The F Word

What is a game?  Wikipedia says it is structured playing, yet ask around and you will get as many different definitions.  I think a game is an activity with a prelusory goal within the confines of voluntarily constitutive rules; in other words, structure and attitude.  But what makes playing games so engaging is that they are FUN.

Vygotsky (1978) said, "play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development."

Fun can be many things to many people, yet fun is always highly engaging to all people.  Through research,  XEODesign discovered The 4 Keys to Fun which is a model for thinking about fun.  It is also useful for planning for fun learning experiences or gamification that engages players at the 'right' level of fun; even fun can get boring eventually.  The four types of fun are: easy fun, hard fun, people fun, and serious fun.  

Fun is a powerful motivator and finding the fun in everyday experiences can be used in gamification, in education, or to change social behavior.  Thefuntheory.com believe that the easiest way to change people’s behavior is to find that fun, and I totally agree, this is my favorite.

Finally, I encourage you to try fit that F word in your teaching and learning.

References

The 4 Keys to Fun retrieve from http://www.xeodesign.com/research.html on 16 May 2013.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). The Role of Play in Development retrieved from http://www.igs.net/~pballan/RoleofPlayinDevelopment(Vygotsky,1978).htm on 16 May 2013. 

Avoid Spam with an Email Icon

Spam seems to come and go in waves, sometimes just ripples but other times a tsunami!   One way to lessen your spam is to avoid having your email typed on your webpages; "spider" programmes trawl the net and collect emails for spammers.  

As I have just been updating one of my sites, I found this easy email icon generator which turns your email into an image.  Now dumb "spiders" can't read and collect my email, yay!

Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

In this inspiring TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish; diversity, curiosity and creativity.  He says they are however contradicted by the culture education under which most teachers must labor & students endue.

1. All students are different: give equal weight to other curriculum areas

2. Teaching is a creative system not a delivery system (the point of education is to get people to learn - the role of the teacher is to facilitate learning).

3. Human life is inherently creative: being opposed by the current culture of standardization.

Sir Ken states that great leaders should know that: education is not a mechanical system it is a human system - the culture of a school provides the conditions for learning to happen -  teachers and students need discretion to be creative and innovative in what they do. The real role of leadership at state or school level should not be command and control; it is climate control, creating a climate of possibility for learning.

Game Based Learning vs Gamification

In order to use games and/or gamification purposely in education we need to start with understanding the difference between Game Based Learning or Gamification?  

Game Based Learning or GBL is using games for learning; they are usually topic, concept or skill specific, in order to teach or provide practice in achieving some clear learning outcomes. GBL is a useful and engaging tool to reinforce or scaffold a learner, like any tool in a teachers kete, it needs to be the right one at the right time to be effective. 

GBL and Gamification sometimes overlap. Where there are games with clear learning objectives, but are also using gamification (points, badges, leader boards) within the game (Lure of the Labyrinth).  Or using using a range of GBL games to teach smaller chunks of skills; but tying them together using a social gamification framework like, Mathletics or Sumdog.

Gamification is the process of using game design, elements and game thinking in order to apply them to non-game contexts to engage your players to achieve your objectives.  Some examples are FourSquare in the entertainment area, or Linkedin who use profile completion bars effectively.

1. Game elements are points, leveling up, collecting resources, quests, avatars, and social graphs.
2. Game design techniques are planning your objectives and designing fun activities for your players.

"Play creates a zone of proximal development of the child.  In play a child always behaves beyond his average age." Lev Vegotsky

Why study gamification?  Games are powerful things with strong links to the psychology of motivation.  The encourage rich immersion and use strategies to scaffold, give feedback, challenge and reward.  Data is able to be easily tracked for assessment. 

Where is it already being used?

- Edmodo is an excellent social network style learning site which now offers badges.

Gamification is not a "ready to bake" mix guaranteed to work every time.  It is like teaching, taking a range of tools and techniques and putting them together with just the right mix of magic.  So Gamification in education can and will take many forms, not all will work and not all situations are suitable for it either.  But it does have the potential to transform learning experiences and make life long learning a game worth playing.

I have always been fascinated by Game Based Learning and Gamification because learning should be fun.  Do you have any examples of Game Based Learning or Gamification in education?

Measuring screen elements in pixels

In a past life as a graphic and web designer, I often needed to know the pixal measurement of images on the screen.  If you have ever had a blog, wiki or other website, you will know that sometime size really does matter.

I used to use a pixal rule app like the ones below.  It sits above everything else, can measure horzontal and vertical in pixels, inches, picas, or centimeters.  They are free and come with a whole lot of other good features.

Mac: http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/

Windows: http://www.arulerforwindows.com

The thing is I am really lazy and opening a new application is sometimes just too much!  After some googling and luck I found a discussion on Mac OS X Hints, on measuring screen elements in pixels.  It turns out to be the simplest and effective way of measuring pixels on Apple Macs.

Use the built-in screen capture command (Cmd-Shift-4) to drag and measure the area you want to measure. Click and drag to measure it; to avoid taking a screenshot press the Escape key before letting go of the mouse button. 

I use this when embedding forms, videos, other webpages, polls etc. into tables when I have limited area on my webpage. 

I'd love to know what use you find for it.

Some useful things you can add to an Evernote note

Evernote is a website and app that stores information and synchronizes across all your devices.  It's logo is an elephant, I think they are suppose to have good memories. I don't, so it functions as a digital memory and lately as my "To Do" list and even bookmark.  

I also use it to keep photo records of student data, notes when conferencing, samples of their work; which are all easily sorted using tags and Notebooks.  I love how Evernote can scan and find text from digital copies of printed text, it's search feature makes it powerful!  I have been using the free version of Evernote for over two years and still finding new ways to use it.

Playing around with some of it's features last night, I found that JPG's and PDF's are embedded as a viewable image in the note.  The date and time stamps are useful for quick notes on the go and the audio notes with a note are so easy to use, I'm thinking running records, oral assessments...  Another amazing feature I found is you can embed a Pages document in a note which shows as a button; click on it and a mini window opens showing the content, nice.

If you use Evernote then get another free app from the family; Skitch.  Skitch allows you to annote any image then share it or make it as a note in Evernote, which can be tagged and allocated to any notebook.

Evernote and Skitch are on all my devices and I am only starting to tap into their possibilities.

What happens if we give these tools to our students?

Edtalks video: Co-operative and collaborative teaching

My collaborative teaching teams discuss the benefits and the challenges of working collaboratively for ourselves as professionals, and for the students in our care.  This video is recorded by and from the Edtalks website, a growing resource of excellent videos of education professionals sharing their learning journeys.

This was recorded at Ulearn 2012 after a very long day, that's why I look so ragged.  
Co-operative and Collaborative teaching from EDtalks on Vimeo.