I’m not a real big video game fan, but I’m very interested in how to gamify a classroom, with or without technology, so that the same elements that engage learners so naturally on video games might apply to social learning. My summer started last Spring Break when I sat down with a fellow teacher and brainstormed how we could create an online learning environment to support kids practicing basic skills that might reduce summer slide. Our process was relatively simple, that we wanted to identify specific skills to practice, a platform to use, and find a way to keep kids engaged, all while measuring if we had an impact.
We looked at classroom data and standardized test evidence across a group of students who would be leaving 4th grade and entering 5th grade where my partner was teaching. Thinking this experiment might be replicable, we started a Google Doc to document our process and ended up creating teacher and parent manuals for how to implement our program, called the Summer Online Academy. Now any teacher could follow our design for any number of students s/he wanted to follow through the summer.
Researching data from students in our district, we soon learned that fluency in math and reading were huge stumbling blocks to advanced application. This was especially apparent in a population of kids across the district who were just beneath proficiency for their grade level. Schools are busy working on bringing the bottom up, ever since policy in Michigan indicated that intensively supporting “bubble kids” (those just beneath proficient) wasn’t sufficient. We chose to evaluate the effects of regular practice for any kids not at grade level, but on a voluntary basis to see if we could create an experience where kids would choose to practice basic skills, even minimally throughout the summer.
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The platform we chose was Edmodo for our Summer Online Academy (where the words teacher, assignment, and school were replaced with coach, mission or work, and academy). Edmodo functions similarly to Facebook, a draw to upper elementary kids, but provides more security, assessment functions, and built-in scoring. It also provides badges, which we learned are the incentive much like points in a game. Kids appear to perform differently when they begin at zero and work up to each next level based on what they can do and what you can teach them to do, than they do when we start them at 100% and whittle them down based on what they don’t know or what we didn’t teach them effectively enough to perform. Hmm.
From Edmodo we provided links and instructions for using RAZ Kids (reading fluency) and Xtra Math (math fluency). Each site has built in reports and performance levels, so we just created accomplishment badges based on these. The basic design was for kids to work just 30 minutes a day using both tools and we would check in weekly to review their work and deliver badges.
We launched the whole event with a pizza supper where we detailed the entire program to kids and parents, demonstrated each site, and outlined how it all would work, but most importantly WHY it was necessary. Ten families came to the supper and by the time we launched the week after school, 15 kids were registered with permission slips with 5 parents who had created accounts as well to be active in their children’s learning.
The Summer Online Academy is a week away from finishing and we are going to have some final measurement of the kids who participated along with a control group. We want to collect survey data from both control group kids and parents and Academy kids and parents to determine how much practice is typical versus how much, or little, they had to do with us and what impact it had on their Spring to Fall reading and math fluency performance. Stay tuned for results and let me know if you’d like to learn more about how to implement this with your outgoing or incoming kiddos…if every teacher identified just 3 kids who could use some summer coaching, think of the difference that investment could make for those kids’ academic performance and the relationship they would have with you!