Gamification is something that I go back and forth on a lot. On the one hand, gamification can increase student engagement by making classroom structures more engaging. Cleaning up becomes a way to earn points or levels for your avatar. Turning in homework on time has the added reward of unlocking a badge. Psychologically speaking, adding positive rewards to desired behaviors through gamification of a classroom is a great thing. Adding these rewards hurts no one. Even if a student sees them as a silly gimmick, it does not inherently hurt their learning experience. However, I tend to feel like that student is seeing the truth. A lot of gamification elements I have seen are just that, gimmicks. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Badges, levels, whatever feature you want to add can inspire students and instill pride in their work if (and ONLY if) those rewards are meaningful to them. You can make them look cool with smart graphic design, you can hype them up to your students, but the fact remains that there is no guarantee that 100% of students will latch on to your gamification. I have to quickly say that that is not a bad thing or a reason to not gamify. NOTHING in education is a 100% guarantee, we are working with diverse sets of humans with diverse wants and needs. It is a reality to keep in mind though. A teacher who pours their everything into making their classroom a super hip game might not get resounding success. This brings me to a second caution about gamification. It is a community building tool. An engagement tool. A motivator. A reward system. Not a content delivery system. Not really. A student might be more motivated to do homework to get a badge. A student might also cut corners on homework because they ONLY want the badge, not the content. Gamification can be awesome for class culture when done right. However, gamification will not teach your class for you. Not by itself. I still want to add gamification elements to my classroom. I want to explore badges more to acknowledge the work students put in. I want to explore class dojo more. I want to develop some kind of leaderboard for Khan Academy and Prodigy. It could be a great way to make behavior I want visible and positively reinforce it. However, what I am more interested in is some solid Game Based Learning. Game Based Learning takes technology beyond the digital worksheet and actively delivers content to students in different ways. One system I want to explore more is Lure of the Labrynth. It seems it started out as some educator’s grad school project in Maryland, but is still available and free for any educator to sign onto. It is a full on quest game with a story, choices, minigames, customizable characters, and message boards. It is like a real video game, but every maze, map, puzzle, and challenge weaves in principles of algebra. Students practice factorization without ever seeing the word “factorization.” In fact, most puzzles come with almost no instruction and demand students to either collaborate via message boards for hints or experiment. It pushes them to develop number sense and critical thinking. I want to try and introduce this into my classroom. Let me be clear, it will not replace much content. They will not learn academic vocabulary from it. They will not learn the distributive property name nor will they learn formulas for geometric figures. They will engage the mathematical practices without ever seeing them listed. These are great things and can really engage some students. It will not replace content in the classroom though. Students still need strong mathematics vocabularies, still need to develop proficiency with formulas and procedures. I am excited though. I tested it with my intervention students last year. Some of them really latched on and excelled in puzzles that, according to their data, they did not have the knowledge to solve. They eventually burned out due to increased difficulty and a lack of structure (I literally gave them the url, their password, and said “no class work today, go have fun and try this for half an hour.”). I am excited to see how I can adapt it to my classroom as an extension activity or an optional competition.
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One tool I have discovered and try to incorporate regularly into my school year is Infogram. It is a web service that allows the creation of and sharing of custom infographics. They can incorporate text, quotes, images, or a variety of customizable charts. The app can link with Google Sheets, making data input from Google Forms quick and easy. Students have control over font, color, arrangement, size, and can pick from a variety of free templates.
It can be used as a powerful presentation alternative to Slides or Prezi. This is intuitively more visually oriented, but can be used to deliver text if necessary. The given tools also emphasize solid evidence and statistics being used to make a point or, at least convey information. It allows students to be expressive in choice of chart and think about what charts or displays best communicate to their audiences. It makes them think about what their evidence means and how to explain it, since they cannot read off of slides like in other presentation mediums. This technology tool is not explicitly used for instruction. It is a tool that can enhance learning. What argument are students making? Who is their audience? They have to make choices that are not prominent in other presentation mediums and those choices can help them reflect more deeply on their content. It is used to create end products and, when scaffolded well, can really refine the way students think about the work they have done. The tools provides the opportunity for high quality end products that can be printed out or digitally shared with authentic audiences. Students can send infographics to adults in communities, peers in schools, or politicians with a simple link. I use it when I have students design their own surveys and have it as an option for students for other presentations, such as a PrBL unit on the United States Census. I feel like it is especially valuable to me as a math teacher because it opens students up to different ways of presenting information. Not everything is best communicated in words and sometimes students have gotten so used to creating written arguments, they have forgotten the visual power of diagrams. However, this is not a tool without its flaws. Most importantly, there is a paid version of Infogram. That means that there are definitely features that are deliberately missing in the free version. The next biggest issue comes from being spoiled by Google. There cannot be multiple authors on a single infographic. That means students need to collaborate offline to work online. While that has potentially useful implications, it can bottleneck student production. It definitely requires strong collaborative norms to ensure participation in group settings. The third major issue is that students will need some training to use the tool. Again, this issue presents excellent opportunities, but can cost valuable time in the classroom. The software is fairly intuitive and the templates are a big help, but I always need to assist students when using the program for the first time. On the teacher end, it took me very little time to become familiar with the tool myself. I, however, was also familiar with Google Sheets and spreadsheet software in general, so I had an easy time modifying charts exactly how I wanted. Teachers less experienced with Sheets may find a steeper learning curve, although I still hold the tool is intuitive. What was more difficult was trying to teach this tool to students. Like in our readings this week, the Digital Native is not a reality. I am individually a digital native and had quick success but not all my students did. Most could easily make an account and pick a template and start plugging. However, some found the Sheet disorienting. They needed to change values in column B of the sheet to edit the horizontal axis of a particular chart, for example. It took experimentation. Also, students, mostly, did not have an idea of what made infographics strong. Now, I spend time discussing that with students. I show them good and poor infographics to try and help them avoid common design mistakes. I have used the tool more than four times with students at present and I am still learning about better ways to introduce and instruct students with it. However, I will say that I do not feel like other services like Piktochart are significantly better for students upfront and that Infogram has some more powerful chart options later on. Ultimately though, as a math teacher, I find a lot of value in students discussing the merits of different charts, interpreting data, and presenting alongside a chart with no pre-written sentences. Like everything in a classroom, there is an opportunity cost. Individual teachers need to assess their own needs. Digital literacy is an absolutely essential element of 21st century education. The landscape of the professional world is shifting more and more away from rote memorization of crucial information and moving towards problem solving and collaboration. We have also seen exponential and explosive growth in technology over the last two decades. To ignore technology in the classroom and, more importantly, its authentic use in problem solving is grossly irresponsible as modern educators. However, the Common Core in and of itself is weighty enough to fill an entire school year. Add in state and district testing and time becomes pinched. Add in the normal disturbances of a public school such as fire drills or visits from counselors and teachers begin to get concerned. Then, factor in the need remediation and re-teaching, community building activities, and a desire to make your classroom authentic and engaging and teachers begin to panic about covering everything. Then consider the seemingly inevitable delays of education. A few years ago, my district suffered an earthquake that largely disrupted our first month of school. This last year we adopted a new Learning Management System and had a rocky transition into the new year. Power outages happen. Sick days happen. Training days happen. Suddenly, asking a teacher to cram just one more thing into their school year becomes laughable. Most teachers will smile and nod in a staff meeting and then go back to business as usual in their classrooms. So, the biggest question around digital literacy is not of its value, but of where in pacing guide does it fit in?
I believe it requires a perspective shift. Technology is not an add on to the schedule. It should be blended in. It’s a powerful tool when used properly and can accelerate learning through powerful visuals, interactions, and differentiation. Saying “I don’t have time for classroom tech” is like saying “I don’t have time for graph paper.” In many ways, technology can be a time saver! In some cases, the time saved can give students more time to actually think about the content! An example of this in my own room is teaching compound interest. Students spend so much time just doing calculations over and over that they don’t get to reflect and consider what is happening as interest earns interest. However, when I began to utilize spreadsheets as a way to calculate interest, it sped up students abilities to do calculations.They could calculate for much longer investment periods and see the results of compounding to an even greater effect than before. They learned how to use a spreadsheet and several tools, such as the formula writer.They practiced the mathematical practice of looking for repeated reasoning in the spreadsheets code and attended to precision in writing their equations. Some of them were able to extend their learning by learning how to create charts digitally from a spreadsheet to provide visual evidence for a presentation. Not to mention, because they finished faster, they got to compare results with others in the class and think about the pros and cons of choosing a bank. They got to think about why people might choose a bank with a lower interest rate and what those extra features might be worth to people. I share this example because the “solution” to digital literacy is integration. My compound interest yielded extra results. They learned the basic formula and understood the difference between simple and compound interest. Along the way, they also learned how to reorganize a spreadsheet and use cell names to write equations to automatically calculate interest for any principal. All in the same amount of time my pacing guide allowed for those lessons from the curriculum. Proper technology integration should at the minimum make your class time more efficient. There may be some upfront investment. I briefly “fell behind” while I taught students how to read cell names and how to type operations into the spreadsheet, but they quickly made that time back because typing “B4*A6=” is significantly faster than doing 2237.53*1.0125 on a calculator. In the middle of the road, students master the content while learning valuable skills alongside the content. At it’s best, technology integration provides new opportunities for students to explore content and come to conclusions. An example of this I enjoy is Desmos, an online graphing calculator resource. They have a game called “Marble Sliders” where the students only objective is to get a marble to slide down a ramp, gather stars, and land in a target area. The catch is that they have to build and adjust ramps by using coordinates or writing equations but there are incredibly limited instructions. Students basically need to experiment with different numbers and ideas until they find things that work. Their thought process is authentic. Some of them complete the entire activity with only coordinates. They count squares on the screen and visualize and convert it into an order pair. Some students realize how tedious that could be and start trying linear equations. They learn that the coefficient adjusts the steepness of the line. They now have a concept of slope and what effect changing slope can have without any lecture or vocabulary or books. All this while learning how to make graphs online, how to write mathematical ideas on a computer, and more. Technology is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere and we owe it to our students to teach it. Luckily for us, we just so happen to benefit from it when we do it well. The school I teach at is technology rich and is looking to become more so in the future. We are a BYOD school but are hopefully going to be move closer to a 1:1 model with a check out system for students who are in need of devices. We have an online Learning Management System called Echo that teachers are expected to use on a daily basis. Google Classroom is being activated for our district. All teachers are given laptops and projectors and my site has been supportive of teachers who request additional technology such as document cameras. We have intervention classes with software components and a fully stocked computer lab. Students are given e-mail addresses via Gmail that will be theirs through the end of high school. My site is a PBL site and is becoming a PrBL site in math and my district includes 21st Century Skills in their mission. Students use technology every day. Students use shared space on the internet, such as Google Drive and other apps, every day. The need for digital citizenship training is overwhelming.
The school I teach at is a middle school and every year I have been at this school, without fail, we have had some technology related or social media related student issue. Whether it is cyber bullying via Twitter or Instagram or students bashing on teachers in Google Docs or Chat or even things as serious as sexting, students can take their tech use too far without boundaries and training. One year, a student who was in excellent academic shape and had won awards got involved in one of these technology mishaps. It will surely follow him for a long time. I have no doubt that without digital citizenship, more students will wind up like him. Fortunately, my site values digital citizenship. In sixth grade, students complete a digital citizenship project in social studies, focusing on how to use technology professionally and manage their footprints. In seventh grade Language Arts, students do an argumentative project about social media. Yet despite this, students still get into trouble each year. I do not believe there are any shortcomings to the wonderful projects at my site, but maybe students need more. Or maybe it is just a middle schooler’s nature to push boundaries until something snaps back. Either way, the course of action is clear. Students need consistent digital citizenship training in all classes and all content areas. When I reflect about digital citizenship and math, it feels difficult at first. Common Sense Media links all their activities to ELA standards, but not to math. There could be some interesting work in statistics of identity theft, but making students aware of identity theft is not necessarily digital citizenship. Teaching students how to protect themselves against identity theft is closer to digital citizenship and that is something math can help with. Every year, before even thinking about digital citizenship in my own room, I had students do a Problem Based Learning Unit on password strength and why longer and more complex passwords are so valuable. Ironically, students learned that their assigned passwords were not incredibly strong and made many of them glad they changed them. This connected well to mathematical standards on sample space and probability models and begins to get on the fringes of digital citizenship. While being safe and secure online is a foundation of digital citizenship, I believe more can be done. A second idea for integrating digital citizenship could be using Google forms to create surveys. I would prefer this to Padlet because it can export to Google Sheets while still allowing the anonymity of Padlet. Then the data can be organized and used in a structured way. Teaching students to use Sheets also increases their digital agency and 21st Century skills. Ideally, students could design their our survey questions. Perhaps questions like “How many social media accounts do you have?” to show how wide a footprint can be or “Have you ever had a negative experience on social media?” to show the prevalence of cyberbullying in their community. This could help make the issues more authentic for students by seeing data that relates to their classmates. Then they can create charts to demonstrate evidence and make mathematically supported arguments about cyberbullying or other topics that they are interested in. A third idea I have is less mathematically inclined, but still can develop useful skills. This resource from Common Sense Media, which I want to build into a lesson plan soon, does not include math, but is very similar to what my site calls a “Claim-Evidence-Reasoning” process. We do it in all subject areas to help prepare students for the CAASPP and beyond. Students need to put together a claim and research evidence to support it. The evidence they choose is justified by their reasoning. This activity has students do just that. Students need to make a claim about which host to do, find evidence for their claim, and provide reasoning to support their evidence. This activity is perhaps more intuitive to students than some math problems and can be a great way to scaffold and practice the CER process with them. This option is the least personal of the three, but i could add reflective journals to it so students can relate the problem to their own experiences. I don’t feel like any of these ideas particularly tie into digital communication directly. The third idea gets into the idea of “passive” communication where public information has an impact on your opportunities. The second idea could tie into the effects of previous communication on social media. If I needed to focus more heavily on communication and wanted to do it in a mathematical way, perhaps I could focus on infographics and how students can effectively communicate via digital products. Most students do not understand what makes an infographic effective and clear at first. While that is more niche than say, professional e-mails or social media postings, I believe that it is a part of digital literacy and impacts a student’s digital citizenship. In other words, citizenship can show up in a lot of ways. The more literate students are with different apps and forms of information sharing, the more they can participate. A student who knows how to code has different opportunities online than a student who designs graphics than a student who runs a blog. However, all those different skills can impact a student’s citizenship and I imagine that digital citizenship will only continue to expand as time moves on. As a math teacher, competency based learning feels like a Holy Grail. I want my classroom to be self-paced, I want my students to not waste time sitting through notes when they already understand the material perfectly. Math is fairly unique in that it is super progressive. If a student has master 7th grade content, why shouldn’t they move onto 8th right away? Most people seem to answer “well, then they will be bored next year…” That feels like a weak answer to me.
I feel like math is on the road to competency based learning. Softwares like Khan Academy and Prodigy both allow for individualized assignments, self-paced learning, and individualized rewards systems. Other game based learning systems like Lure of the Labrynth also allow students to work in a learner centered away. Even better, all these things are totally free for the classroom! There are some struggles still of course. Can a video module every truly replace teacher interaction? How do you build a culture where every student is confident enough to ask for help when needed? Some systems have great feedback tools, but they can only provide feedback when a student provides input. What about the equity of technology at home? I feel like making a learner-centered environment without technology would be resource intensive (lots of printing). I wonder if, in the constraints of the public school system, it is possible to have a truly learner-centric environment. Without the guarantee of equity and access for all students, I have doubts that a tech-rich system is possible. However, every year I am moving closer to a blended approach. I feel like every school year a new learning system pops up. I have gone through Tenmarks (Amazon), Khan Academy, Prodigy, LearnZillion, Lure of the Labrynth, and more in the last 3 years and I’m sure it only gets better with time. |
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October 2017
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