Literacy Now

Raise your hand if you’d like to create a “picture-perfect” classroom—a place where your students are engaged and responding eagerly. A place where you hear the “Oh, man! We have to clean up already?” comments when your students just want to keep going. Can this classroom truly exist in today’s high-tech, fast-paced world?

p: Enokson via photopin cc

While the “picture-perfect” classroom may seem like more of a dream than a reality, it is certainly not impossible. At the end of each day, teachers want to feel confident that their students are going home with a sense of wonder and accomplishment. Educational games—desktop computers and tablets included—provide effective teaching tools that can motivate students and captivate their interests to foster this environment.

So, how do you get started?

1. Begin by personalizing the relationships with students.
Establish personal connections and build a strong rapport with your students at the start. From the moment Kaylee walks into the room, acknowledge her with a high five and a “Good morning.” Spend time in small groups to ask Tommy and Stephen, who play together at recess, what they spend their time doing at home. Plop down next to Sheila, who never speaks up in class, and find out what excites her. Personalizing relationships with your students from the start sets a positive tone, sets expectations, and helps them feel connected. After all, kids are more absorbed in the material if the classroom culture is welcoming and expectations are clear.

How does this impact e-gaming?
Educational gaming personalizes the learning environment for your students. It does this by offering approaches that will not only meet their learning styles, but also their individual interests as well.

2.  Incorporate objectives faithfully.
When planning a game-based learning lesson, teachers must adhere to learning objectives and goals. “Playing video games to learn” sounds like fun to anyone, but administrators and parents will only buy into it if the games are intentionally aligned to the curriculum.

How does this impact e-gaming?
According to nonprofit research firm SRI International, children are 90 percent more engaged when they are actively participating in an activity, as compared to simply reading. Educational games increase active engagement in the lesson. E-gaming ties the skills to their keenest interests, which, in turn, initiates digging further into an interest without being told to do so.

3. Avoid reinventing the wheel.
While teachers often come up with their own creative ways to integrate technology into lesson plans, online resources such as Submrge, Graphite, Edshelf and Edutopia provide inspiration for teachers. Resources like these are dedicated to empowering teachers with helpful hints, imaginative ideas, and lesson plans to ignite student learning without reinventing the wheel.

How does this impact e-gaming?
Today’s tech-savvy kids will be more engaged through digital-learning technologies. Using readily available resources will allot you more time to integrate the standards into your day. 

4. Organize small group stations.
Just as there are many philosophies in education, there are differing opinions about small group instruction, as well. However, if specific expectations are established from the beginning, you’ll avoid a classroom management nightmare.

How does this impact e-gaming?
Placing students in small groups enables you to adjust gradually to the use of e-gaming in the classroom. Begin with three to four stations, depending on your class size, focusing at least one of those stations on using digital learning tools.

Suggested stations include:
Station 1: Teacher instructed– Personalized learning enables teachers to key in on learning styles.
Station 2: Technology integration – Skill-based programs on a tablet or computer.
Station 3: Independent study – Students work independently to accomplish a task.
Station 4: Small group collaboration – Students collaborate to complete tasks.

Overwhelmed yet? Start small.
Since you’ve read this far, you’re already interested in enriching your curriculum with digital learning. While it may seem overwhelming at first, feel free to start small. Providing your students with just a few minutes of digital learning and increasing the amount each day channels their energies and personalizes their learning. With practice and patience, your students will be performing like critical thinkers and problem solvers in no time at all.

Lindsey Hill is a two-time Elementary Teacher of the Year honoree and veteran teacher of 14 years. As the lead for reading engagement innovation at Evanced Solutions, LLC, she explores current trends in reading innovation to aid in the development of solutions that increase reading proficiencies among our youth. By spending time with parents, teachers, librarians and students in and out of elementary classrooms, Lindsey is able to demonstrate how kids can embrace their interests to learn and read proficiently.

Much in the wide world has changed since I began teaching in 1991—landlines have given way to iPhones, the Soviet Union has dissolved, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been rebooted several times over. Yet much has remained the same. In 2009, when I returned to classroom teaching after spending ten years away as an educational consultant, I came back to a school where I was required to use a core-reading (or basal) program, a program very similar to the one I was required to use almost 20 years earlier.

In 2010, after one year of using this basal program, my frustrations were many. Few phonic patterns were taught to mastery. Spelling was not strongly integrated with writing. There was a dearth of authentic reading and writing activities and too many worksheets. Students had no choice in what they read, and there was little time for them to practice reading on their independent levels. The list goes on and I haven’t even mentioned my struggling readers’ slow rate of achievement or the creativity and professional control the teacher’s manual stripped from me.

After listening to me gripe for months about the basal, my mother, a retired literacy professional, sent me THE DAILY FIVE and encouraged me to pitch it to my building’s administration as a replacement model. However, our district, just like many others, had made a commitment to their very expensive program. I knew they wouldn’t allow me to simply cast it aside.

Simultaneously, while guest lecturing to pre-service teachers at a local university, speaking on the joys of guided reading, browsing bins, and independent writing routines, two students said to me, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but in our school we use a basal program. We’re not allowed to implement any of the cool stuff you’re showing us.”

All of this led me to wonder, “Is there a way to meld the progressive practices I believe in with the traditional core-reading program I am required to use?” Personally, I couldn’t stomach the basal, yet I couldn’t get rid of it. And so I approached my district’s curriculum director and asked for permission to modify and supplement the reading program in one 3rd grade classroom. My goal was twofold: 1) maintain my sanity during upcoming years of teaching, and 2) increase the reading achievement of my struggling readers. Thankfully the reply was “go ahead.”

I based the new program on what I considered to be the four essential elements of any effective reading program:

1. Time for extended reading
2. Time for extended writing
3. Attention to the big ideas in reading and writing
4. Use of effective teaching practices

As my cooperating 3rd grade teacher and I taught with this modified and supplemented basal reading program, and as I watched it unfold over the year, I saw struggling readers experience success more often and reach higher levels of achievement than they had in the previous year. I became excited by the idea that I could write a book about this “bridge” program, bringing a message to other basal using teachers (which, I found out, were the majority of reading teachers in the United State) that said, “If you must use a basal, you can make it better.” What exactly does better mean? It means more interesting and engaging to all readers, more effective for the lowest and highest achieving readers and writers, and more satisfying to masterful teachers.

That 3rd grade program planted the seeds for SUPER CORE! TURBOCHARGING YOUR BASAL READING PROGRAM WITH MORE READING, WRITING, AND WORD WORK. Its most important messages are: 1) a core-reading program should never be and can never be a complete reading program because it simply isn’t flexible enough, powerful enough, or motivating enough to enable all children to reach important reading benchmarks, and 2) by subtracting a few components, adding a few research-based reading strategies and routines, and becoming mindful of a few instructional techniques, teachers and administrators can create a much more effective reading program.

During my years as a consultant, I met reading teachers who knew these messages to be true. But because most were not permitted to make changes to their district’s publisher-created core-reading program, they had to “fly below the radar,” making instructional changes clandestinely, tucking in progressive reading routines whenever possible.

Today, approximately 75% of U.S. elementary schools still use a basal program (a.k.a. core-reading program) to provide reading instruction. Are these programs effective? If no, is it possible for districts to continue to use them, but make them more effective? If so, what are the ways in which these programs can be made more effective? And finally, what instruction and leadership roles for teachers can be created within a basal system that honor their professionalism and expertise and increase their students’ chances of reaching critical reading benchmarks?

My desire to try and answer some of these questions prompted me to write SUPER CORE. Now, with the book written and three years of 3rd grade data in my spreadsheets, I realize there are ways to build bridges between the progressive reading models used by roughly 25% of the country’s teachers and the less-than-effective traditional basal programs used by everybody else. Perhaps discussions on how to meld the old with the new will be of use to districts as they begin to implement the Common Core State Standards. And perhaps SUPER CORE will bring hope to teachers who are required to use their school's core (or basal) reading program...but don't love it.

My personal belief is that school systems that exhibit a willingness to modify and supplement can create primary reading programs (K-3) capable of boosting 85% to 95% of third grade children to independent third grade reading and writing levels. Additionally, I believe that intermediate grade basal programs (4-6) can be made more effective even as these primary programs are built. If districts and administrators avoid pendulum swings, build programs in systematic ways, stick to the common consensus on what works (as identified in the research literature of the last 40 to 50 years), and empower their most expert teachers to organize, create, and lead, then more effective and more satisfying-to-use reading programs can be built on the bones of a basal in three to five years.

Mark Weakland is a mild-mannered Title I reading specialist in Western Pennsylvania; his alter ego, however, is faster than a fluent reader, stronger than a metacognitive strategy, and able to leap outdated vocabulary instruction in a single bound. 

ODETTE’S SECRETS (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Written by Maryann Macdonald
Grades 5 through 8

While living in Paris, Macdonald became intensely interested in what life was like for French Jews during WWII. She was particularly drawn to the lives and stories of Jewish children. She began reading avidly about this time period and discovered that more Jewish children survived in France than in any other European country during WWII.

She learned that many of the children escaped to the countryside and hid in plain sight by assuming the identity of a French Christian child. And in the way that fate works, it was at this point that Macdonald stumbled upon the autobiography of Odette Meyers, entitled DOORS TO MADAME MARIE, which told her story of growing up a French Jew in Paris and then fleeing to the countryside and posing as a Christian in order to survive.

Needless to say, Macdonald was hooked on Odette’s story and learned everything she could about Odette’s life. Unfortunately, Odette passed away in 2002 so Macdonald couldn’t talk to her directly. But she contacted one of Odette’s sons who provided her with as much information as he could about his mother and her life during and after WWII.

Macdonald went on to visit the Paris apartment that Odette grew up in as well as the two country locations where she lived for the duration of WWII. Macdonald knew that she had to tell Odette’s story for today’s children, and Odette’s son agreed, giving her rights to tell his mother’s story. At first Macdonald planned to write a biography of Odette for young readers, but she felt this was too dry and didn’t capture the essence of Odette.

It was at this point that Macdonald began work on what would become ODETTE’S SECRETS, a free-verse historical-fiction/fictionalized biographic novel of Odette. Macdonald constructed the novel around everything she had learned about Odette and imagined what might have happened in the spaces in between. The use of free-verse poetry was a natural choice as Odette grew up to be a poet and a professor of French literature. The result is a moving and beautifully written novel in verse that captures the spirit of Odette while also providing readers, young and old, insights into life in France during WWII.

ODETTE’S SECRETS begins with Odette’s nearly idyllic life in Paris filled with visits to the cinema and warm crepes. She lived with her mother and father in a small apartment. The thing that Odette loved best about their apartment building was Madame Marie, the building’s caretaker. Madame Marie had known and cared for Odette since she was a baby and called herself Odette’s godmother. She taught Odette how to sew and always provided her with a warm and comforting place to be. But perhaps, most importantly, she was instrumental in protecting Odette and her mother long enough for Odette to escape to the countryside.

Once in the countryside Odette had to adapt quickly to this new life, including learning how to be a Christian. Odette eventually became comfortable with this role but it would cause her to question her own identity; who was she really? Was she Jewish or Christian? Was she a city girl or a country girl? Not only did she struggle with this identity crisis during her time in hiding, but also when she and her mother returned to Paris after France was liberated.

Cross-Curricular Connections: Social Studies/History, Language Arts/English/ELA

Ideas for Classroom Use:

Assumed Identities

Macdonald marveled at the ability of young children to assume a new identity in order to survive. Many of us have different roles or identities that we play throughout our days, but sometimes we are forced to pretend to be someone we are not in order to protect ourselves. We may not be protecting ourselves from death, but social ostracism, at certain points in our lives, can seem just as overwhelming.

Ask students to write about a time when they felt like they had to hide who they really were or had to hide some aspect of themselves. For example, a talented female athlete may have downplayed her basketball skills when playing a one-on-one game with a guy that she likes. This writing can lead into important discussions of bullying, difference, segregation, historical events, self-acceptance and many more pressing topics.

Map of Nazi Occupied Areas

In order to visualize Odette’s world and the growing Nazi presence in it, construct a map of Europe that illustrates all of the Nazi occupied areas. The class could be divided into groups with each creating a map for a different period of time in order to show how the Nazis advanced across Europe and were then pushed back by the Allies. I think, and I could certainly be wrong, that many people don’t realize that Paris and France were as impacted by the Nazis as they were; we seem to be more familiar with the Nazi presence in Germany and Poland. Perhaps the creation of maps will allow students to see the full extent of the Nazi reach at its height.

What’s Your Format?

As mentioned above, Macdonald’s decision to write ODETTE’S SECRETS in free-verse was appropriate as it reflects Odette’s later life as a poet. Have students think about the following question: If someone were to write an autobiography about you, what format would be most appropriate? The idea of format should be broad and include such formats as a graphic novel, a playbill, a rap song or disciplinary referral form.

Ask students to think about what format encapsulates part of who they are. In addition to deciding on a format and providing a rationale for their selection, students could also be required to write a portion of their autobiography in this format. This could be limited to a few years or a moment in their life to make the project more manageable.

A Research Plan

The strength of ODETTE’S SECRETS comes from the foundation Macdonald built based upon her research into Odette’s life. Research is often the most important task that writers, of all genres, need to undertake before writing, but for some it is often the most dreaded. Some students may also not understand the importance of looking beyond the Wikipedia page on a topic. In this activity, have students create a plan for how they will research a particular topic or person. For example, Macdonald started with personal experience by living in Paris and seeing the remnants of WWII. She then began reading and narrowed her reading down to a single topic and person. Finally, she reached out to Odette’s son to gather more information from a personal source.

Students can begin by brainstorming all of the places information might be found on their chosen topic. Then, in constructing their plan, they should think about which sources to start with, which sources can provide a broad understanding, and which sources they would consult towards the end. Although this could certainly be a place to begin writing something rooted in research, I believe just the act of creating a research plan, whether or not the research is actually gathered, could be a helpful activity to teach students about the research process.

Additional Resources and Activities:

ODETTE'S SECRETS Book Trailer
Book trailers are a great way to interest readers in new books. I think of them as modern day book talks. This is a nicely done book trailer for Odette’s Secrets that includes haunting music and images from the book.

I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY: CHILDREN'S DRAWINGS AND POEMS FROM TEH TEREZIN CONCENTRATION CAMP, 1942-1944
This powerful book collects poems and drawings from some of the thousands of children who passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. These poems and drawings reveal the horrors of what the children experienced, but also highlight the courage and hope that sustained many of them. I have found that the insights of children are often the most powerful as they don’t yet have the self-consciousness of adults that limits their expression.

Putting Books to Work: Jacobson and Colon’s ANNE FRANK: THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE AUTHORIZED GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY
I wrote a previous Engage post about this graphic biography of Anne Frank by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. Odette and Anne Frank were contemporaries. Anne famously wrote about her life in hiding while she was in hiding, but she didn’t survive to tell us about her life after the war. Odette, on the other hand, did not write during the war, but rather wrote about her life after surviving the war in her autobiography, DOORS TO MADAME MARIE (published under her married name, Odette Meyers).

RESISTANCE (Book 1), DEFIANCE (Book 2) and VICTORY (Book 3) by Carla Jablonski
This graphic novel trilogy tells the story of a French country town during WWII and its citizens that resist, and even, subvert the Nazis. These books would make a great pairing with ODETTE’S SECRETS because the main characters are children who want to become involved in the French Resistance movement. However, they have to convince the adults that children can play an important role in the resistance. The trilogy has been well received and has earned acclaim from such sources as Bank Street College.

Aimee Rogers is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota studying children’s and adolescent literature.  Prior to her return to school, Aimee taught high school students with special needs, in a wide variety of settings, for ten years.  She misses working with adolescents but has developed a passion for working with undergraduate pre-service teachers.  She is interested in graphic novels for children and young adults and has made them the focus of her dissertation.

While sitting and waiting for a plane recently, I heard an advertisement for a Microsoft laptop suggesting it was better than a Chromebook. Among other things, the advertiser pointed out that because it opens into Chrome’s browser when it starts up, a Chromebook has to use the Internet to be able to work. In addition, you cannot use outside software such as Photoshop or Microsoft Office on a Chromebook. However, I’ve heard others suggest that the Chrome browser has most of the capabilities one might need in a computer. Students in schools who have adopted Chromebooks, for example, can access an infinite number of online texts and interactive tools as well as a range of dynamic web based applications such as Google Docs and Google Earth.

Given these differences in opinions, I decided to investigate further to see firsthand how teachers feel about using Chromebooks in the classroom. I visited a second grade classroom to observe their use of Chromebooks and talked to the teacher to see how she was using them to build reading and writing skills in her curriculum.

The school I chose to observe in had received their Chromebooks from a grant the year before. Even though it was already December when I visited, the class had only been using them for a short time because there was quite a bit of set up involved by their school’s technical support team before they could be used in the classroom.

The teacher explained how Google Apps for Education had provided the school with a unique domain. This enabled them to safely store all of their e-mail and student work in its own part of the cloud. After connecting the Chromebooks to this domain, each student classroom was set up on the school’s domain with a class email address. Each student was also assigned a unique login to access the system so each student had his/her own private workspace.  

As I entered the classroom, all of the students were sitting at their desks with their Chromebooks in front of them, writing an acrostic poem about winter for their English assignment. Students were using Google Drive to work on a word processing document (Google Docs), and the teacher was using an add-on script called Doctopus to send assignment prompts to each student (see the how-to guide for more information). She was able to create one document and then send it out so that each of the students received their own copy named with their own name. The teacher also had access to each of their drives and could monitor what students were doing in Google Docs from her computer. Other management techniques to increase teacher efficiency with Chromebooks can be employed with a tool called Hapara.

While I was observing, the teacher was sitting in the back of the room helping some of her students. At the same time, she was keeping an eye on what was going on in the rest of the room. She had arranged the seats so that she could sit in the back of the room and see all of the screens. If she saw someone who needed a reminder or additional support, she could quickly type right into their Google Drive document rather than taking time away from the students she was working with. 

I also noticed that these second graders were applying a broad range of skills to their work. For example, they had learned how to efficiently navigate into their account and then to Google Drive to access their document. Although their typing was slow, they were also learning how to use a keyboard. Since the document saved automatically, there was no time lost in redoing documents because of common mistakes like a student forgetting to save his work or inadvertently saving over someone else’s document.

Outside of using Google Drive as a main source of productivity applications, Chromebooks start instantly when they are turned on, as opposed to a more traditional laptop operating system that keeps users waiting for a number of applications to start up in the background. Another significant benefit is that unlike most laptops, Chromebooks hold a charge for eight hours, so there is no need to recharge them during recess or lunch. This reduces the amount of time teachers need to spend managing laptop power issues, and allows more time for meaningful teaching. Because their data is stored in the cloud, several students can easily share one Chromebook and keep their work separate; they simply sign in with their own account and password to access their personal files.  Students can even design their own desktop and icon or logo for signing in. Of course, a necessity for using Chromebooks in school is a robust Internet connection since the Chrome browser is central to every activity. 

At the time, most of the programs that were used in this classroom were available online, as shown in their Chromebook Classroom List. There are useful teaching guides for Chromebooks, such as this one by Kathy Schrock. Google Apps also has an Apps Document and Support page that’s incredibly useful for teachers. However, a few specialty programs at the school would not work with the Chrome system. The STEAM teacher, for example, could not use the Chromebooks with her students because her Robotics software could not be installed on them.

Overall, after my visit to this classroom, my conclusion is that Chromebooks can be an excellent way to teach most things in the classroom. In time, the Chromebook will become even more useful as more specialty programs like Robotics are made available online and the Internet becomes quicker and more robust at schools. If a school has a weak Internet connection or if it is often down, Chromebooks are not an ideal solution for a classroom.

Janice Friesen is self-employed as a Technology Tutor. Her company, I’m not a Geek.com, provides hourly one on one or small group training to people who missed bits and pieces of technology use and need to learn for various reasons. She has a teaching credential and Masters in Educational Technology. She worked for many years in Elementary Schools with teachers and students.

This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

In the fall of 2012, during my first semester as a middle school language arts teacher, I taught my classes as a multi-player game (MPG). At the start of the year, I invited my students into a world I'd created and dubbed Veritas, and I asked them to take part in an adventure that would weave together tales from our literature study and narratives of their own making. I had a mountain of research to support my instructional choices, but truth be told, standing before them on that first day, I had absolutely no idea if it would work.

p: Tony Dowler via photopin cc

Then they started asking questions.

“I live on this island,” said one eighth grader, pointing to a tiny circular land mass on the map of Veritas. “What's it called?”

“What's the mail system like? How'd we get invites to come train in the capital?” asked a seventh grader.

“My family is from those mountains up north. Do I ride a donkey or something?”

They may seem like simple questions, but they showed me something incredibly important. In asking about the most basic infrastructure, my students revealed that they were buying in to this world, choosing to suspend disbelief, and taking on my challenge to be heroes in an epic story of our making.

My answer to all their questions: “You live there. You tell me.”

In the days and weeks that followed, my students added many points to the map. They invented family bonds, developed my skeleton of a narrative into a rich history, inhabited the texts we studied, and took on active roles within them. They spoke out in defense of their personal interpretations, researched extensively, and wrote pages and pages to tell their own stories.

They became world builders and engaged in powerful literacy practices along the way.

Why Games?

Play, and specifically playing video games, has been a part of my learning process for as long as I can remember. I fondly recall hours spent munching numbers and travelling the Oregon Trail in my elementary school computer lab, and online games like World of Warcraft have made me rethink both how we teach and how we tell stories.

However, we don’t have to be hardcore gamers to incorporate gaming principles into classroom learning activities. We simply need to be willing to take a few lessons that games have to offer. Good games get teaching right in so many ways.

Games offer personal choice and individualized pacing. When we play a game, it might take me multiple tries to master a level or figure out a puzzle. That’s okay. On any given day, I might focus on different areas of gameplay than other players I know. That’s allowed. How can we build similar opportunities for students to work at their own pace and make decisions about how and when they’ll learn our course skills and content?

Some of the best games out there immerse us in their worlds and the tasks at hand because they allow us to decide who we are and how we’ll conduct ourselves. How often do our students go through the points-grabbing motions because they don’t own anything that takes place in the classroom? Allowing my students to make decisions about the world we created together and to build that world for themselves helped them to take ownership of everything aspect of our class learning. The level of agency offered by games and the opportunities for developing identity and voice can be incredibly powerful when leveraged for classroom learning.

Gaming experiences often support teaming opportunities and collaboration. We want students armed with the skills to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and tackle problems together. Ideally, the classroom is a tight-knit community of individuals bound together by a common purpose and similar beliefs about how to get the job done.

Good games nail it when it comes to assessment. Gamers get constant updates about how they’re doing, what their teammates or opponents are up to, and what steps to take to accomplish the next objective. Feedback beyond just a grade is crucial for motivating students to improve their skills.

In games, we stand in fire, die, and learn not to stand in fire again. We fail spectacularly when fighting a boss, research and confer with group members, alter strategy, and win. Learning happens as a result of those failures, and we are okay with failing in games, yet we so often fear failure in the classroom.

However, if we’re looking for mastery of skills, risk-taking, and creativity from our students, failure—followed by reflection and growth—has got to be an option.

Ways to Incorporate Games

When considering making games a part of classroom learning, I believe there are a variety of ways to go.

• Playing Games Designed Specifically for Education
• Engaging Students in a Multiplayer Class Game
• Utilizing Commercially Available Games
• Designing Games

For my initial foray into games for learning, transforming our class into an MPG offered the most opportunities for addressing my students’ literacy goals. This means that students developed their own personas, or avatars, and continuously imagined themselves as characters in a story that I initially developed. Class activities addressing content standards were designed as quests within that imagined world, and completing these quests earned students experience points which allowed their game characters to level up, advancing through the game’s narrative and class content and growing stronger in their abilities over time.

To cap off our school year, and to provide a final method for students to demonstrate skills mastery, we built a final project in which students became game designers themselves. They chose specific content standards from one or more of their other core classes and worked in teams to develop a game that demonstrated those standards. Using the Learning Games Network’s Game Design Tool Kit as our guide for this project and Google Drive for collaborative writing allowed us to address numerous language arts standards, as well.
 
Tips for Getting Started

If you are thinking about using games or gaming principles as a part of your students’ learning, consider the following:

It’s not all about points, badges, and achievements. While these features may be some of the most commonly discussed aspects of gamification, they don’t necessarily lead to greater engagement or more meaningful learning. 

Check out online communities for educators interested in gaming. The folks at 3D GameLab have created a platform for turning any course content into an online game. They’ve also developed a supportive community of educators interested in learning more about the intersection of games and learning and offer both free and paid accounts, as well as a variety of teacher camps for learning more about gaming and other digital learning topics. Additionally, the Games MOOC offers an open online course designed to help participants explore how to use games for learning, and Twitter hashtags like #gbl and #gblchat provide access to ongoing conversations about similar topics.

Start small. My students and I dove immediately into the deep end of gaming implementation and got to learn from many mistakes along the way. Consider applying gaming principles to a single project or unit of study, then build from there.

Communicate with administrators, parents, and students about the learning goals attached to gamified activities. Though a class or project designed with gaming principles in mind may include many of the same learning activities as a more traditional class, those activities may look quite different. Help students to articulate that learning when it is different from what they have experienced in other classes, and help administrators and parents to understand that powerful learning is taking place via class work that looks like play.

Remember one of the best lessons that games have to offer: Be brave. If you’re willing to take risks and learn from failures, you just might achieve something epic.

Laren Hammonds teaches 8^th grade language arts at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her interests include media literacy, cross-curricular collaboration, and the design of learning spaces. Connect with her on Twitter where she goes by @_clayr_, or read more at her blog, Game to Learn.