 So, five steps to level up your teaching. My name is Sarah's Harmus, by the way, and I am an English Language Arts slash technology teacher in Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland. And my Twitter handle is SarahTheTeacher. I love connecting with educators all over. So if you would like to connect, then I would be more than happy to do so. Now, here are some resources for you. If you'd like to follow along throughout the course of the presentation. So if you wanna see, you know, what I'm referencing, then just go ahead and go to this link here and that will take you to everything that I have mentioned. So without any further ado, let's get started. So I'm gonna tell you guys a story. This is a story of a student that I knew. This young lady would come into class. She would go sit in the back with her friends. Whatever the teacher was saying, then she'd just kind of disengage, shut down, not really pay much attention, just crack up, he, he, he, all kinds of things. The teacher would get so frustrated. When this young lady went home, then she would be playing video games, talking on the phone, things of that nature. Now, how many of you know a student like that? Obviously I can't see you, but I can imagine that almost everyone is probably shaking their head, yes. I'm gonna tell you, I know this student very, very well and the reason that I know her is that she was me 20 years ago. 20 years ago, can you believe that? In 2014, then you have students that are even more so engaged in technology. Technology is their life. You see students walking around with cell phones in their hand all day. They're also very big into video games. Jane McGonagall, she is a video game designer who has given many, many TED talks and she is like a gamification guru. And she stated that as a planet, we spend three billion hours a week playing video games. Three billion hours. So that's gonna lead us right into our topic of the day which is gamification. So gamification, what it is, is using game design elements to engage and empower learners. So why would you wanna gamify? It gives them choice. It also increases engagement. So gamification is phenomenal. It's not just for the classroom. You've probably seen it in other venues or apps such as Nike Plus, they gamify. The more you run, the more points you get, things of that nature. Duolingo is an app that teaches different languages. It also uses the gamification model. You get different levels, different stars. You get hearts if you, the hearts break if you get the answer wrong. So it's very, very engaging. So before we get into all of that, I just wanted to share my learning process. So I learned about gamification through a workshop offered through my district by some phenomenal educators there. Definitely have to give a huge shout out to Barbara Liedahl who organized it. And Erin Smith, the art guy on Twitter. He was very, very thorough in explaining the gamification process. Also, Selina Ward was also facilitating that session. And from that brief gamification session, I believe it lasted two days over the summer, then they gave a fantastic framework by which I gamified my entire, the entire 2013 to 2014 school year. So huge hat tip to them. Now this year at Google Teacher Academy, I was introduced to Chris Avelis who has a different model for gamification that I implemented in my English language arts class. And Zena Brown, I met her at ISTI this summer and she talked about gamification with parent involvement, which is phenomenal, mind blowing, which kind of gave me the idea to use it for adults as well. In addition, Chris Rogers in Georgia, he also uses a gamification system with staff. So for a professional learning, he gamifies that at his school. And there are so many other gamification experts that are just fantastic. Just look out for them on Twitter and on Boxer, the things of that nature. So, I'm gonna give you a first example of gamification, which is my technology class. So I am now going to go to my website, tinyurl.com forward slash Madame Thomas, that would be me. So this technology template, I haven't really changed it up much since last year. You'll see that my English language arts, one is slightly different, but okay, it's opening up. Here we go, here we go. So I am now scrolling down to where it says, oh goodness, come on thing. Okay, technology class structure. This item shop is new, I just added that this year. So I'll talk more about the item shop for English in just a moment. But for technology for my class structure, then just to show you how it looks right now, it's still a living, breathing gamification board. So here we have our leader board. It's very, very basic. I'm just doing this through a Google site, but the students can see their name, what stage they're on, things of that nature. You see that we have two students on stage one right now, but they level up every 2100 points. I'll explain how that works in just a second. Down here I have a current high score. What I do when my students are ready to level up, then I have them make an appointment with me and we go over their work together. But down here we have rules for my classroom, for our class game. They can only do missions based on their current stage. They must do all missions at the tutorial level. Then after that they get to select their missions. And this goes to student choice, which we were talking about before. It's highly engaging for students to be able to choose what they wanna do. And they can use any combination to reach the XP requirements. Some of the missions just like video games, they allow for multiplayer gaming. The point totals don't reflect actual grades, so this is good because it addresses the confidentiality aspect. And missions completed out of sequence will not be counted towards point totals. Because I strategically, on the advice of Erin and Selena, placed the higher interest missions towards the higher stages. Everybody wants to play Minecraft. So they have to work towards that Minecraft. Everybody wants to design an app. They have to work towards that. So yeah, down here we have a top 10 high score leaderboard. And I'm gonna have to change this date right now. The good thing about it though is that we have students who no longer go to school who are still on the leaderboard. So for example, I believe, let me see. Yeah, these top three students right now, they have exited the school, but their score lives on in infamy. That is a huge motivator. So that was example one for technology class. Now, example two, this one's a little different. This one I have borrowed from my good buddy, Chris Abelis. And the reason that I also like this one is because it introduces guilds. We call them squads in my class, but it's set up on a leaderboard as guilds. I try not to change too much. But let me go ahead and open that up and I will explain it. Let's pop right over here to ELA leaderboard. Let me show you how this is set up. This is a different model of gamification here. And Chris does a fantastic job. If you get his kit, he kind of walks you through the steps of how to set it up. This one is done through a Google spreadsheet. So once again, both of these were free to do. Let me just start right over here, learner tags. You'll see that some students chose to stick with their first name. Some of them chose to pick pseudonyms. A question I get a lot of the times is, is it shaming like if a student is towards the bottom of the leaderboard, do kids pick on him or her? And the answer is that I've never seen that happen, but I do give students the option to give me a gamer tag so that their progress is kind of anonymous. XP, this is their total number of points that they've earned in class. And the way we keep track of this is on class dojo. And I award them points based on the work that they do, based on good citizenship, all kinds of different things. There's all different kinds of ways for them to earn points. So I keep track of their points through class dojo. And every 50 points, then I release 50 points to their spendable AP. Now, there's other ways for them to receive points as well, hidden levels, if you will, to the game that they don't necessarily know about, but I just kind of like to throw a monkey wrench in there because a lot of times that's what video games do. They'll just have some kind of bonus level or something like that. There's a script that Chris made that comes with his package that kind of just lets you click on whatever student you want or whatever team you want and just assign them points. As you see down here, some of them are negative. I'll take you to the item shop in a second and you'll see how students can earn points or lose points or whatever. This level thing, I don't understand at all how it's calculated, but it has worked very well. So I'm leaving it in, so we'll go with that. But every time they hit, like if they hit a level 10, they each got 10 extra AP, spendable points, spendable AP. When they reached a level 20, they got 20 extra spendable points. So you can really flip this however you wanna do it. It's all up to you. That's just my system. And over here we have class and finally we have guilds. So these are their squads. So it's good to be able to have it set up like this because you can also look and see which teams are in the lead by going to the guild versus guild part. And you'll see right now, Migo Squad is in the lead, Tree Nation, Team Glory, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Class versus class, usually third period keeps on kicking fourth periods rear end. Yeah, as you see they're doing right now. But fourth period sometimes comes back. So it's a really good competition. It's a very friendly competition and the students seem to really like it. So going back to spendable AP, looking at the item shop. Here are some of the things that students can buy. Over here, you'll see that there are different categories. There are individual, automatic and group and even class purchases. Yeah, and we keep adding. And the way that this item shop came together is that I asked the students what they wanted and they told me. So some of that went into that. Also, I borrowed from some of my buddies. Chris has an item shop. So some of his items rewards showed up in here. Some of Temp and Neal as well, my friend in Florida. Some of her items show up in there. And yeah, it's just been an amalgamation of different items. And before I show you the different items, I have to reference Chris one more time. He has a fantastic blog post about things that students really crave. And he says in order, they are status. Access, power and stuff. So I try to keep this in mind. I try not to put too much stuff on here. So there are a couple of stuff items on here because the kids really, really wanted them. And I definitely wanted to listen to what they wanted. Definitely to engage them more. But yeah, the stuff is very limited. So you'll see here, trading spaces is a great one. Oh my goodness, Fourth Period has been using this like crazy. A player can trade him or herself with another player into another squad. And that's 50 experience points. And that's individual. Then a factor, they've used that a bit where they can use their bonus points to buy something for their friends. Now as you'll see, there are some automatic purchases. So these come out of their points regardless. For example, Tardy to the party come to class late without a pass. The late bird starves, they turn in a graded assignment late without making prior arrangements. There's another one where they go to the bathroom or go to their locker. In rare cases, they might dip it to the negative. You might have seen some kids on the other board who were in the negative value. And that was probably due to them going to their locker or going to the bathroom when they had no points. So you can check it out. I've put this resource on the resources sheet. So definitely check it out when you get a chance. I love this item shop. It's just really changed the class dynamic in so many ways. So it has been amazing. Alrighty, so that was the English language arts. So now let's talk a little bit about how to gamify. These are free. And this is based on the method provided by Erin and Selena. So the very first step is to create a site or use an LMS. So you can create a site for your class. I like Google sites just because I gamify using Google and it works very well. So the spreadsheet goes seamlessly into the Google site. Wix is a very professional clean looking model of creating a website. Also Weebly, I've heard great things about Weebly, strikingly, heard great things about that as well. I actually use strikingly and it looks amazing. So you can easily throw together a site or use an LMS and LMS stands for learning management system. So Edmodo's, School of G, things of that nature, just somewhere where you can update the leaderboard if you choose to go that way. If you need any help with setting up a website or anything of that nature, you can always visit my YouTube channel. If you type in Sarah, the teacher, and my computer's being extra slow, what else is new, not much. Okay, Sarah, the teacher, I'm the first one. And here right here to walk you through Google Drive, there's one down there for Wix, have 112 videos. Not all of them are walkthroughs, but a good majority of them are. So definitely check that out if you need some help setting up a website. And there's also stuff on there for Edmodo. So if you need an intro on Edmodo, then definitely check that out. Step two, you gotta create rules. Every game has rules. So just come up with a system. However you see your classroom game working, then just create rules. I would suggest making it easy for the players to win because we're all in this to help the students and make it fun. Like feel free to throw some monkey wrenches and hidden levels, whatever. Things in there just to keep them on their toes. Step three, create challenges. So you can plan in hyperlink your assignments if that's what you wanna do, just like how we saw it in my example. So if you look on the resources and then you'll be able to see a Google Doc that I have, I've set up some ideas that helped me plan for last year. And definitely you can collaborate with other teachers or other educators who utilize gamification and see what works for them and maybe exchange some challenges that way. But just some quick tips for design challenges. Of course, you wanna set the level and maybe scaffold it, set the XP. So like I said, that's totally arbitrary. My system, they get 700 for classwork, 200 for assessments, 100 for homework. And that just kind of follows our county's model of grading 70% classwork, 20% assessments, 10% homework for tech. So it's totally up to you what numbers you wanna use. It's totally arbitrary. And then you can set the number of players, permission, like a video game. A rubric is always a good thing to have, aligning it to standards, explicit directions and a video walkthrough. YouTube is a great resource for tutorials or you can make your own. And if you borrowed it from somewhere, then give a link back. Just a shout out to the person you got it from. Step four, create a leaderboard. So we looked at my leaderboard. You can do this very, very easily, directly on Google sites by just making a table or you can make a spreadsheet, like we looked at in the second example. And step five, have fun. So make sure that you explain it to your parents and your students so that they understand what's going on exactly because there will be a lot of questions, trust me. But as long as you have a good handle on it, then it's fun for everyone. The parents have told me how much their student enjoys being part of a gamified class. So it's just fantastic. It's changed the way that I teach 100%. The kids are having fun. I'm having fun being Game Master and sometimes I might even play along with them. So for further reading, you might wanna check out Jay McConnacle. I talked about her a little bit in the beginning and she is a video game designer who gives multiple TED talks. She has some great resources about gamification. Also, Carl Kapp wrote a book all about gamification. So Google him, look him up, check him out on Amazon. edpeen.com is a great one. Michael Miserra and a bunch of other great, great, great educators are on there. They're always sharing innovative ideas. I think that they have a whole section for gamification. And also Microsoft, pil.network.com, or pil slash network.com. Let me see. I wrote an article for them in the gamification and game-based section of their site. So the Microsoft Educators Network, slow computer, forgive me. All right, so this is level up your teaching right here. So this is, let me see, it's loading, but it will give you more ideas and the link to the video that I have on how to gamify your class. Now, some people that I would like to share for gamification gurus, so definitely check these folks out right here. They're all fantastic. There are so many more that I would like to shout out as well, but we just don't have the space on the Haiku deck slides, but definitely check up level up ed, which is a gamification Twitter chat going on 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday nights. And there are so many great conversations there. It's run by Dacin, who is on the list right there, and it's just fantastic. You'll get some great ideas that way. All right, so if you wanna connect, I would love to connect with you all and chat about gamification. That's one of my very, very favorite things to talk about. So once again, my name is Sarah Thomas. Sarah the teacher is my Twitter handle and my blog. SarahJaneThomas.com is my official website. And if you wanna join the DC Metro Area Google Educator Group, we talk about a variety of topics. Gamification keeps coming up, so check out that link. And if you're on Boxer, then just feel free to email me or tweet me your Boxer handle. And we'd love to have you in the group. So just wanted to thank you guys again for tuning in. Had a great time talking gamification and hope to see you soon. So keep leveling up your teaching. Have a great one, bye-bye.