Inquiry link

This could potentially be a good source of info! I'll check it out:
http://www.gamifyingeducation.org/

Thoughts for inquiry #1

I've been going through the archives for my main source of Gamification info, Gamification.co, and making notes on which posts are useful for my project. Quite a lot are! There is a lot of information centered on demystifying the idea of gamification. One of the most interesting posts is an article about how using the term "gamification" serves more to muddy the waters than to clarify anything. As I've noted in my other blog on Gamifying my Classroom, the term means many different things to many different people. As such, the people you speak to probably either don't know what it means, or think itmeans something else. So it's much better to have a term that really explains what you are trying to do, such as "Behaviour reward program" or something like that, as ridiculous as that sounds.

Quick side note: A good example of gamification are reward cards for buisnesses. Every time you buy a coffee, you get a point; buy 10 coffees and you "level up," receiving your reward of a free coffee. It would be even better if your second card gets you something a little better, and each time you redeem a card, you get a new one that pushes you to a bigger and better reward. This would prevent players from getting bored of the experience, and play on the concept of loss aversion - now that they have already invested so much into this reward program, they wouldn't want to lose all that by switching to another, or letting it slide.

Hmm... now, how to apply that concept to education...

I found this and I don't know what it is...

Let's find out!

EDIT: It's goats from Banff! I took this with my Android phone, but found and posted it with my iPad. How did Blogger know about this?

Inquir-rific!

My inquiry idea is to look into the concept of gamification. This is something I've been investigating on my own, as well as trying out in my class, so I am eager to take this opportunity to delve even deeper into this concept and see what is being done, and what else it has the potential to do. I also really want to examine the drawbacks and the ways it can go wrong.

My current plan is to divide it into sections:

1. What is gamification, and how is it different from games in the classroom
2. The potential benefits of gamification
3. What is being done and ideas for implementation
4. Drawbacks and pitfalls (and ways to avoid them? Don't know if I'll be able to get to that. I'm not really an expert.)

I'll be using this blog to post research links and random streams of consciousness, so watch out for that. (I also have a lot on my other blog, chronicling my journey through the process of gamifying my classroom, creatively titled Gamifying my Classroom) When I'm done, the pieces of the final product will all be put together in this spot.

Alright! Here we go!

Grrr, GRR!

So, I've been playing with the format of my blog, and I've completely lost my sidebar. I also can't add links to my pages because, for one reason or another, blogger thinks I've added it already. WHY, TECHNOLOGY?? I LOVE YOU SO MUCH; WHY DO YOU HATE ME?

EDIT: OK, well... I got pages added, but since my sidebar insists on showing up at the bottom of the page (which blogger assures me is a browser issue, but since I'm in IE which is only the most widely used browser around...) I've just added those page elements to the footer instead and eliminated the side bar altogether. Oh well...

Sep 19

So, today AGAIN I have very little to contribute as notes. For the most part, doc introduced us to iPad apps, and I just downloaded them if I liked it. I really enjoyed Dragon Dictation to help students who have trouble writing to take notes orally, or to create growth statements or something like that. The only problem is that it doesn't do any kind of punctuation. But even that could be a cool proof reading exercise, especially since some of them really have issues with punctuation.

Our hash tag is #mlcourse.

Sep 12

[So, I only started taking notes via blog near the end of the period. Up until then, I did it on e-mail, so this is all I gots.]

Xtranormal: write a script; pick "actors" to read the script out loud.