensory regulation support such as exercises, weighted vests, and focusing techniques. She helps student develop fine motor skills, and also provides flexible seating options like wiggle cushions and yoga balls for students needing movement.

Misty also provides technology support for our students with disabilities to make our standards-based curriculum more accessible.

With an increase in accessibility to the web, our students are becoming extreme consumers of content. They can connect to the web and easily read or watch infinite sources of information. While many teachers are beginning to rely more on digital texts, there is a great extension for Google Chrome that can make reading and writing more accessible for our students with special needs.

I’ve been using Google Read and Write for the last few years with my students. Until recently, I was only using the basic reading and writing features. After chatting with Misty, though, I’ve learned some other great features of this extension that will be so helpful for my students.

Reading

In its simplest form, Google Read and Write will read any web-based text aloud. You can even control the rate at which it reads. Readers just click where they want to start reading, press the play button on the toolbar, and the program will highlight each sentence as it reads. Students can pause or replay at anytime.

Google Read and Write also has a tool called the Screenshot Reader. It’s intention is to read any text on a student’s screen once they draw a box around it. This allows students to access text in images, PDFs, and online textbooks. Misty has been working to get this feature available for our students, but due to a glitch on our end, we are unable to use it at this time. Instead, Misty has been using Snapverter to convert PDFs into a format that will work with Google Read and Write. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of time to do all the converting for students, so we are still hoping to get Screenshot Reader to work soon.

The read aloud feature is such a powerful tool for students who struggle with reading because they can still access online text, even when a teacher is unavailable to read aloud to them. This tool allows students to build independence and gain confidence in their online reading comprehension.

Writing

It also provides word prediction for writing. Students who are using this feature can begin to type words, and the extension will automatically provide word choices for the students. This is especially helpful for students who struggle with spelling.

Google Read and Write predicting words

Google Read and Write also has a speech-to-text tool, allowing students to use a microphone to create written text by simply speaking. The tool automatically converts the speech into text, including punctuation. Students can stop at any time and use the reading tool to check their work.

"I like using [the speech tool] because it helps me get ideas
out. When I write, my words get stuck sometimes."

So Much More

Google Read and Write also has some great research tools. While reading online, students can highlight text that they find important. When finished, students can choose to collect their highlights. This feature pulls all of the highlighted text into a new Google Doc. If the reader chose to highlight in various colors, perhaps to signify which text they found the information in or what main idea the information supports, then Google Read and Write will sort the highlights by color in the Google Doc. How awesome is that?

One other feature that I just learned about is Voice Notes. It’s similar to making comments in a Google Doc. Rather than typing a comment or note, the user can leave an verbal note. Instead of translating into text, Voice Notes remain in audio format, allowing the listener to easily hear comments and notes. I really like the idea of this feature for leaving specific feedback for my students. In the past I sometimes hesitate to write comments for some of my students because I know they will struggle to read my feedback. Voice Notes solves that problem. Students can even respond with their own voice note to form a running conversation of questions or comments.

As you can imagine, these features of Google Read and Write are a game changer for my students with disabilities. They can access text online and write much more fluently. Organizing notes from research is quick and effortless, and students can understand teacher feedback through voice notes. What a great tool!

Technology and Differentiation: Meeting Instructional Needs

This is my teammate, Toby. One of the things that most impresses me about his teaching style is that he is always willing to try something new to make his classroom run smoother. He is forever challenging his fourth graders to think critically and flexibly. Over the past year, he has discovered a really smart way to use technology to better meet the needs of his students.

Our fourth graders review prerequisites and previously taught skills for both math and language arts each day. Typically, students practice independently and then review with the whole class. This sort of repetitive practice allows students to maintain their math and language skills. As you can imagine, some students need more support than others with these skills. While some kids are truly reviewing previously mastered content, others need to be retaught. This is difficult to do in only about ten minutes in each subject, so Toby thought of a new way to review with his class.

Differentiation Through Technology

Toby's students have about 30 minutes of independent work time each day during math. During that time, they are given a variety of review tasks to complete including correcting their math and language review, practicing multiplication math facts with Xtramath, and reviewing recent math skills through IXL. During this independent time, Toby is using technology to meet the needs of his students.

Toby takes about ten minutes a day during his prep to record himself using his document camera. He solves each math problem and reviews the language concepts for the day. Students who need to simply check their work access his Youtube video through Google Classroom and follow along. They can pause it to correct their own work or watch parts multiple times to ensure they understand each question. They can also access these videos from home to review with their parents before the weekly quiz.

Students are also encouraged to use the comment feature on Youtube to ask questions about problems they do not understand. This helps Toby know who may need more help face-to-face. This year he is also thinking about encouraging students to answer the questions that their peers asked through comments, allowing students to help one another as well.

While the majority of the class is reviewing online, Toby is able to work with a small group of students and reteach the skills they are struggling with the most. He sees an average of about 8 students each day for intense reteaching. At times, students choose if they need help, and other times he calls up specific students.

The major drawback of this system, according to Toby, is that he must be very conscious of each student’s progress so that students don’t slip through the cracks. To do this he uses weekly quiz results and weekly reports through IXL to determine who needs help with specific skills.

The benefit of his system is that he can meet each student’s specific needs, while also promoting independence. He has essentially used technology to clone himself and teach two groups at once, providing differentiated instruction to meet the needs of his students. How cool is that? Thanks for sharing this great idea, Toby!

Starting Math Workshop

One of my personal goals for this school year is to transition to a math workshop model. As much as possible, my co-teacher and I try to teach math in smaller groups for a number of reasons.

First, we have an inclusion classroom, so we have a wide range of needs. Teaching in small(er) groups allows us to work more closely with each student. We are able to gain a clear idea of the skills each student has mastered, and who needs more support. That data helps us to differentiate our instruction, making sure all students are progressing toward our objectives.

Next, we have a large class. Right now, we have 31 students and 2 teachers. Working in smaller groups ensures students are engaged and on task. Moreover, our time is much more efficient because there are usually fewer distractions.

With our 31 students we can split the class to parallel teach (teach the same lesson at the same time) and each have about 15 kiddos, but we don’t really feel like we experience the benefits of small group instruction with such a large group. We also use alternative grouping, where one teacher leads a whole group lesson, while the other teacher teaches a small group of 5-6 kids. Unfortunately, we still have a very large group of students with one teacher, and they are not benefiting from small group instruction.

Last year we sort of stumbled into a grouping method that finally seemed to make a difference. Half of our students would work independently on a review task, assessment, or project while my co-teacher and I would split the remaining students, effectively allowing us each to have a quarter of our total students for small group instruction. We could also set up 3 rotations, allowing each teacher to meet with a sixth of the class. After replicating this grouping system as often as we could, we started to have serious discussions about making this a regular part of our future teaching. This year, we are intentionally moving toward a math workshop model for our instruction in order to take advantage of these small group possibilities.

Math Workshop Explained

Math workshop generally consists of a short mini lesson for the whole class and centers or stations in which students work independently for a time and then receive small group instruction with the teacher. The blog post Differentiate Math Instruction with M.A.T.H Workshop at The Core Inspiration is a great explanation of the different aspects of math workshop. I found it helpful in thinking through how I might create meaningful work for my students when they are working on their own.

One of the main reasons I hadn’t tried math workshop in the past is because the idea of creating multiple center activities and directions for students every day seems so overwhelming. Not only that, but our students need consistency. Learning a new math game or trying a new activity every few days would be a disaster. What I like realized after reading various blogs is that consistency can be a part of math workshop, and thanks to our technology resources, it doesn’t need to require excessive material preparation.

Here’s a list of activities I’m planning to use for independent work to start off this year:

• Multiplication fact fluency with Xtramath or multiplication partner game
• Independent skill review and practice with IXL
• Partner skill review and coaching with paper and pencil worksheets
• Number work (building number sense with “number of the day” type activities)
• Assessments including pretests, quick checks, and tests

Eventually, once we have the hang of the procedures and expectations of math workshop, my goal is to incorporate some online learning. A station rotation model of blended learning would work really well here. To create the online content, I’ll make my own teaching videos using a document camera (check out my Donor’s Choose grant to help make this possible!) and using Khan Academy materials.

Logistics 

This article from Math Tech Connections helped me to wrap my mind around various ways to organize our math workshop. It outlines three different ways to create groups and rotations-plus there’s free planning resources!

For our class, we will have two sections of whole-group time including daily math review and our daily mini lesson at the start of our math block. Then we will split into three main groups for our stations. During our stations, students will have about 15 minutes at each station.

• Teacher Instruction: Focused and differentiated instruction will be provided for students related to each day’s whole group mini-lesson.
• Independent Review: This will be mostly fact fluency for now. Eventually, it will become the online learning portion of our stations.
• Partner Practice: Students practice recent skills with a partner for support and collaboration.

Workshop in Action

Today was our first day using the math workshop model. We taught our mini lesson and took some extra time to discuss our learning expectations during independent work time. This left about 40 minutes for instruction. Our students completed two or three stations today. We left the third station as optional for our early finishers.

Independent Work: students completed a pretest for an upcoming unit.
Skill Review (optional): students practiced math fact fluency online. 

Teacher Stations: students practiced rounding on a number line.

Winning with Workshop 

Let’s reconsider the problem of large groups. With this model, students would ideally get 15 minutes of differentiated teacher instruction in a small group of only about 5 students. FIVE! With 31 students, that’s 10 in each of the three groups. Since there are two teachers for the teacher instruction station, that’s about 5 with each teacher if we divide groups strictly by number of students. Does that seem amazing to you? Because it seems really amazing to me!

Personalization and Universal Design for Learning

So far I feel pretty great about getting blended learning up and running in my class. My students are able to work independently and solve most of their own problems. I’m able to teach more rigorous lessons during my guided reading groups because students have already learned and practiced the skills during their online learning portion of the day. We really are off to a great start. So, what’s next?

As I consider the online content that I’ve created, I notice a few things. At the end of each online lesson, my students take a survey to give me feedback about parts of the lesson that were confusing, difficult, or just plain boring. They also share their favorite parts of the lesson so that I can design engaging content in the future. Not surprisingly, most students say that they like the video content and games, so I try to incorporate some of those elements in each lesson I create.

Beyond student feedback though, I’ve realized that my online content is pretty basic. Each student is completing the same content in the same way. Ideally, I’d like to create content that is more student centered. One benefit of blended learning is the ability to personalize learning for students, and I plan to focus future content creation around this concept.

What is Personalization?

Personalization is similar to the concept of differentiation in that students are learning the same content, but in different ways. With differentiation, the teacher controls the learning. She decides which students are doing what activities, how they will represent their learning, and when they will do these tasks. With personalized learning, the teacher creates the content, but each student makes learning decisions for themselves. Students are given the opportunity to choose how they will engage with content and represent their learning.  One benefit of personalization over differentiation is the increase in student agency, or a student’s ability to take initiative in their learning.  

According to Leila Meyer’s article The 4 Common Characteristics of Personalized Learning, personalization can take many different forms, but there are a few common characteristics, including: student ownership of their learning process, a focus on the learning process rather than big end-of-year tests, competency-based student progression, and anytime/anywhere learning. My next logical step is to move toward student ownership of their learning process.

Universal Design for Learning

The concept of personalization is closely tied to another topic I’ve been reading about called Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This 4 minute video does a great job explaining UDL.

The three main principles of UDL are:

• Engagement- student learning is most meaningful when students are naturally motivated.
• Representation- students learn in different ways, so it is imperative to provide multiple formats for student learning.
• Action and Expression- students can demonstrate their learning of the same content in many different ways.

When I consider these three main principles as they relate to blended learning and creating online content, it all boils down to student choice.  As much as possible, students should have the ability to choose the content they will be studying- allowing for maximum engagement. While that is not always an option, giving students choice whenever possible is best. It is also important to provide multiple pathways for students to learn the content and then express their understanding.  

Consider my students here. They have very different preferences for learning and expression. UDL would suggest providing paths for all these learners to find the best possible success.

These girls prefer auditory learning. They like hearing instruction and
expressing their learning through verbal explanations.

My students here are visual learners. The need to see models,
and they prefer to show examples of their learning. 

Written expression is a strength for these learners. They have very strong
vocabulary skills, and they enjoy being challenged through writing. 

Designing Personalized Content Using UDL

My next step in content creation will be adding student choice into the lessons I’m creating. I will most likely continue to have my class work on the same lesson, because I just don’t have enough content created yet to branch out in that way. While they are working on the same content, though, I will design lessons in such a way that students can choose their learning path through the UDL principles of representation and action/expression.

The principle of representation focuses around giving student multiple ways to engage with and learn the content. I can see my online lessons giving students multiple resources to use and having them choose a certain number to engage with. These resources could be teacher made videos, online content, teaching charts, songs, online books, infographics, interactive images, etc.

The principle of action and expression promotes student freedom in showing what they have learned. Students could express their understanding of the content by simply writing or solving simple problems, making an audio or visual recording explaining what they learned, creating a teaching tool for other students, writing a book, or creating an infographic.

Universal Design for Learning Example

A few months back I created a digital project based learning resource for my students in which they are tasked with the challenge of persuading a chosen audience to take action in conserving and protecting our natural resources.  After learning about UDL and personalization, I think my resource shows all three principles of UDL:

• Engagement- students are tasked with persuading others about a real problem. They can choose the topic they wish to learn about from a provided list.
• Representation- students choose from videos, websites, and online books to learn the content.
• Action and Expression- students choose from a variety of projects to complete. They can write a song, make a TV public service announcement, create a radio commercial, write a letter, design a poster, or give a presentation aimed at an audience of their choice.

As I go forward, I would like to not only incorporate opportunities for students to choose their learning path in everyday online lessons, but also create more projects like this one to incorporate into our units.

Do you have ideas or strategies to increase student choice in learning? Share them in the comments here. I’d love to hear your ideas and try to incorporate them into my classroom!