Xbox Kinect in the classroom

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Alice Leung

hurdles in kinect sports

Last week I bought a Kinect for the science faculty and embedded it into a Year 7 science class. If you search for Kinect in the classroom in Google, you’d find a large number of teachers already using Kinect in the classroom. However, most of them have integrated the Kinect in complex ways that require hacking the Kinect or SDK coding. I wanted to embed the Kinect as part of a learning activity that all teachers can implement in the classroom without feeling intimidated by.

My Year 7 class is doing a unit of work on forces at the moment. In the unit of work, they do an activity to measure average speed of moving objects. Traditionally I would bring students outside the classroom to run and walk a certain distance and measure the time taken to calculate average speed. I have also used slot cars in similar ways. Now that I’ve got the Kinect, I wanted to device an activity that allowed students to do a fun activity that won’t usually be possible in the classroom.

I decided to get my Year 7s to do hurdles in Kinect Sports. In pairs, students ran a 100 m race in hurdles and Kinect Sports measured their time. Students then calculated the average speed of each student and constructed a table to show the results.

My Year 7s usually need a lot of support in learning activities. With Kinect Sports, I had a student volunteer familiar with Kinect to demonstrate the game and all students knew what to do without my help at all. They were also highly engaged and were very motivated to calculate average speeds for each student to find out who is the fastest. The students completed the speed calculations faster than I expected. In a one hour period, this is what the class achieved the following:

-Completed a quick quiz

-Brainstormed why distance, time and speed were important measurements in an object’s movement due to forces

-Students constructed a table to record the results from Kinect Sports

-Each student ran 100 m hurdles in Kinect Sports

-Average speed calculations were completed by students

-Furniture was rearranged to its original seating plan

-Lesson was summarised

It might not sound much, but this was a great achievement from this class!

While this activity may not be the most creative or complex way to integrate Kinect as a teaching and learning tool, it is an activity that can ease many teachers in integrating gaming consoles into the classroom It is a numeracy-based activity that has applications in many other subject areas. This activity was shared with other teachers at my school in our weekly Xbox professional learning sessions.

Using Google Apps to work smarter

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Alice Leung

Our school has a strong digital culture both in teaching and learning and in whole school processes. For example roll marking and many administration processes are electronic. Using technology in such day-to-day practices allow teachers to be comfortable and familiar with technology, which transcends into the classroom.

I was recently given the opportunity to move some of the school’s administration processes online. These administration processes include the applications for staff to attend professional learning and applications for excursions and variations to routine.

Prior to this, we were using interactive pdf forms for these applications. All forms were placed in a pdf portfolio in a shared drive at school. Teachers had to complete the relevant form, save the form from the portfolio and attach it to an email and send it to the designated staff member who processes the application. These processes were a critical part of the school’s journey in creating a digital culture. It allowed the school to move from paper-based processes to electronic processes. However the pdf forms had several issues, including:

Staff saving the whole pdf portfolio instead of just the relevant form.
Only one member of staff being able to access the forms’ information. This staff member would then have to pass on the information to other staff members that required this information, such as the person responsible for organising casual teachers to cover classes.
The forms taking up storage space in emails
The lack of a system to track which forms had been processed, especially in times when multiple people processed the forms

Basically we wanted a system where there were simple forms that staff can fill out and click submit (without the need to save or email). We wanted a system where multiple organisers can access the same information and track progress in processing the information.

I was lucky enough to be trusted with the responsibility in exploring a tool to do this. I decided to use Google Documents and Google Sites. I made forms via Google Documents for applications for staff professional learning and applications for excursions and variations to routine. With these forms, staff only have to fill in the relevant information and click on Submit. Designated staff members with administration access will see the forms’ responses in a spreadsheet. The main advantage is that there can multiple designated staff members working on the same document (eg. the person in charge of placing events on the school calendar and the person in charge of casual relief can work collaboratively on the same spreadsheet to track who has done what. The spreadsheet can also be downloaded as an Excel file to be backed up if required.

Screenshot of online form for application for professional learning made in Google Documents

screenshot of spreadsheet in google with responses from online forms

The next step is to find a space to hold all the forms. I decided to set up a staff intranet via Google Sites. I was also able to merge the school’s calendar and link in the school’s previously set up technology blog into the intranet. So now there is one online space for all administration processes that can be accessed at school, home and anywhere else with internet access. It can also be accessed by mobile devices.

screenshot of the staff intranet on google sitesscreenshot of a page in the staff intranet where all school admin forms are placed

Hopefully this will continue our school’s journey in creating and maintaining a digital culture. In the end, it’s about streamlining processes, centralising resources and working smarter.

The best part is Google Documents and Google Sites are free!

But I like writing on paper …

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Alice Leung

“But I like writing on paper …”

This was said to me by a Year 10 student. We were discussing how laptops were being used in his classes. He said he liked copying notes and thought that copying notes allowed him to better remember information. He said he felt like he was falling behind because he was no longer required to copy notes in class. A teacher told me they have been asking students who have their own laptops to show them their books as an indication of what the student has done in class and what the student has achieved. It is now the third year of introducing 1:1 laptops in NSW schools. What do these two reveal about students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the place of 1:1 laptops in learning?

Let’s look at the first thing: “I like writing on paper”

With the introduction of 1:1 laptops, we’ve often focused on teachers. However, we haven’t really talked about how the kids are responding to the change. I was reading an article on problem based learning the other day and the article talked about student resistance at the start. The article emphasised how some students are accustomed to transmissive teaching and may find it difficult to adopt problem based learning because it challenges them to use higher order thinking skills and to manage their own learning. This is a big change when they have been used to memorising and regurgitating information for many years (and been very successful at it and rewarded for it). Introducing 1:1 laptops is similar because it changes the learning environment. When used to transform learning, 1:1 laptops remove students from a ‘everyone-look-and-listen-to-the-teacher ’learning environment to a learning environment where students are working at their own pace, at different tasks and they need to take a more active role to manage their own learning. I’ve seen some students really take off with this while others are very reluctant. There has been lots of emphasis on preparing students to use their laptops such as teaching them how to use the software within their laptops. However, 1:1 laptops isn’t about doing work on a laptop instead of on paper. It’s about transforming the learning environment. Perhaps we need to teach students how to work in small groups, how to manage timelines in long term projects and how to self-directed independent learners.

Let’s move on to the second thing: Checking students’ book work

This works on the assumption that the amount of work in a book determines how much work a student has done. This implies that if a student doesn’t have a book, they aren’t working in class. This also implies if a student doesn’t have much text, worksheets and title pages in their book, they aren’t working in class. As educators, why are we still obsessed with book work? In a digital age where notes can be sent electronically or easily looked up on Google, how does having copious amounts of text and cut-and-paste activities glued into an exercise book indicate that you are learning? Why do we still include “book mark” as an indication of a student’s learning? Why don’t we ask students to show their Edmodo pages and see how much they have contributed to discussions, how much they have helped with other students’ questions and how many assignments they have submitted. Why don’t we ask students to show us how regularly they write on their blogs? At the moment we want students to be self-directed and independent learners and critical thinkers in a 1:1 laptop learning environment, while at the same time we want to assess their learning by requesting them to show us how much work they have recorded on paper.

It is now the third year that 1:1 laptops have been introduced to NSW schools and I think there’s still a long way to go before the full potential of 1:1 laptops is utilised in classrooms. I think this requires a lot of change – from students, teachers and what we perceive as learning

Gamifying learning in my classroom – 1:1 Learning Unconference

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Alice Leung

This post has been designed for the 1to1 Learning Unconference. I will be showcasing my work on games based learning and gamification with three of my students. Below is a summary of what the showcase will be demonstrating:

We will also have an Xbox and a selection of Xbox games so you can get a feel of games based learning yourself.

Please comment below and tell us your thoughts and ideas on gamifying learning 🙂

Should our classrooms be like Mario Kart?

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Alice Leung

Mario Kart is one of my favourite racing games. And recently it has made me think about the implications of what’s happening in my classroom.

To succeed in Mario Kart, not only do you have to drive fast and stay ahead of the pack, you also need to know how to use power-ups. Power-ups are picked up by driving into the power-up blocks. When you drive over one of these blocks, the game will assign you with a power-up. However, Mario Kart likes to work on a handicap system. mario kart power-ups Basically the further you are ahead in the race, the power-ups you get never boost your speed. So if you’re coming first, you are only ever given banana peels and turtle shells as power-ups. You leave banana peels on the track so others slip on them or you throw the turtle shell at whoever gets in front of you. You are not given power-ups to get you further ahead. If you’re further behind in the race, the game will give you a range of power-ups like:

-star (gives you a huge speed boost and you’ll take out anyone you touch)

-thunderbolt (zaps everyone else in the race and makes them small so you can run over them)

And if you’re really behind, you get Bullet Bill, Bullet Bill turns you into a bullet and you rip through the track at super fast speed, blasting everyone that gets in your way. Bullet Bill is designed to give anyone coming last with a fighting chance at the race. Basically the power-ups gives everyone an even chance of winning all the way through the race.

So what does Mario Kart have to do with my classroom?

For anyone that has been following my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been implementing gamification with my year 10 science class. (Click here for more details) We wrapped up the first gamified unit of work recently. While I was evaluating the effectiveness of gamification, I noticed the leaderboard. The winning team had over 400 points and the last team had 30 points. (Points were awarded for completing and submitting class and homework tasks). So what happened to the team with 30 points? This team wasn’t doing nothing. They weren’t being lazy. I regularly helped them in class and saw them do their work. They just didn’t hand it in.

While I haven’t asked them why they haven’t handed it in (yet), if I was them I would say to myself ‘Why bother? It’s not like our team will ever catch up.’ It is like when you are so far behind in a car racing game that you re-start the race because there’s no point of continuing. In most classrooms, there’s some kids who are behind for some reason (went overseas for a lengthy period, have poor reading skills, etc). For many of these kids, it’s like being very behind in a racing game. Everyone is on their 5^th lap while they’re still on their 1^st lap. They want to re-start the race and have another go. But they can’t. How can schools and teachers give them power-ups like in Mario Kart. I want to give those kids Bullet Bill so they will still be engaged in the game. But how? And what about the kids who are always a few laps ahead of everyone else? Are teachers keeping the game challenging enough for them?

Mission complete – an evaluation of gamification

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Alice Leung

My first attempt at gamification has wrapped up. The Great Science Race was a science unit of work on experimental design, but had gaming elements integrated such as points for completing work, passwords to level up, achievement badges and leaderboards. For more details please see my previous post.

On the last lesson, my class completed a short survey to what they thought of gamification. Click here to see the survey questions. The sample size was only 21 students, but the results were overall very positive towards gamification.

Here are some of the results:

When asked what they liked most about the unit of work, students indicated the following:

Working in groups/teams
The topic fun and entertaining
The competitive atmosphere
Doing experiments
Getting a prize at the end if your team wins

When asked about how to improve the unit of work, students indicated the following:

More experiments/more harder experiments
More organisation in handing in tasks
More interactive activities
Assigning everyone in the group with roles/tasks

The next unit of work this class is doing is Chemical Changes, a topic involving learning about atoms and chemical reactions. The class has indicated that they still like working in teams, getting points and having a leaderboard. However, I’m going to scale back on the passwords and the achievement badges.

Enhancing formative assessment & personalised learning – add on benefits of gamification

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Alice Leung

It has been two weeks since the implementation of gamification in my Year 10 Science class. Five out of six teams have completed the first two quests and have been awarded the achievement badge of “Cool Scientist” and the password to level up to Quest 3. Engagement and motivation has definitely increased for 99% of the students. I now get nervous when I log onto Edmodo because I know there’ll be heaps of work uploaded by the students with comments such as “please mark asap”. At the end of every lesson, almost every student submits one or two pieces of work on Edmodo for me to mark. I have to be honest – marking their work every night has been hard work. However, because the students are handing in quality work so regularly, I can easily analyse their areas of strengths and areas for improvement.

Before I go into this further I want to emphasise that every teacher, including myself, knows the benefits of formative assessment (For non-education readers formative assessment is about finding out what students can and cannot do regularly in class tasks. Students are given detailed written feedback. In many ways it is more effective than making students sit an end-of-topic exam). However, many teachers know how difficult it is to gather student work regularly for assessment. Many classrooms involve students doing a task and then the teacher going through the answers together with the whole class. Students mark the answers themselves and many students do not know what they need to improve on and more importantly how they can improve.

So back to gamification …. Since the students are so keen to submit their work, I had an opportunity after every lesson to see whether they “get it”. And what I found is that the design of scientific experiments is much harder for this class than I expected. I also found out they cannot construct tables to present data in a way to show trends. While most students understood independent, dependent and controlled variables, a selected number of students still didn’t. From this I was able to provide detailed written feedback via Edmodo for each student after every lesson. I was also able to plan mini-lessons at the start of each lesson to go through the concepts they did need to improve on. This was followed by students working in teams on their quests.

I can see so much potential with using gamification to enhance formative assessment, which branches off into better personalised learning plans. When I implement gamification for the next topic, I want to use it to enhance personalised learning. Here’s my idea – When students complete quests in the game, there are multiple parallel levels (tasks) that I as the teacher can give the students depending on their need. For example, the next topic is chemical reactions. If a student is capable of completing word chemical equations, I can give them the next level of writing chemical equations with chemical symbols as their “level up”. However for a student who needs more time with word equations I will provide them with more levels of practicing chemical equations. Points and leveling up is tailored for each student. I know this is a very ambitious plan and I’m still ironing out some ideas, but I think using gamification to engage and motivate, enhance formative assessment and better inform personalised learning can reap great benefits for our students.

Gamification – is it actually working in the classroom?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Alice Leung

I don’t like lugging stacks of cardboard and paper for recycling, but it has to be done. While I know it’s good to recycle, it still feels like a chore to do it. Similarly many of my students don’t like completing and submitting their work, even though they know it’s good for them. Doing work and handing it in can often feel like a chore and many students do it to avoid punishment. So how can I make my students want to hand in work? Perhaps by making it fun?

But how do I make it fun? While nothing beats designing learning that’s authentic, relevant and engaging, there are always some areas of the syllabus that is mandatory to teach, but it’s not very exciting to 15 year olds. So I started to implement gamification with my Year 10 science class. I wanted to see whether gaming elements in the classroom will increase their motivation and engagement in learning. The unit of work is that has been “gamified” is called The Great Science Race and uses game mechanics such as a narrative, quests and achievement badges. For more information on the gamification of this unit of work, please see my previous post. But in a nutshell I have turned a unit of work about setting up science experiments into a game. The unit has a story line, worksheets have been grouped into quests and students work in teams to complete their quests to receive points and achievement badges. A leaderboard has been set up in the classroom to show the ranking of each team.

So how is it going so far?

Term 2 has started and it’s the first day that students are returning to school after a two-and-half week holiday. When one of the students asked me what topic we were studying this term, I replied “scientific investigations”. He groaned: “Not all the independent variables stuff. It’s so boring”. But when I explained that the topic is a game and how the game would work, the class, including the student who previously groaned, were very excited. They laughed at the story of the secret society of epic scientists, but they were very excited about the achievement badges and the leaderboard. They quickly chose their teams and started working on their first quest.

After two lessons only two teams out of six have submitted their work. They were awarded 5 points on the leaderboard. On the third lesson the students saw the rankings on the leaderboard for the first time. The teams who were ranked first were delighted, and the teams who were on zero points worked extremely hard to ensure they caught up. One team, who was on zero points, very diligently completed most of the work from Quest 1 in a day (including doing a lot of extension work after school). They are now ranked first on the leaderboard.

I did ask myself whether the leaderboard was encouraging students to rush their work and not spend enough time on it. However, the work they submitted so far is of the same quality or better than their usual standard. But now they are submitting their work quicker and more regularly, which is allowing me to better identify their strengths and areas for improvement.

I am still in the early stages of implementing gamification so watch this space for more updates on gamification in my classroom.

Gamification in the classroom

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Alice Leung

Games based learning is supposed to be the next big thing. So when I revamped a unit of work for Year 10 based on designing scientific investigations, I decided to “gamify” the unit of work.

I was inspired by a YouTube video by Seth Priebatsch on gamification, where elements of gaming can be added to education. After also seeing presentations by Dean Groom and Ben Jones I have come up with my first “gamified” set of learning experiences.

The normal non-gamified version

Here is the unit of work in its regular, non-gamified version. It is like many units of work in high schools – sequential, everyone does the same thing, etc. In a nut shell the unit of work is about how to design and carry out fair experiments to test a prediction, how to record results accurately, how to make sure your results are reliable and how to write up a report to share you findings.

scientific investigations 2011_blog version

So here’s the gamified version

The unit of work has been turned into a game called “The great science race”. At the start students are introduced to The Professor, who explains the overall game narrative. It’s sort of a corny narrative. If anyone has a much better narrative, please let me know!

The game is divided into four quests. Each quest has a number of tasks where some are compulsory and others are optional. All tasks have been assigned points that reflect their difficulty level. For example, a fairly easy task where students have to tick whether an experiment is controlled or not will allow students to gain 5 points on completion. Whereas a more difficult task with more higher-order thinking questions will allow students to gain 10 points on completion. This is set up to encourage students to undertake more difficult tasks. There will be a leadership showing the students’ scores.

Quest 1 is the training quest and introduces students to the basics of experimental design (for science nerds these are the basics like the types of variables, the meaning of accuracy and reliability, when to use a control, etc). There are three compulsory tasks in Quest 1. These tasks need to be completed in order to gain the apprentice badge and a password to level up and unlock Quest 2. Quest 1 also has a number of non-compulsory tasks that will add to the students’ score. Like Quest 1, the other three quests require students to complete certain tasks before they are awarded a badge and a password to level up and unlock the next quest.

Quests 3 and 4 involve students choosing a problem from a list and designing an experiment to solve the problem. The problems are given different points depending on their level of difficulty.

The gaming platform

So how can I implement this game? I could program it into Adobe Flash and turn it into a FLV game, but I haven’t got the time at the moment. So I decided to use the exiting resources that I’ve got:

-The game narrative, quests and the tasks within the quests will be given to students at the start of the unit of work as a OneNote notebook. The introduction (which contains the game narrative and explanation of badges) and Quest 1 will be unlocked sections. Quest 2, 3 and 4 are different sections which has been password protected. Once students have been awarded the relevant badge they will get the password to unlock the section.

-Edmodo will be used to give students their badges and password. The class will be a group on Edmodo. This will mean that a post to the class group will be seen by all students. A “small group” will be created for each student team. Posts to small groups will be seen only by students in that small group. This means that students can have discussions amongst each other and with The Professor (me) without the rest of the class seeing. Once a student team has completed a Quest, they convert that OneNote section of the quest into a pdf document and use the “turn it in” function in Edmodo to submit it for marking. The Professor (me) will mark the quest and provide feedback. Points, badges and passwords will be given to students via posts to their Edmodo small group. Updates on which teams’ progress on badges and points will posted on the Edmodo class group.

So that’s it for the time being ….

This unit of work will be implemented in a week’s time. There will be some classes doing the non-gamified version and my class (and others) doing the gamified version. I shall update the progress on this blog.

I am also applying the same gamification techniques to a Year 7 unit of work on the classification of living things.

Watch this space …. 🙂

Teaching writing – a high school perspective

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Alice Leung

For many high school teachers, teaching students how to write can be a challenge. I have often found it a challenge to have my students write sustained pieces of text. But in recent weeks I have had some successes.

I have a Year 7 science class that consists of students who need additional support in literacy. Many of these students are also learning English as a second language. One of the first things they learn in Year 7 is to write an experiment report (Think back to high school science. It is the report that has Aim, Equipment, Method, Results, Conclusion). This week they completed their assessment task on writing an experiment report on an experiment they did that separated sand and salt. I was so impressed that all students were able to write the experiment report independently. In previous times I have had other students who had higher literacy skills that could not do it as well as these Year 7s. So what did I do different?

I have used the strategy of deconstruction, group construction and independent construction for a few years now. Whenever we need to write something, we look at an example first and deconstruct the structure and language features of the text. Then we try to write one together as a class and in small groups. This is followed by the students writing independently. I have always emphasised purpose and audience when I set a writing task for my students.

In the past many students still struggled with the last step of writing independently. What I did different this time was to provide students with more opportunities of writing independently and marking their work immediately during the lesson. In high school we often mark student work after the lesson and provide students with written feedback. From this experience I found that marking the piece of writing with the student watching and getting the student to correct their writing then and there is more beneficial than collecting the students’ work, marking it then having the student read the written corrections and comments. I used the strategy of getting the students to read out a sentence/paragraph that contains a mistake. Nine times out of ten, they pick up the mistake when they read it out loud. You cannot do this if the feedback is delayed. The opportunity for students to self correct would have passed.

I followed a very similar process with my Year 10s. My Year 10s are writing a persuasive text on whether space research is a waste of money. Like the Year 7s we looked at a sample persuasive text to analyse the structure and language features. They then worked in small groups to write a persuasive text on whether they believed the Big Bang theory explains the origin of the universe. Like the Year 7s I marked their writing with them. Since they had 1:1 laptops I used Track Changes and Comments in Microsoft Word to make corrections and record comments on what they have done well and what they need to improve on while I’m speaking to them. Students also marked each other’s writing using marking criteria.

In light of these reflections I think immediate feedback is the key. Teachers need to provide students with more opportunities to discuss their work with them and with other students very shortly after completing the task. Once again the difficulty of implementing this will be time and the pressure to ‘teach the content’. But the way I see it, what is the point of ‘pushing through the content’ when students cannot clearly articulate their understanding.