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?
- Doing a book club on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook is an amazing way to grow our minds and grow relationships.
- I have been blown away by the resources their community has created. As a student of game design for teaching, I am looking forward to study the links, stories, videos, and games they have collected.
- Diigo and livebinders.com are cool tools for organizing ideas. I love how they organized the ideas from their twitter community.
- Leader boards and authentic thank you’s can be a powerful way to celebrate people from your community.
- Matthew and Jennifer are passionate about their craft of library science. They have shown to me that libraries can re-invent themselves. Jennifer created an awesome “infographic” showing ways her library is engaging students in the past year. Very cool!