Gamification is one of the buzz-words in businesses and is an up and coming idea in education. Gamification is taking game thinking and mechanics and applying them to the real world. Think of your students, they can play MMOG's (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) all day working on quests. If you are on Facebook, you may play or get inundated with some social games such as Farmville, which you work on quests for points to purchase things.
Other examples are cell phones and credit cards with reward programs. If you pay your bill on time or spend a certain amount of money, you get points. These points can be turned into purchasing power. Other examples are the craze of fitness apps, such as Fitbit and Nike+. When you take so many steps, you earn points and have a leaderboard where you compete with your friends. When you take a certain number of steps, you earn a badge. It is a recognition of an accomplishment, progressing through higher and higher levels of development just as people do when they are playing a video game. Its constant feedback, its work and reward.
One very important part of gamification is earning a virtual reward to keep people engaged
to participate and keep moving forward. In Farmville, these would be the infamous purple
cows, or more commonly known as badges and achievements. The virtual rewards, badges, play into our natural goal-setting impulse - when one sees there is a virtual badge
for something or if a goal is close to being met, it encourages one to participate to increase
their activity level.
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| Example of badge |
Badging also provides opportunities for recognition in a community and rewarding model users. We will be using gamification and badging for part of our technology professional development for Nevada's Community Schools. The badges that are earned through Nevada’s World of Learning are not just a stupid reward, but through the system staff will gain badges that are connected to meta-data about how and why they earned that badge.
How many of you have went to a conference and received a certificate for learning which is now stored in some file? With these badges, the metadata, which contains the information about the accomplishment, is stored online available when you want to show your skills, training, and accomplishments in your career development plan, resumes, and can be embedded into a social networking site or your blog.
There are numerous badges our staff can earn that cover a wide array of topics and technologies related to integrating technology into the classroom. The topics include many areas - a few examples would be things like flipping classrooms with Touchcast, connecting with other educators, students, and experts with social media, and even presenting tech professional to other staff members. The badging opportunities will continue to grow throughout the year. The leaderboard will be posted with prizes given to top performers at semester and the end of the school year.
The real purpose: Not only will they earn badges, the main purpose is they will learn new ways to integrate technology into their classroom in transformational ways. Also, when providing professional development, we want our sessions to be relevant to all staff members. It is very difficult to have a one-size fit all technology pd session, so we want to give our staff options to dive into areas of need and interest to improve their classroom teaching and learning.
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