” Somewhere down the line, learning became not fun.”
Game Based Learning
When I heard this quote in the “Game Based Learning” video I sunk deep into my chair. Do learners entering my room feel this way about learning? This made me reflect on what I do for learning and how I make it engaging and effective.
In our space, I have created “Exploration Bins” where we explore numbers and letters in a game-like or play fashion.
These bins are very low stakes and they can be differentiated as the learners need. They also allow me to move around the classroom and monitor learning and offer guidance if needed. They also allow me to have an interpretive role where I can ask , “what can I learn about the student’s thinking by attending carefully to what she just said?” (Black & Wiliam, 2014) This way I am formatively assessing where my learners are at so that I can build more learning resources to guide them to where they need to go.
In this bin, each learner will pick a colour and a partner and choose one sheet. Their job is to roll the die, build that amount of blocks and place it on the corresponding digit. Once a player places their blocks on the digit no one else can go there. The goal of the game is to have the most amount of spots filled on the sheet once you no longer have any cubes.
Here, learners who are just beginning to recognize digits will be happy with this. But as an extension to those who are further along in their number sense, they can grab two dice and add them together to find where to put their blocks. I realized, that I do gamify in my classroom and that these bins truly keep them engaged and entertained.
That being said, I learned from this weeks learning materials that I have NOT flipped my classroom, but I now have ideas how I will. I love the idea of sending home the learning resources through videos, readings or tasks to respond to via something like Padlet or Polleverywhere. This way, I can have my learners prepped about what is happening in the class and have exciting and interactive tasks for them to DO in class. Not only that, but I can have a basic understanding of what they know coming into a lesson. If I know what they know or do not know, I can start there and move forward. Rather than potentially reteaching something they know and boring them to tears.
I have been following a teacher on Instagram called Trevor Mackenzie, aka @tntmackenzie, and he has just written a book on Student ownership of Assessment. If you have a chance to check him out, he is a great resource, and so are his books. Below is a sketchnote that I use as a reminder for myself.
Citation
Game Based Learning. (2021, May) University of Toronto. https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=448614&p=3507705
Black, P., & Wiliam , D. (2014). Assessment and the Design of Educational Materials. https://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume2/issue7/article23/.
Mackenzie, Trevor. (2021). Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/tntmackenzie/?hl=en