Gaming & Formative Assessment

It is hard to know where to start for back-to-school information. Do we wax philosophic or look at some clear goals? (I did reflect as I read the second blog.) Or just get back to work with new ideas, new tools and new perspectives? I am choosing to start with new perspectives.

As I read Matthew Farber’s post, Gamifying Student Engagement, and listened to Jane McGonigal’s TED talk about gaming making the world better, I was reminded of my use of Sim City in a middle school industrial science class. But that is a story for another time.

Matthew made me wonder if the “I do, we do, you do” strategy has given way or is moving towards – “The first “level” or “mission” is typically a constructivist tutorial.” This blog talks about the connections to PBL (Project Based Learning), student engagement and ownership, critical and creative thinking and also made me connect to classroom formative assessment.

Matthew and Jane got me wondering about…what “badges” we offer in the classroom. (There seems to be a connection to the formative assessment practice of students monitoring their own progress here.) How do we let kids “level-up” in our classrooms? (See previous parenthetical statement.) “Modding” was a new term to me, and once again, I was reminded of formative assessment. When I use pre-assessment, I sometimes discover that I need to allow students to change the learning opportunity to better meet their needs, so modify their learning.

Matt says,
In video games, players are encouraged to learn as they go. This is the very definition of constructivism. Constructivism makes learning meaningful and satisfying.

And guess what? So does the use of formative assessment.

Leave a comment a tell me how you plan to use classroom formative assessment this year.

Leadership survey and more…

• Take the TEDEd website tour. Every month the number of videos and flipped classroom episodes increases. Topics include: the arts, business and economics, health, literature, mathematics, social studies, thinking and learning and more.
• The controversy continues over the use of video games in education, and guess what? Not all teachers are sold on the benefits of video games as learning tools.
• “PowerPoint on steroids” allows a teacher to create presentations on their iPad, share them with students on their iPads, build in polls/quizzes, collect the data and engage students in a different way.
• From the University of Kent – take this 50-question survey about your leadership style. The results include: authoritarian, procedural, transformational, participative and Laissez-faire. I’d be curious to learn where you fall.
• I’m taking an online course right now and we were talking about building trust online. You might like to check out our thoughts on that topic here.