What aspects of games help enhance learning? Check out this awesome TED talk from Dr. Richard Van Eck.
For additional examples of gamification and game based learning, please consider reviewing my previous blog entries.
Dr. Van Eck feels that games could fundamentally disrupt the core of education. Are there games that we can use today in our teaching? Does your organization or company use games to teach?
I have the great pleasure of sharing my life with my wife who teaches college Biology. We have a number of friends who are preparing their final plans for the fall semester. I have to admit the process of planning and executing a quality class can become overwhelming. As a designer of software, I have profound respect for all educators. I believe that we need to celebrate and support our teachers in much more profound ways.
Ok. Back to feeling overwhelmed by work.
During a brief period in my life, I worked in music ministry, IT, and church communications. I will always treasure the community our church staff built together. We, however, were VERY busy at this time. I struggled to balance all of the needs and demands: organizing binders, planning choir practice, making edits to the church website, meetings, four worship services, planning for retreats, etc. I was also taking graduate school classes in computer science at UCF.
During this time of life, I discovered “getting things done” (GTD). For a great summary of “Getting things done” by David Allen, please visit http://www.wikisummaries.org/Getting_Things_Done:_The_Art_of_Stress-Free_Productivity .
I have to admit that I still do not execute this system perfectly. I, however, find myself using ideas from this system every day. Here are five reasons why I value GTD:
In future blog posts, I will try to comment upon the tools I have used. For now, please check out Scott Hanselman’s great resources and podcast on the topic:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast268PersonalSystemsOfOrganizationReyBangoInterviewsScottHanselman.aspx
For now, I strongly encourage you to check out GTD by David Allen. I can honestly say that I use these ideas every day. Am I stress free? No. I know that my mental stress level is lower because of David Allen’s work.
How do you keep yourself organized to reduce stress in your family or work?
Photo from http://www.public-domain-image.com
I cherish my mission as a father. My wife and I have been blessed with two wonderful boys who are going up so quickly. I often ask God to help me become the best dad that I can be. In my morning reflection, from dads.org, the author talked about the identity of a father: “A father is committed to his children.”
After reading this article, I felt a desire to find activities that engaged me and my sons. I hope that I can be more present to my kids by designing our activities to be fun. As a young dad, it can be hard to keep the attention my four year old and one year old for extended periods of time.
As I boot up my Saturday morning, I am searching for ideas with Peter. Here’ five “father son friendly” idea sites that we will be checking out:
I am always looking for new ideas and books. What has inspired you to be a better dad? What are some of your favorite activities with your kids?
I teach at a small college that typically serves non-traditional students from lower income brackets. I find one of my biggest challenges is to get my students truly engaged in the material. I am competing for their attention in a busy world with many distractions. Many of my students have children and full time jobs. Some are taking care of parents, grandchildren and extended family members. In our noisy, digital world of Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, Youtube, reality TV, a whole host of electronic media are constantly vying for my students’ time and attention.I have to create a course framework that captures their attention and causes them to make an emotional investment in the material. My students need to know WHY they are studying the material.
This summer I am teaching a course in parasitology for upper level biology students. This is a subject matter that I absolutely love. My husband thinks I’m crazy for being so interested in parasites, but I find their lifestyles and the diseases they cause absolutely fascinating. There is so much variety and these organisms have unique adaptations that allow them to live inside the human host. I could go on and on about parasites, unfortunately my students don’t always share my passion. I find that it is important to discuss the biology of parasites within the context of their broader human impact.
What can I do to get my students to connect to this subject? I came across an idea on someone else’s blog and I decided to expand upon it. I designed a class project that includes elements of project based learning, game based learning,and service learning. One theme that is discussed over and over again in any parasitology course is the necessity of clean water and adequate sanitation. Instead of a term paper, I gave my students an assignment to write a blog post on a topic of their choosing related to the broad topic of clean water and sanitation targeted at a general audience. You can find their posts here. To bring about awareness of these important issues and to introduce a spirit of gaming, I am awarding a prize to the post with the most Facebook likes. The winning student will receive a Giant Microbe (pictured below) of their choosing.
Finally, the last component of the assignment is that each student will submit a proposal for a service oriented project that can be executed on our campus. The projects can include awareness campaigns, fundraisers to build wells or buy medicines or campaigns to collect needed supplies. I am leaving the door open so that my students can exercise their creativity. I plan on bringing at least one of the projects to completion over the course of the next school year. I am teaching Microbiology in the Fall so I hope to expand upon this project and see where it takes me.
As a musician and software designer, I care about my children and future generations being creative. I believe creativity fills my life with passion, teaches me to be expressive, and helps me as a problem solver. Sir Ken Robinson has some thoughtful remarks on how our education system treats creativity.
Do you feel our education system values creativity?
Great recipes start with great ingredients. The folks at the #levelupbc have served up a dish of awesomeness with the ingredients of passion for teaching, community building, crowd sourcing, and games.
Through this blog, my wife and I want to celebrate people and organizations innovating in education. As a community of leaders and educators, we need to pay attention to people who are finding new ways to teach. I personally believe that games can spark innovative thinking. The #levelupbc has inspired me by using a simple game on twitter to gather insights and resources for teaching games.
For my readers who are not familiar with twitter, hashtags are used in twitter to help organize topics and communities. As a twitter user, you can search for hashtags to see the “buzz” around the topic. Make sure to check out the the hash tag for levelupbc.
During my research on game based learning, I stumbled upon their blog. Matthew Winner and Jennifer LaGarde have created a book club community around gamification. The gamification community seeks to use ideas from game design to “spice up” the activity of a community. In a leadership context, I have enjoyed learning about this topic from the book “Gamestorming” , a book applying game mechanics to brain storming and exploration. This book also has a wonderful wiki for simple games that you can use for business meetings or classes: http://www.gogamestorm.com/
Matthew and Jennifer have done an amazing job of using the craft of gamification on twitter. For more details on their latest challenge, please visit their blog.
How has the #levelupbc community inspired me?
In computer science, I fell in love with artificial intelligence. It’s the sort of topic that you see in science fiction that makes you dream about how the world will be different. While I would love to talk about artificial intelligence more, I feel that I need to talk about another type of AI that has profoundly influenced my thinking. I believe that we could make positive change in education, our places of business, and our families using appreciative inquiry. (AI)
Why do I believe appreciative inquiry(AI) is important?
In my previous employer CompassKnowledge group, I had the opportunity to see this process in action.
How can I use this process today?
Put yourself in an environment where you can think for 20 minutes. I would recommend getting a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Take the time to answer the following questions.
1 – What are the high points or most celebrated stories in your life?
2 – What was a time that you were excited to jump out of bed and start working
on your project or cause?
3 – What personal strengths do you have from those high points in your life? In general,
what are your personal strengths?
4 – Imagine a world where you are happy and creating positive change in your work daily.
What does that dream job look like?
5 – How can you use the personal strengths from question 3 to create the dream
job that you talked about in question 4?
What insights did you make about yourself?
As we dream about the future of education in five years, how can we use this process to enhance the lives of our teachers and students?
All of the technology in the world is not going to make me a good teacher. It can help me to become a better teacher. Technology in the hands of a bad teacher can be disastrous. I think that every student can recount a time in the classroom where technology was used poorly. I know I can. This week, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, even Bill Gates said that “Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. “ (see the whole interview here (. Be a good teacher first. Use technology to become even better.
I am a relatively new teacher. I just finished up my first year as a full time biology professor at a small, primarily two year, school. I’ve always felt called to teach and I finally feel like I am truly pursuing the vocation I was made for. That does not mean that it has been an easy ride. Most days I feel like I am barely keeping my head above the water. Michael is a wonderful partner in this journey and has been incredibly supportive. He dove head first into the realm of educational technology in an effort to help me become the best teacher I can be. That said, many days I have to reign him in and remind him that my first priority is to make sure that I am building a strong foundation in the classroom first, then as I move forward throughout my career I hope to build in more technology and innovation to enhance my teaching.
My biggest struggle is just to remain organized. I know that students will perform better if I clearly communicate my expectations and present the course material in a logical fashion. I teach relatively large lecture courses and managing all of the assignments/lab reports/exams etc. can be overwhelming. Here are some tools/strategies that I have used to help me stay on top of these things:
These are just a few tools that I use to stay on top of things. What are the best tools/strategies that you’ve found to keep organized in the classroom?
Posts On Teaching and Learning