Parent Communication
Stakeholder Collaboration
It is my goal to help parents and students feel like they are a connected entity in our classroom. To help parents feel connected, I have created a series of videos on our classroom YouTube channel to help parents understand our classroom. The videos describe the procedures in our classroom, what blended learning is, and how we gamify our classroom. Parents also have their own parent portal in Haiku where they can access this information, as well as their students' online course material.
Resources
Related Videos
After five years of traditional teaching, I broke away from direct instruction and moved into a self-paced, blended-gamified classroom. My students flexibly move through the curriculum while self-directing and managing their learning. This is done through the use of Classcraft, an online education gaming software, and our classroom game “Isle of Nosredna.” The addition of game elements into my classroom has helped my students stay on track and motivated as they progress through the science curriculum.
Number of Students: ~20 students/period
Number of Adults: one teacher
Length of Class Period/Learning Time: 51 minutes
Digital Content/Ed Tech Tools Used on a Regular Basis: Haiku Learning (LMS); Classcraft; Google Classroom; Doctopus (Add-on in Google Sheets connected to Google Classroom); Educreations; Flipboard; Symbaloo; Kidblog; ThingLink; Socrative; Kahoot!
Hardware Used on a Regular Basis: iPads (1:1); SMARTboard; Apple TV
Key Features: competency-based; student agency; project-based; gamification; innovative use of space
Gamification is the process of adding game elements to an environment that is not traditionally a game. I use Gamification as a strategy in my blended learning classroom to motivate my ninth grade students to engage in the curriculum and to buy in to my social and behavioral expectations--all while keeping learning fun! We have two games going on in our classroom---our academic game and our behavioral game. Our academic game is based around the storyline of the Isle of Nosredna and features an island-based theme with a leaderboard ranking based on students' engagement in our self-paced learning environment. Our behavioral game, using the Classcraft online tool, is based on health points, experience points, battles, and powers. Students work as teams to keep each other "alive" and progressing in both games.
Battling the Boss is a formative assessment strategy I use at the end of almost every level in our academic game. It's a process that allows students to prove that they understand the material covered in each level. Battling the Boss usually consists of me asking the student who has indicated that s/he is ready to "battle" one or two questions that require the student to demonstrate the skills I'm looking for them to develop in the level. If students prove that they understand the material, I let them move onto the next level. The students then put their names on the next level's poster, which is a public demonstration of each student's progress in the course. If students are not successful, they have the opportunity to do additional preparation and Battle the Boss when they have mastered the content.