From the desk of Mr. Walters

I’ve been blogging here about gamification for years. I’ve read and watched just about everything  Gabe Zichermann  and  Jane McGonigal  have said about human motivation and how games motivate us*. I've spoken at conferences, workshops, and in-service events about gamification. Despite all of that, I have not tried Classcraft until this school year. Classcraft  bills itself as a game-based approach to teaching, but it is basically a gamification tool (see my  Gamification / Game Based Learning / Game Design disambiguation here ). It was designed to encourage participation, good behavior, and collaboration and at first, seemed like the secondary version of Class Dojo. In some ways it is, but it does a lot more. Basically, Classcraft’s goal / premise is to help me manage, motivate and engage my students by transforming my classroom into a role-playing game, which should be right up my alley. Anyone who has spent any time reading my blog knows that I love...

Even if you know nothing about design! Designed in Canva... in 1 minute. Okay, graphic design is a classically snobbish topic in most of our minds, and historically most of our students really had little opportunity to experience it or interact with it. Today, we live in a visual landscape that is constantly getting more competitive. Everyone has a connected device, including most of our students. They see great design all day on web sites, apps, user interfaces, advertisements, and even E-cards from their middle school bae. The visual elements of most of our classrooms, though, from educational / inspirational posters to handouts to our Power Point Presentations (do people still use Power Point to make presentations?) look like amateurish garbage made by a well meaning but under-skilled octogenarian trying to design a bake sale flier for the local Rotary club. We can get away with die cuts, glitter, and Karen's Kids clip art until about fourth grade. Soon, though, kids are...

A brief survey of the stuff that is coloring my decisions this 9 weeks in class & another plea for online community for my students... Paradigms, Context, & Survival... Now it's video clip time. I just want to share with you a bit of the context in which my thinking has been framed lately, before I talk about why I'm blowing up my curriculum and pursuing things that are driving me crazy. Many of you have seen this stuff before. If you haven't, watch these. They're good for you, like fiber & anti-oxidants all rolled into one delicious sweet roll: Sir Ken Robinson. Diane Ravitch - This video reminded me of  this article , which came across my Flipboard the other day, thanks to my awesome PLN... ( supplemental reading )   Jane McGonigal Projects, PBL, and Online Community One of the awesome things about being Middle School BCIT instructor is the freedom I have to teach a skills based cu...

Okay, I'd like to give y'all a chance to learn from my successes and failures over the last two weeks, so here goes. If you want students to use Diigo for class and your school doesn't have / support student email, sign up for an educator account . FAQ Get your students' info.  Use a google form with fields set up in this order: name, email, username, password. Download the resulting spreadsheet as a csv.  It should look like this . (Diigo's sample csv doesn't load) Hints for Success: Make sure to have students add school initials to their usernames; there are a lot of Diigo users out there. Create a class group and upload your users.

...that aren't overdone. This year, my colleagues and I moved into a renovated building. One of the upgrades that every teacher experienced was a classroom equipped with a ceiling-mounted computer projection unit, a Mobi (mobile whiteboard), and a Laptop.  As a result, the number of us using PowerPoint for every lesson has grown exponentially. The explosion of Power Point aided lessons has in some cases led to an exponential growth in students placing Power Point on the same level as thick worksheet packets and lengthy standardized assessments. Further, many teachers are starting to feel the same way after being subjected to poorly constructed and delivered presentations by students. What happened to this tool that at the start seemed so engaging and dynamic? Essential Question: How do teachers navigating this new world of projection screens, Smartboards, etc. keep things fresh? Let's look at some presentation tools and techniques available to any teacher with an Internet ...

Recent response to request for students to be permitted to post images, screenshots, etc. to forums in officially supported district course management system: There is a way to change the Student Permissions to allow this, however; they then have access to all of the files within that course.  This includes any database records, back-ups and general files related to the course itself.  I do not feel that this is the best option as students should not be allowed to access this information. The idea was raised that you could create a course strictly for Forums.  This would then allow students to access the course and browse all of the files without much of a security threat as there would not be a gradebook or other files that they can get to.  Again, I do not feel this is the way to go as the students may still remove or delete files that need to be kept on the server for the course to run properly.  I could see this being an option only if the students are to...

Okay so I'm facilitating a workshop on blogging today at my school, and I'm struggling to recommend any one Blog site.  They all have good features and bad, depending on what you want to do. Edublogs I used to simply recommend Edublogs.org , but due to it's new advertising practices, it's difficult to endorse. Okay, I understand.  Edublogs needs to make money to keep their servers running, but there are various degrees along the spectrum of supporting oneself and selling out.  Edublogs has sold out.  An appropriate banner ad or two is expected on most free web services, but embedded advertising links??? Will Richardson , whom I respect greatly, defines real blogging as, Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience response in mind. If this is the case, and links are an integral aspect of the connective writing process known as blogging, then what is one supposed...