This week in EDCI 336 we had guest speaker Tina O’Keefe speak with us about how she uses technology in her classes. In her class, students get to decide which google classroom course they want to take based on their preferences and skill levels. Tina shared different programs she incorporates to teach technology skills and gamifiy the learning. We then tried one of the resources she uses, Hour of Code, together as a class.

Photo by Toby56 on Unsplash

Tinas presentation was so interesting to me. I have never heard of gamification of learning or the importance of it. For example, I never considered the benefits of using Minecraft to teach students about resources and building projects. I suppose it was all new and exciting to me because technology wasn’t as important in my elementary curriculum growing up. Now, technology has become such an integral part of our lives and we need to educate and prepare our students for a future that will be even more dominated by it. We need to prepare them for technology jobs that haven’t been invented yet. How do we do this? This can be daunting for new teachers who didn’t grow up with a lot of gamified learning. Me being one of those people. But Tina provided us with lots of ways to teach students about technology in a fun and engaging way. Some examples of the resources she shared were Nitro Type, Scratch, Microbits, Kodable, and Hour of Code. When we tried Hour of Code, there were a lot of interesting games. I liked that you are able to sort through the games using different filters on the left of the screen. I set my filters to iPad activities and grades 1-2, because my grade 1/2 Link2Practice class has access to iPads. The game I found was called RodoCodo and it teaches kids the very basics of what coding can do. There are two parts for students to choose from, ages 4-7 and ages 8-11. Within these parts, there are different levels, increasing in difficulty, for kids to advance to as they progress in their code proficiency. I think my students would be able to do this because it’s a simple drag and drop activity where they just have to count the moves they need to do in order to complete the track. Below I have included a video of myself playing RodoCodo. There are YouTube videos at the beginning of every level to teach students new commands. I think the game is fairly straight forward and effectively teaches students the basis of coding.

Thanks to Tina and the reading Joanna suggested, I now know the importance of gamification of learning and different ways in which I can incorporate it into my future classrooms. I’m so grateful for all the resources we are learning about in this class. It feels like I’m just building a large cheat sheet for how to incorporate technology into my classes in a fun and engaging way. I plan to check out and use some of the resources provided by Tina to teach different things like typing, coding, artificial intelligence, computer science, etc. I hope you guys get a chance to check out RodoCodo and I encourage anyone who didn’t make it on Monday to try Hour of Code. So fun!

Special thanks to Toby56 for the photo on Unsplash