Getting in the Game--A Review of The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning

One of the least understood possibilities in the pedagogy of education is the world of gaming.

Don’t worry. Help is here. The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning is an excellent starting place for anyone who would like to merge gaming with schoolwork design.

Contributing writer Katie Salen Tekinbas tells us, “For a long time, learning—school learning—has demanded something different. But that something different has sometimes been manifest in policies, which emphasize outcomes like standardized test scores, rather than a love of learning, and which result in experiences that are efficient (e.g. metrics driven) yet rarely child-centered. Such an approach to education doesn’t so much discount engagement as a condition of learning as erase it altogether.”

Amen, Katie. Phil Schlechty is beaming right now!

The world of gaming provides many opportunities to address engagement in classroom work designs. While it is a no-brainer to see that gaming addresses Authenticity, Novelty, and Affiliation, the reality is gaming can address multiple qualities of schoolwork that lead to engagement.

The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning is very well laid out. There is an excellent introduction followed by a section on research. If you are interested in detailed research on gaming, the authors direct you to a very comprehensive survey. Following the introduction and research, the booklet covers:

• How to Start Using Digital Games for Learning
• How to Choose a Digital Learning Game
• Overcoming Obstacles for Using Digital Games in the Classroom
• How Teachers are Using Games in the Classroom

The guide includes links to a wealth of resources and examples. There are even videos of actual classroom usage.

Teacher/designers familiar with the 10 attributes of schoolwork that can lead to engagement will find Dr. Schlechty’s 10 Design Qualities all over this document. It would make an interesting task to pencil in given Design Qualities as they appear in the article-– by name, metaphor, or synonym.

This article is a confirmation that the 10 Design Qualities drive engagement.

Whether you are just getting started with digital gaming in your classroom or are a seasoned veteran, this guide will be helpful to you. We highly recommend it!

The Engagement People

The Teacher's Dilemma

The Teacher’s Dilemma

Teachers and others who theorize about teaching are well aware that the instruction of children in large groups (larger than eight to ten children) is not ideal and that individual tutoring and instruction in small groups are probably more effective means of instruction. Until the digital age, the economic realities of mass education made—or were perceived to make—such a solution beyond reach. Consequently, educators have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to create ways to individualize and personalize instruction in a context that is designed to support mass instruction and batch processing. The result is that teachers worry much over the fact that the demands of large collections of children gathered in a single place for instruction make it very difficult for teachers to do many of the things they believe are important to educate each child—for example, to coach and assess each child each day in a careful manner. A teacher once said to me, “There are so many of them and so few of me. Their learning styles differ, and I try to adjust what I do to meet their styles, but like everybody else, I am limited in what I can do.”

As long as teachers believe that they are or should be the primary source of instruction for children in school or out of school, teachers will always be confronted with this very real dilemma. Fortunately the revolution that has developed around electronic information technologies makes it possible to address the problems this dilemma presents in ways that were not possible in the past.

Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work
Phillip C. Schlechty, 2011, p. 99

Want to see how one teacher uses technology to address the "teacher's dilemma" while leveraging the Design Qualities of Authenticity and Novelty? Watch this video.

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Product Focus and Creativity

Phil Schlechty often tells us that engagement begins with a product, performance, or exhibition that the student cares about. What that looks like and how teachers go about leveraging it is as varied as the needs, motives, and values of students. This blog is about one educator's experience designing for Product Focus.

Ann Witherspoon is a district instructional technologist at Frank Seale Middle School in Midlothian ISD, Texas.

Ann designed a school-based take-off on Google's "20 percent time." This phrase refers to a practice in which Google would allow its employees 20 percent of their time to work on projects of specific interest to them. Students at FSMS were allowed to sign up for a school version of Google's 20 percent time led by Ann. What transpired is really quite amazing to see. Students spent their time dreaming about products they would like to see created and then creating presentations to demonstrate their products. In some cases, such as one student author who wrote two novels, students actually created their products. In other cases, students designed products they would like to see created. The learning and creativity is inspiring. Check out these examples:

The work is impressive enough, but listen to the students reflect on their experiences in this video:

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Like what you are seeing? Do you see something that might address the Design Qualities your students respond to? Ann tells you all about how to do it at Inspire With 20% Time.

What would YOUR students come up with if they were allowed to have "20 percent time"?

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SafeShare.TV and Protection from Adverse Consequences

Picture this. It’s Monday morning, the first day your students will show their project presentations. Your first students take the podium and are doing pretty well cruising from one slide to the next. They have embedded a related YouTube video into the presentation, and as it plays you can tell it is really helping make their point. Then it happens. As the video concludes with that collage of image links they all end with, the class erupts into laughter. There she is, the latest pop star, only half-dressed. And listed down the right side of the screen are a number of video images inappropriate for your kids. Your student presenters are devastated.

They need Protection from Adverse Consequences for Initial Failures.

Enter SafeShare.TV and a great blog from Dr. Roland Rios at Ft. Sam Houston ISD in Texas. Read on…

Friday Freebie: Safely Share YouTube Videos With Your Students!

Let's face it, teachers love YouTube! There is a lot of great stuff out there to share with students. But, whether you're displaying a video in class or posting a link on your website, you have to be careful. On the YouTube page itself there are tons of links to other videos, and sometimes comments from other viewers. And, no matter how innocent and appropriate the video itself may be, there are times these links and comments are wildly inappropriate for young eyes.

There is an easy solution--SafeShare.TV. And when I say easy, I mean EASY. Here's what you do...

1. Find the YouTube video you want to share and copy the URL (web address) of the video.
2. Go to www.safeshare.tv.
3. Paste the YouTube link in the box under "Paste a YouTube Link."
4. Click "Generate Safe Link."
5. After the Link is created you'll see a preview of your safe link and a link to go to the safe view.
6. There is an option under that to "Customize Video" that allows you to change the title, the background theme, the option to share, and even trim the start and end of the video!

If you use customization, do that first, and then follow the link to the safe view. Once there, copy the web address (URL) of the safe view. This is the link you'll want to save for viewing in the classroom or posting to your website.

Happy and safe viewing!

Thanks, Roland. Friends, you can join Roland’s blogs directly here: http://rioscybercafe.blogspot.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @drrios.

The Engagement People

Digital Tools and Engagement

At the Schlechty Center, we offer a parallel process for using digital tools in the classroom.

First, it is crucial to know we believe student engagement is essential to profound learning. Students are engaged when they are attentive, persistent, and committed, and when they value and find meaning in their schoolwork.

There are 10 qualities of schoolwork that address intrinsic motivation. These 10 Design Qualities include Content and Substance, Product Focus, Organization of Knowledge, Clear and Compelling Product Standards, Protection from Adverse Consequences for Initial Failures, Affiliation, Affirmation, Choice, Novelty and Variety, and Authenticity. Each of these is considered in the social context of meaning and value to the student. In other words, if a student values affirmation, designing Affirmation into the schoolwork can lead to an engaged student.

A teacher can align digital tools to the Design Qualities and use them to produce engagement.

For example, a class of students in Dallas, Texas, learned science standards through a project on the West Nile virus. Their teacher invited a local doctor to contribute to their projects via Skype. For many students in the class, the doctor became someone whose affirmation they valued. When it came time for students to present their projects, the doctor participated via Skype. The teacher created Affirmation by video linking the classroom to a person significant to the students. Had the teacher linked another person of lesser significance to the class, the affirmation might not have occurred.

Another teacher in a botany class was faced with teaching the mundane task of leaf identification. However, the teacher was well aware that the students found meaning and value in creating videos with their iPads. The teacher designed work that caused the students to create a movie that included a variety of leaves. Creating a video is a form of Product Focus. She aligned the digital tool iMovie to Product Focus to engage her students.

We call this a parallel process because it can work in tandem with other processes such as SAMR. For example, a teacher might ask a small student team to create notes on a Google Doc. At the substitution level, the teacher was merely replacing pen and paper with a computer. However, the ability to share the doc among the teams and have all students contribute to one document augments the original note-taking task. At the same time that the teacher sought augmentation, she also sought to leverage the Design Quality of Affiliation to engage her students. She created an interdependent experience by requiring each student to contribute to the task. This in turn created the Affiliation she sought for engagement to add to the augmentation provided by the digital tool. In this case the Google Doc addressed parallel uses:  Affiliation and augmentation.

A common mistake teachers make in selecting technology for their students is to think that technology itself will be engaging. Those days have truly passed. As one student in Columbia, South Carolina, put it, “To us, technology is like air. It’s always going to be there.” The initial novelty of a new digital tool can often fool teachers into thinking that they have found an engagement gold mine only to wonder a few days later why the students are no longer interested. Hint: the novelty wore off!

Learning to use the full spectrum of Design Qualities and match them appropriately with digital tools can significantly increase the likelihood of engagement. 

We will explore this concept in further detail in future blogs.

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Introducing a New Gathering Place for Ideas

In the world of categories, "The Engagement Connection" will get labeled a blog site. That’s a shame because, in the words of the net generation, it really “is what it is,” a gathering place for ideas.

Here we hope to keep the national conversation going on engagement. Sure, we’ll post articles on the subject of engagement in general, but we plan to have a healthy dose of ideas a teacher could take right back to the classroom.

Here is a sample of what's coming:

Tired of boring professional development? You will enjoy the upcoming article “Choosing Your Next Conference.”

Thinking about digital gaming and its impact on learning and engagement? You will want to read our review of the MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning.

Looking to connect the Design Qualities to digital tools? We have a blog coming entitled “Digital Tools and Engagement.”

Looking for specific ways to connect digital tools with a given Design Quality? Check back for a future guest blog from Dr. Roland Rios and see how we connect it with Protection from Adverse Consequences for Initial Failures.

Getting the idea?

Yes, we’ll also weigh in from time to time on education’s hot topics and brag on the good work our friends are doing in the field, but our intent is for you to find this site a helpful source of ideas you can use. And that’s why we call it "The Engagement Connection– A Gathering Place for Ideas."

Your time is valuable. To cut your reading time significantly, we will post to Twitter and Facebook when new ideas are added. So follow us on Twitter (@schlechtycenter) or like us on Facebook. Then you will be just a click away from what interests you.

Finally, if there are topics or questions you would like us to address, drop us a line and we will do our best to address your needs. You can e-mail us at info@schlechtycenter.org.

The Engagement People