Saturday, October 6, 2012

This has been something that I have been wrestling with.  At first I didn’t see the point. After listening to several presentations and doing some reading I now feel that I have a better understanding of why you would want to gamify your curriculum.  I heard a presentation at the Adobe Education Summer Institute that really intrigued me.  I followed up with Mike Skocko who is a teacher & Tech Coordinator at Valhalla High School in El Cajon, CA.  For years I have followed Mike (and the MAC Lab) and Rob Schwartz (and Brainbuffet) from Seminole Ridge High School, Loxahatchee, FL (both Adobe Education Leaders) who teach what I teach.  They are awesome and I love their method of deliver and philosophy of education.

I followed up with Mike and found some exciting things.  He and several students have developed a Wordpress website gamifying the education he has been delivering for years (and I have been following).  While this overwhelmed me a little, I was fascinated.  I have been follow all of the posts on the Adobe Education Exchange through the trials and tribulations of getting something like this setup.  I truly feel like he is on to something.  Check out his new site:  Mac Lab 3.0
I thought about re-creating this through Moodle, especially the new Moodle 2.3 which has the ability to not let students move on unless they have completed certain requirements.  I actually started to create this.  I had a student test it out.  However, I see several things that he is able to do with his site that I will will not be able to do with Moodle, or would be quite complicated and possibly confusing.  

I decided, after that experience, to contact our computer science teacher, Dave Hamilton, to see if he had a couple of students that might want to get involved in something like this.  Dave is also the Track Coach for Sentinel High School, and he said he would not be able to do anything for two weeks.  He was very interested, however and had a book (with many bookmarks) that support gamifying education.  I will be getting back in touch with him, for sure.

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