 Hi, my name is Avi Specter, I'm an Education Consultant with the Riverside School Board in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Today I'd like to share my presentation with you, Gamification, It's Not All Fun and Games. Now in order to start off, I'd like to ask what is gamification, but in order to best answer that, I'd like to start off with what gamification is not. Space learning, or GBL, is about allowing students to play video games to better understand certain concepts. And while this could be neat and it's an interesting tool, I don't think, pardon the pun, it's necessarily game changing. In really order to change the classroom dynamic, to change what happens in the classroom in terms of learning and teaching every day, what we're going to be looking at is gamification. And gamification is really about looking at all the engaging and motivating aspects of video games and seeing if we can apply them into an educational context. So what exactly are these engaging and motivating aspects of video games? Now I'm going to get to that in a moment, but what I would suggest you do, especially if you haven't played a video game in a while, is pause this video and take a look at the link that I've provided on your screen. What it links you to is a video that I've uploaded to YouTube, which has me playing video games, but what I do is highlight all the different things I'm doing in the video game in a gamification context. So in the next part of the video, I'm going to run you through my seven key points of gamification. And in order to make this really concrete is I'm first going to highlight the point how it is applied in a video game, and then next how it could be applied in your classroom. Now the first point is recognition. Now in most games, everything you do is recognized or at minimum your progress is tracked. In a classroom, you want to do the same sort of thing. You want to put systems in place to recognize all student efforts, whether it be an activity or a project based learning or whatever the student does, recognize all the efforts as they go along. Now I want to make an important distinction. Recognizing does not necessarily mean reward. You're simply recognizing all efforts as the student goes along to help them keep track of what they've done and where they're going. The next point is up. In most video games, you never lose points as you go along. You actually gain them. You start with a zero and you gain points and you go up. In a classroom, students come to class with an A plus or 100% in mind. And as they start making mistakes, they start losing points, which can be rather demotivating. So the idea is in a gamified classroom, students gain points as they go along. But that's easier said than done. One of the main challenges we encountered when we tried gamifying things is what kind of value do you assign to points? Do you just arbitrarily give points? I don't have the answer for you, but what I do have an answer for you is the way to think about it that might help you set up your own gamified classroom. In a video game, if you're just starting out and you're on level one and it's a little hack and slash game, you decide you're just going to slash away at the little tiny ogres all day on level one, well, the rewards are going to be very tiny. And it's not too challenging. The rewards are small. But if you decide, all right, I'm ready now for bigger challenges. I'm going to go take on a boss or go to the next level. Well, the challenge will be bigger. But if you defeat that baddie, what's going to happen is that the rewards are going to be bigger too. Now, if you look at that in a gamified classroom, think of students doing project-based learning or a large group project or a large project, whatever. The rewards and the points should be bigger. Don't just give points for the sake of giving points. The next topic is choice. In many video games, the player might be presented with a map of different objectives or different levels they need to do in order to beat the game. Now, how do you implement this in a gamified classroom? Well, let's say in your class, your students need to do x, y, and z before they can tackle the exam. Is it possible to redesign your curriculum so it doesn't need to go in a linear order? Can some students do z, y, x or y, x, z? Now, I realize it's not possible in all classrooms. However, by taking this approach, what you do is you give students a greater sense of agency. You make things more student-centered. The students don't just show up to class and expect the teacher to tell them what's next. They really see all the different objectives they have to meet, and it's up to them to choose in what order they want to tackle things. The next point I love, failing forward, allowing students or encouraging students to learn from their mistakes. Now, in a video game, you might try something, you die, you're put back a little bit, and you try again, and then you beat the challenge. You keep failing and trying again, failing and trying again, and the video game lets you learn from your mistakes in order to beat the level. Now, how do you implement that in a traditional classroom? Well, I'll give you one example that we tried in a language classroom that worked really well. Let's look at oral presentations. Traditionally, students might come up with a paper and they do their oral presentation or they have a discussion with their peers, but it's a one-shot deal. They prepare for it, they do it once, they're done. Often, there's not a lot of chance for improvement, it's a little nerve-wracking, and it's not really that authentic. So what we've tried in a language classroom which worked really well is allowing students to use their mobile devices. So we allow them to do their oral presentation on their device and they go and they record, and the first shot is usually not that good. They're doing speaking strangely, their body language might not be right, so they stop it, erase it, do it again. And they do it again and again and again and again until they're happy with it. So what happens is that they get a lot of practice, they learn from their mistakes, and they fail forward. The next topic is feedback. You wanna provide students with systems for more immediate feedback. And this is what games do amazingly well. If you're playing a video game and you jump and you fall down a hole, well, you die. The game tells you you die. If you're doing a dancing game and you do the incorrect dance move well, it will tell you that you didn't do the move correctly. But in a classroom environment, it's hard to give students that immediate feedback. We're only one teacher and regardless of the way you have your system, your classroom set up, you're not always there to always constantly give students feedback. So how do you address this in a gamified classroom? Well, let's take a look at Bloom's Taxonomy. As an education consultant, I'm always pushing people to aim higher on Bloom's, help students with creating and evaluating or analyzing. But we can't ignore the lower-orbit thinking skills either like remembering and understanding. And I think that's where technology can really help here. What happens if you are to give your students the ability to use their own devices in the classroom and give them a tool like Brainscape, which is digital flashcards? Yes, it's not cognitively demanding, but students can sit there all day on their device, or not all day, but as much time as they need to help them better remember a concept by getting that instant feedback from their device. The same thing goes for tools like online quiz creator or any other quiz tool, allowing students to sort of go off on their own, on their own device or on a computer and getting that instant feedback from the technology when you're not around. The next point is differentiation. Now, in certain video games, players are given the choice of what type of character they wanna take depending on their preferences. Some people like being a barbarian and smashing everything, or some people like being the wizard and sitting back in the sidelines and throwing in little magic spells and not getting hurt. It's really up to the player to decide what kind of character do they wanna take in order to beat the game. What happens if we take that concept and we apply it to the tools that the students are using in the classroom? Some students may decide that they wanna do things traditionally or use computers or mobile devices. Everyone gets the same goals, but you leave it up to the students to choose what tool best suits them really depending on their particular taste and strengths. Last but not least, let's take a look at incremental challenges, which is really about progression based on mastery not going forward because the class is ready to move on. Now, let's take a look at a video game example. Let's talk about a classic, Super Mario Brothers. You can't just plop someone into World 4 without them doing World 1, 2, and 3. They need to really beat the earlier levels before they're ready for World 4 and all the challenges that it has. And you wanna do the same thing in a gamified classroom. Overall, you wanna put systems in place where students have choice in regards to how they wanna tackle the objectives, what tools they wanna use, and in what order they want to do so, and most importantly, at the pace that's most comfortable for them. So to summarize my seven key points of gamification, recognition, recognizing all student efforts as they move along through the course, no matter how big or small. Up, students only gain points, they never lose points. Choice, is it possible to give students a little bit more choice in regards to what order they wanna tackle the course objectives? Failing forward, putting systems in place to allow students to learn from their mistakes. Feedback, can we use technology to provide our students with more instant feedback for the lower order thinking skills? Differenciation, can we provide students with more choice in regards to what type of tools they wanna use when they're tackling the objectives, whether they are traditional or technology tools? And last but not least, incremental challenges, which really speaks to progression based on mastery, not because the class is ready to move on. Next, here are my two essentials for a gamified classroom environment. Number one is flipped instruction. As I mentioned before, it's really important that the students are able to progress at their own pace and you really wanna individualize that learning. Flipped instruction allows you to do that. Number two is BYOD. However, BYOD when they need it. So no longer are you saying, hey, everyone, let's take out our iPads or our mobile devices. No, it's really up to the students when they wanna use their tools to complete an objective. So in a nutshell, why gamify? Why bother doing any of this? Well, really it's about making things more student centered. You wanna provide students with a clear structure for the goals of the course. Give them an overview of everything that needs to be done. And linked to that is providing them with a sense of agency, a sense of control of when they come to school. They have an idea of what's coming. They're not just showing up waiting for the teacher to give them instructions. Now a couple of other things before we finish up. What about class leaderboards? Leaderboards in the gaming community are a way of keeping track who are the best players in a game and they move to the top of the rankings. Now I'm actually not a big fan of leaderboards. I find if anything, what they do is they're great for the students that are at the top of the leaderboards but very demotivating for the ones that are at the bottom. So my solution with the teachers that I've worked with was to have the scoring done privately in private grade books so that the students are not competing against one another. So what have I tried to gamify? One of the very first teachers that I worked with was Catherine Boisvert. She's a French second language teacher at the Eastern Quebec Learning Center with the Central Quebec School Board. She teaches individualized French and you have a whole wide range of learners from basic to advanced. Her classroom is BYOD. Students are allowed to bring in their own devices for their learning. But the really neat thing about Catherine's Center which gave us a lot of latitude to play around with these gamification concepts is that all the assessment before the exam is formative. It's really Catherine's job to get them ready to take that final exam. Now for the purposes of this video, I'm going to give you a very superficial explanation of our classroom gamification model. Our inspiration really came from Angry Birds. In Angry Birds, players can pass a level whether they have one, two, or three stars. So the way we set things up is that they had four major tasks that they needed to work on. And these tasks were not simple activities. They're really project-based learning. And at the end of each task, they would submit it to Catherine for feedback and she would either give them one, two, or three stars. If the student wanted to go back and rework what they had done, they can go back and aim for more stars. What went well was that things were more concrete for the students. They had a real sense of what they needed to accomplish in order to pass the course. And they really liked the stars. It encouraged them to try more and learn from their mistakes. Our challenges were that we started things mid-year. So some students simply preferred their books and drills, the way that they were doing things before. And the technology that we had offered was not used as much as we had liked. So what's next? Well, the next teacher I'm working with is Shana Loach. She's an English teacher with the New Horizon School in the Eastern Township School Board. And what Shana's main challenge is is that her students come to class and they don't really have a good understanding of all the different objectives they need to meet. So what we wanted to do was to design individualized grade book for each student to give them a global overview of where they were with the four different competencies that they needed to master before they can take the exam. Now the neat thing about Shana's grade book is that we got a little bit more granular. We wanted to keep track of everything the students were doing, not just the project-based learning. So as you can see over here, we have for reading, writing, listening, and speaking. And what Shana can do is, as the student works on these small little assignments, she can rate them on a level from one to five. Now the neat thing about this is this is a gamified classroom. So they never go down in points. They only can go up. So I'm going to finish off this presentation with a challenge. If you have access to a smartphone or tablet, any brand, it doesn't matter, I'd like you to try picking up Angry Birds. And the idea behind it is the following. Which elements of gamification can you identify while playing Angry Birds? Specifically the ones that I've outlined in this particular presentation. I have a feeling you'll be able to make quite a few links. Good luck.