For this week’s class, Tina O’Keefe came in to give us a presentation on gamifying the classroom. I really appreciated hearing what Tina had to say, as gamifying the classroom is something I believe to be truly beneficial to student learning. In my experience, whenever an activity was gamified, my interest in the activity instantly increased. In turn, this improved my comprehension of the presented material as I became more involved and engaged with the content. In comparison, when activities were not gamified, I often had difficulty maintaining focus and interest, especially with content I already had little to no interest in. Of course, not everything in the classroom should be gamified but finding a balance between non-gamified and gamified activities brings a level of play to the classroom that I believe is too often lost. School should be something students look forward to, not something they dread due to it being boring. For this reason, I plan to implement gamification whenever I can in my future classrooms!
During her presentation, Tina also spoke about how she runs and manages her classes, which I found quite interesting! In her classes, Tina provides her students with almost complete freedom to take their learning in any direction they please. Comparatively, this is a very alternative method to teaching versus the ones we’ve come to know in the classroom. Since watching the “Most Likely to Succeed” documentary a couple weeks back, I’ve become very interested in alternative schooling. For me, the traditional methods of content presentation never really clicked so alternative teaching is definitely something I’m looking into more and more. My only concern is how effective these methods are. To my knowledge, these methods of teaching are fairly new to the education scene, so there is a chance they may not be as effective as they may seem. I have a few friends who went to Esquimalt High School, where Tina teaches, so I plan to ask them if they had any classes with Tina and how they felt about how the teaching. Hopefully, this will allow me to gain a deeper insight into these alternative methods!
Finally, Tina also introduced us to the Hour of Code Website. Hour of code is a website in which coding is presented to students in a gamified and easy-to-understand manner. On the website, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different coding-related games students may choose from. These games range from the absolute basics of coding to more intermediate levels. In our increasingly technological world, these skills will only become more and more valuable. Thus, teaching them at an early age is something I deem to be of extreme importance.
Here’s a link to a game I would share in my Wednesday â…” split Link2Practice class: https://app.codemonkey.com/junior/chapters/sequencing/challenges/1
Photo Credits: My photo
