The MindLab Session 11 - Games and Gamification in EducationalLeadership

The  start of a huge topic - and only going to be touched on today! 

A great quote from James Gee - don't try to use games for everything -that's what extrude with a text book! 

Instead think about the flip - the reverse - what could be the problems.

Today's focus 

Games and Gamification 

Games and Leadership 

Badging 

The concept of gaming is not new. Modelling or simulation games for content. Games for revision. 

The difference between becomes games and simulation is the element of competition! 

Increase engagement, especially after hours - revision! 

There are a lot of games out there - someone needs to 'sift' - how do we know the game addresses the learning objective. 

How do we choose a game for Education? 

Or is better to design a game ? How to we approach the integration of games into classroom learning? What is the function? 

5 Step Process 

- define the learning objective 

- describe the learning 'mechanic' - what actions are we looking for?

- imagine what students are thinking - what do we want going through students' heads as they play - what dots do we want them to be joining up? 

- pick a game mechanic - what game elements might best address the actions that you are looking for? (Eg work against the clock/collecting objects)

- create a theme where the mechanic can exist - what is the metaphor for the game ? (Arcade/ medieval world/ skate park)

gamesforchange.org - look and assess the games - cos this looked like a fun group of activities 

Gamification - was one of the ten trends for education by Core Ed last year.

The Horizon Report from the UK had some thought provoking ideas around future trends ini education - globally - have not had time to read yet - a holiday task!! 

http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2015-k-12-edition/

Key trends in education 

- blended / steam / creators 

- gamification - it's already been adopted by the mainstream 

Challenges that face technology -authentic learning education and integrating technology into education 

- wicked problems - spreading teacher innovation and teaching complex thinking 

- short term - maker space and BYOD 

All of the solutions are manageable 

TED Talk - Seth Priebatsch - building a game layer on top of the world 

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world?language=en

The linking of game theory to activities that we already do ini what seem to be non- game tasks was an eye opener and made sense. 

- this is already happening - coupons, loyalty cards etc - is everything a game? 

- tools to consciously influence behaviour 

Social  Layer - Connections (Facebook) - past decade 

Game Layer - influence - next decade - using forces to influence others 

How do we build the game layer? 

- the appointment dynamic - do something at a set time ( first ever game 'happy hour') - one game dynamic changes lifestyles ( medicine taking reminders) 

- influence and status - think about colour of credit cards - hierarchy of status - used in games - the tools you can get -,in conventional settings eg report cards 

- progression dynamic - eg you have completed 5% etc - game health, weapon strength 

- completion theory - complete the health bar or weapon strength

Fun Theory 

The piano stairs - why would people walk the stairs when they can take an elevator - 

James Gee - computer games simply a set of problems that need to be solved 

Most games are so complex - kids are addicted to complex games that adults give up in 25 mins! 

Schools teach the way they because of the way we are tested - eg a chunk of time, a chunk of learning - in gaming the game is the test! 

We should be able to create learning that is so deep, that we will not need a test  at the end! 

Situational learning! 

The rise of  24/7 learning provided by places other than schools, is situational, where the assessment is situated  with the learning. 

I read a lot of Gee's works when I did my Masters in 2008 - I'm keen to look into his website re social games -  http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/

Can games inculcate agency, it would be a positive.

Rewards in games, people work towards the rewards - do we want to send this message in education? Isn't it the process and the journey that's important in many areas of education.

Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation - need to find the ideal place of skill vs challenge - you become so enraged you lose track of time - the flow!!

Gamification in Leadership 

Applying games to leadership training- they simulate real environments 

But leadership is a complex thing -.

America's Army - training the lower officers in leadership skills 

Deloittes leadership programme makes use of badges - at a corporate level 

NTT - data Ignite Leadership Game - testing the key skills of leaders 

- negotiate 

- communicate 

- time management 

- change management 

- problem solving 

Where would you game a 'relationship' - apparently by simulation 

Badging

The premise is that as you acquire skills, you gain a badge - Mozilla open badges - skills that are not endorsed by a certain centre eg web developer - these badges can be linked to aggregator websites - 'backpack' 

Badges would show level of ability, level of involvement in extra curricular 

PTCs - what would you give badges for? Why? What might they look like? 

How would we reward the things that are not 'assessed' in the course? 

Eg - how we evaluate implementing our learnings in the classroom? 

     - badges for staff PD - would staff go for these ? Not everyone has the same motivation? 

This is one way you can recognise attributes in an organisation, or skill sets across institutions. 

I made a badge for Julia!!

Game design is crucial 

Games need to follow a narrative structure - one way us to begin with a teaser, followed by an elaboration that leads to conflict escalation. 

Dr Who Game Maker Activity - would you use this in your classroom? 

Could be used as a collaborative activity, aimed at teaching coding skills. Applied modelling of 21st century skills - but this took me AGES to get my head around...... 

Popular games to check out - Carmen Sandiago (and old favourite) and Agario.

Once again 4 hours flew by - lots fo food for thought regarding leadership training and game theory. 
Lots of readings to do .....

The MindLab Session 10 - Entrepreneurship, Startups, Crowd sourcing PLUS learning and problem solving with real world problems solving

Education has changed - school no longer preparing kids using skill and drill

Entrepreneurship is the way of the future - kids not just waiting for when they leave school. 

What does this look like in school? What tools are they to help us do this? 

Lean Canvas - a tool by which to test ideas

Came from the business world - a template - not a 300 page business plan 

The Mind Lab developed a lean canvas from this - which we'll have to use for the next assessment! 

Social Enterprise 

- an organisation that applies commercial strategies to maximise improvements in human and environmental well-bring - improve social well-being. Profit is in the form of social good. 

TOMS SHOES - an example if social enterprise - www.toms.com

A great little cartoon history of TOMS is here - https://vimeo.com/79833962

- a company that gives back - sustainability the key 

- from very small beginnings - 250 pairs of shoes initially - this year 45 million pairs - now in 75 different countries; now 10 different types of shoes for different climates 

- 'if you see an issue, engage with it and fix it'

- start small, but do something 

- jump in and learn while you're doing it - rather than expect to know everything 

- the world is a global village - the issues are everywhere 

- have the why - we sell shoes to give shoes - the why comes first 

- the purpose needs to be legitimate

- be more responsible (eg the business card story - do we need them? How many trees? 

This is the heart of social enterprise - business model for social good. 

TOMS founder took the workers to personally fit the shoes - they could see the impact that they had. 

The social lean canvas was what TOMS used as a plan 

The beauty is that it is an one pager! 

Preparing students for social future. 

The MindLab Lean Canvas 

Start with the problem and the who. 

Then the how and the why? 

What - is the problem - what is the proposed solution - this may change - an iterative process - but there will always be an initial idea. What is it about the proposed solution that is unique and attractive? 

Who - who are the people affected by this problem? Might be the students and parents - but could be wider. Identifying the stake holders up front is very useful. Who might be the early adopters (always an interesting question!!!!) 

How - the process - what time, space, money, people resources will be needed! How will this be sustainable? How do you ensure this innovation will keep going? How will we measure impact or success? What does success look like? What do we want to see at the end of this? How do you grow beyond early adopters? How don you spread the workload? 

Why- the so what question! What will be the impact - why is it worth doing? 

My lean canvas - version 1 (minus the template) 

What 

Problem - student engagement in junior school, integrated junior curriculum that uses student voice and choice to improve engagement 'improve student engagement and achievement by using student voice and choice to create high interest cross curricular modules of learning - possibly linked to community based issues' 

Who

Stakeholders - students - year 9 and Yr 10; staff of those year levels - early adopters are likely to be a group of staff who are keen to collaborate and deprivatise their teaching spaces 

How  

Resourcing -Time for staff to plan, adjoining spaces for teachers to team teach, upskilling of staff around Google Classroom and flipped models of delivery, collaborative planning, shared documents etc 

Sustainability- has to be sustainable; pedagogy has to shift, NZC 

Key Metrics - student voice and feedback, staff anecdotal evidence around engagement, behaviour management data, assessment???

Scalability - it needs to grow - need to plan for whole staff through to the senior school ....

Why - junior curriculum delivery needs to change - can't keep doing the same old same old ; feeder school data - research around authentic learning and problem based education; new school plans 

Real world problem-solving : decision steps  

(Many schools already working along these lines) 

CHARACTERISTICS of - 

- experienced by real people 

- solutions for a specific audience

- specific explicit contexts 

- use real data 

Crowd-funding eg Kickstarter

( focussing on sustainability) 

There are people out there who are willing to support ideas - social enterprise attracts interest.

What rewards are offered?  

- free service

- pay back 

Some of these are education  projects - http://youtu.be/6IjaZ2g-21E

Ocean clean array -

Add caption

Crowdsourcing

We looked a at few examples that could be used in education 

Zooniverse -  mainly science based projects - but I did like the WW1 letters project and the annotate artists' notes. 

OpenIDEO - good ideas around technology setups 

Innocentive - this was too wordy for most kids 

The fun stuff - Market Share 

OK - I'm not a great lover of money games - but I could see how this could be addictive - lesson learned - don't take a risk without insurance!!

The MindLab Session 9 - International Perspectives, Assessment, MOOCs and Kahoot

International Perspectives:

Today's sessions starts with cultural intelligence - the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures.

We are multicultural in a bicultural framework - which led to my reflecting on my years with Kotahitanga and the cultural understandings - implicitly know the learner. The whole premise of who they are and what they bring to the classroom. The most recent assessment has made me reflect on my learnings and understandings from Kotahitanga a lot actually. The whole notion of whanaungatanga - making connections between groups of people - kinship or otherwise. How much do we actually take notice of cultural capital? 

Looking at PISA: 

Great little video about the value of PISA - the very things that PISA says do not make a difference - are the things that we still do - separating students into academic and skills pathways and making students repeat year levels and courses. 

               https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1I9tuScLUA

What questions do we need to ask about PISA?

- what is the value of this to us - why would the students bother?

- what cultural capital of the test and the students sitting the test? 

- why are we following a vocational pathways model????

Key points from PISA 
- wealth overall does not guarantee better student performance
- quality of teachers should be the priority
- belief that all students should achieve and they have the opportunity to do so

Learning from others: 

I don't think I want anything from the Singaporean system!! It appears to be a teacher directed, content based, high stakes assessment model! 

The best model that I have seen recently was at the John Monash Science School and Australian School of Maths and Science - you can read about this here - http://aljcleary.blogspot.co.nz/2015/03/choose-your-own-adventure-australian.html and http://aljcleary.blogspot.co.nz/2015/03/work-like-scientist-john-monash-science.html - follow your passion and work like a scientist! 

Shanghai's model sounds a lot like what we are trying to introduce in Communities of Schools - getting the top performing schools and and school leaders to pull low performing schools and teachers up to scratch? 

Assessment Drives Teaching: 

What does assessment hell look like? 

- even in primary schools the key things mentioned here was 'moderation' - overall teacher judgement within schools and across schools. 

- too many assessments

- pressure to get a level of success - monetary rewards 

What does assessment heaven look like? 

- in English we have a clear goal around formative assessment - using feedback books and setting a number of formative tasks before the students enter the external examinations at the end of the year

There needs to be a lot of debate around the value of summative assessment. Because it is formative assessment that is the key indicator of student success.

How do we choose tools?

When we speak about a learning management system, who manages the learning? How the learning takes place is is controlled by the designer of the system. 

If this is the case, if the design of software controls the type of learning - how do we decide which software to use? 

The tool is irrelevant, it's how you use it that makes the difference. It is the design of the learning activity that makes the difference. How you use an APP is what makes thelearning  relevant or enables the learner to progress. 

Tools for formative assessment: 

Padlet

XMind

Kahoot

Kahoot.it session:  

Interesting Kahoots and discussion around the Finnish education system - for example who knew that the highest rate of suicide of 15-24 year old males was in Finland!

Less than 10% of students who apply get into teacher training.

Yay - I was the winner with 12447 points - 14 correct and 7 incorrect answers!!!!

MOOCS - massively open online courses:  

Why would people bother if they do not get recognition?

Why would universities bother investing in these?

Less than 10% of students who apply get into teacher training.

Studying a whole range of things for the sake of studying - less than 10% of those who sign up actually complete them. 

Check out - Clayton Christiansen - disruptive education - http://www.claytonchristensen.com/http://www.claytonchristensen.com/ - creating a revolution in tertiary education. Game changer in higher education.

Lots of theoretical today, with a Kahoot break. 

The MindLab Session 8 - Leading Change and Robotics

This week session is focussing on school transformation and leading change. The practical part of this session focuses on robotics. 

Practical activity - Robotics 

Arduino - a basic robotic micro-controller board - much cheaper than Lego robotics 

MBlock programme similar to Scratch programming -  easier to use - well that's what we were told. 

My robot time - 

Input - infra red sensors 

Outputs - motors 

Totally out of my comfort zone of knowledge here!!!!

Aim to programme the robot to follow the black line and stay inside the box! 

My brain is fried already!!

Apparently it's important to always highlight end before you go to the next command - they need to be mashed together every time you change the programme. 

I hope someone else in my group is following this!!

Reflection - thank goodness the other two in my group knew about coding! Very happy for them to take over leadership because they had the knowledge!! 

Now try to think this to leadership theory! Each situation might need a different leadership theory and style. 

School Transformation 

How do we ensure education evolves to reflect the needs of today and tomorrow? 

What does this mean for us in practice? 

- regularly reviewing things like vision 

- broadening our view 

- how do we make those changes in our school 

- how do we get that 'leadership lens' into our schools - and become a thought leader 

Self review - why do you teach? What do you stand for? What do you hope to achieve as an educator? 

Social media has opened our world to views that we may not have ever looked at before - different world views and educational viewpoints. 

Ramsay Musullam 

This video on sparking student learning is underpinned by ideas of student centred learning, personalsation and differentiation - not all students being on the same page at the same time. Inquiry over content. 

I liked his final statement - new paradigm - cultivators of curiosity  - rather than delivery of content. 

https://www.ted.com/talks/ramsey_musallam_3_rules_to_spark_learning?language=en

Educational Philosophy 
What is an educational philosophy? 

What is my personal educational philosophy? 

Draw a concept map of your own educational philosophy that analyses the political, social, philosophical and economic assumptions that underpin that philosophy. 

Quite like this set of questions - http://www.edulink.org/portfolio/philosophies.htm
to help frame a philosophy statement. 

Leading Change 

Change management - change does not happen in a vacuum
It happens in the context of 
- multiple stakeholders (who are they in education?)
- strategies (what is your school's strategic vision?)
- evidence (how do you find the evidence to support and monitor change?) What evidence do I need to gather and how do I gather it??
How do I know whether my change is successful? What are the measurable outcomes.

How do we communicate change to our school community?

This particularly relevant at the moment - considering that our most recent community consultation only 5% of the community responded!! 

Seemed like a long session today!!