Summer of Classcraft

I took some advice after watching a great webinar about classcraft by Mr. Andrew Hutchinson. Classcraft is best implemented after you already have started teaching your class. Perhaps getting a unit in. Every other time playing I went feet first and this time it allowed me to lead with my head.

Summer school classes started with structure and class routines. Introducing the game on day four of fifteen with my students meant that I could identify real reasons for why I wanted to play the game with my students.

1st Session Reasons
Rude/Impulsive Ss
Ss Falling Asleep In Class
Inappropriate use of technology
Reward students for progress made

2nd Session Reasons
Lack of collaboration and communication
Limited participation
Reward students for being positive and hard working.

What Classcraft does is give students the ability to earn privileges (powers) as they advance their character and become heroes inside the classroom. It was important to tweak these abilities so that they mattered, and I took some great suggestions from the Hutch Playbook, like mage council meetings for major assessments.

It gave students a better sense of belonging in the classroom, allowed them to have rewards and a means to own their class. They also gave me many tools to help gamify over the existing structure of explorations, examples, assignments and assessments and reward students for pursuing quality in their practice.

Students were always more interested in doing extra practice before an assignment if I phrased it as a Boss Battle, and were more focused and collaborative on a review if it was a race to find treasure. Summer really flew by because of the fun my students and I had while learning Algebra 2 and playing Classcraft.

Summers Gone By

Some teachers look forward to summer, every summer I look forward to summer school.

Teaching summer school was the very first gig I had out of college. Working in the district where I completed my student teaching, I started as a long term sub for first session then became a teacher for their second session. A friend from college thoughtfully designed the course to focus on skills. The students worked towards mastery, with a constant spiraling back to foundation skills on assessments.  We focused on relationships, and made sure that while they were required to come every day that every day was a day they wanted to be there.

Fast forward to year two... Now at a new school (new district) I taught Algebra 1 and then again at a different high school across town. This was the last summer I settled with using printed curriculum documents and taught without a true online resource. I had been introduced to Classcraft this year and had some experience playing with my students during the regular year. Now was a great time to start the journey together with a fresh group of students.

My department chair introduced me to a new resource at the end of year 2 (before summer 3) called SAS Curriculum Pathways. There was near perfect alignment with our regular curriculum. It provided students with the opportunity to get feedback while pursuing mastery at their pace. I was so impressed with teaching with online assistance. When students know that they are getting it, they have confidence to continue forward. When they know that they aren't, they know it's a good time to ask for help and that is where I had an invitation in to teach them.

Side Note: Our district had not adopted a resource/textbook in many years as they made the conscious decision that the textbook is not the curriculum, and standards must come first.

The flexibility of learning this way allowed us to enjoy our time together, some students worked ahead, others dragged behind the suggested deadlines. Memories were made and students kept morale high by taking occasional breaks to play games together. The way we learned about our classroom community and each other through gaming taught the soft skills that many of the students needed.

Whether through gamification (Classcraft) or through games the secret to a positive classroom (summer school) experience is to make it about learning and fun too!

I Need You to Call Out "Fake News"

This morning I found the most relevant article related to my graduate studies when we discuss content creation and lessons in digital literacy. The article from December 5th, 2016 titled  Fake or Real? How to Self-Check News and Get The Facts by Wynne Davis offers practical tips for those who know that information found on a Facebook stream comes with a Reader-be-ware disclaimer.

The article itself is worth the read but a short list of suggestions might be helpful.

• Pay attention to the domain and URL
• Read the "About Us" section
• Look at the quotes in a story
• Look at who said them
• Check the comments
• Reverse image search

These tips are ones that we think about when researching. There are some powerful questions to ask yourself when considering articles that come from Davis's suggestions.

Things to ask yourself when reading anytime (not just the web).

• What is the source, who is the author and what bias may they have?
• "I can't believe he said that!" 😠then take time to search for the full context of a quote and who said it.
• Watch out for clickbait headlines and check out the comment section, what type of discourse happens may be indicative of target audience.
• Use the reverse image search feature on Google to see where something originated from.

Thanks Wynne Davis for summing it up when you call all of us to do our part to battle 'fake news'

 "If this happens or if you see your friends sharing blatantly fake news, be a friend and kindly tell them it's not real. Don't shy away from these conversations even if they might be uncomfortable. As said, everyone has to help fix the fake news problem." (December 5th, 2016 titled  Fake or Real? How to Self-Check News and Get The Facts by Wynne Davis)

Analysis of the Research Process and Content Curation: Citizen's Lament

Analysis of the Research Process and Content Curation

Analyze the research process by discussing how you acquire, organize, and evaluate resources. What process do you go through while researching and evaluating resources? How do you organize or curate the resources? Please share the link to your curation method for this course.

I think it is important to distinguish between being a consumer of information and a curator. When the Learning Scientists article mentioned, "Information Overload" I immediately thought of the past year's political cycle and the political cycle that I have been tuned into since 2010. Generally, information is brought to me through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, the information is then evaluated based on a quick read-through of the content and if I choose to share it is then 'organized' chronologically by my share or repost. I do this frequently sometimes all too often and find that posts that don't include additional commentary or an opinion gets very few reactions.

Note I didn't say I evaluated the resource for bias and I didn't make sure to establish the credibility of the source. While in hindsight I realize I am part of the reason we have a growing distrust in the public of the 'media' because of the continuous bombardment of 'fake news'. I think it is time for citizens to start doing their part to combat the anti-intellectualism in the age of information by curating resources.

I notice that I work very differently depending on the purpose for which I do my research. For my academic career, my research abilities have grown and have developed with my work for Marian University. The structure and expectations of the course emphasized using curated content to teach these lessons. I have used tools like Wikispaces for class, Pinterest with a coworker and bookmark tools for myself to capture things I would like to curate.

Recently our grant writing class had me do a good deal of content curation by creating a grant proposal that is to be submitted. This is all information that has been collected and resynthesizes to create a document which you can view here. Honestly, no one has bothered to teach me to curate content through my K-12 education so I am rather poor at it. The most research I have had to do was to compile and cite resources for a paper which usually meant a few books or scholarly journal articles since content from the Wild West Web was usually off limits for scholarly work.

I think I have found an area to really focus on during this course and am looking forward to learning and growing a lot during this course.