Part 2 of the Headlines Challenge

My first post introduced my new desire to gamify my classroom and this post is a follow up to the first gamified activity I created.  This past week my students began their challenge.  This challenge was met with a lot of excitement and students were even talking game strategy before they even started!  Fast forward now one week in and the enthusiasm has dwindled for some, but for others the challenge is still exciting.

I shared last week the amount of articles that had been read by our entire school from August to the end of February, which was 2,711 and now 7 days later the total number of articles read is 6,253.  Now I cannot claim credit for all of this.  I suppose I could go through the program and count all the articles my students 'read', but this program simply records when an article is viewed.  No matter what the case is here, whether they read the articles or looked at them, that's a 130% increase.

Last post I also showed the number of quizzes by our entire school from August to the end of February, which was 918 and is currently 2,580, a 182% increase.  Again, I cannot claim credit for all this, but here again we run into the problem what is being calculated here.  This calculates the number of quizzes taken, not passed.  For the purposes of our game in class, students needed to pass the quiz they read.  My students read, and passed, 1,159 of the quizzes this past week.  The number of quizzes taken by my students and passed makes up 69% of the increase in quizzes.

Finally, on the last post I showed the percentage of proficient students at 32% which now shows 41%.  While this seems impressive on the surface, I did introduce a large number of users with no previous data.

The information I am most interested in is the participation of my individual students.  After one week, 72% of my students are participating.  16% have already reached the lowest goal and 9% have exceeded the goal.  The goal this week is get 100% participation, but this activity is mostly outside of class time. 

At this point, the ultimate goal is get all students to read at least 10 articles (that's level 1 of the game).  With the information gathered for each student, I can share the skills mastered and not mastered with Language Arts teachers and work on more clear reading goals for students in preparation for the PARCC testing. 

Overall, I'm very happy with the initial results and students still seem excited about this challenge and many students are now constantly reading!

Fail to teach.

Welcome to my blog: FAIL to teach.  F.A.I.L is an acronym for first attempt at learning.  The best teachers fail and while I cannot say I'm the best teacher, I can say with certainty that I fail!  I fail and my students fail but we learn and grow through our adventures.  I've started this blog to begin my discovery of gamification in the classroom.  I am totally new to this, having only heard a few podcasts, participated in a district gamified initiative, and connecting with people on twitter.  Without having any experience, any training, and having limited knowledge I am embarking on my first gamified month long challenge with my students on the topic of Current Events.

I was not hired to be a reading teacher, but rather a social studies teacher, however, my principal always says we are all teachers of reading.  The problem is, I struggle to know what I'm doing because it's been a long time since I took that class on fluency and comprehension way back in undergrad.  My students read, but I have them for 40 mins, roughly 2 minutes of this can be compared to wrangling cats, leaving me with 38 minutes to be a teacher of reading and social studies.  We read a lot, but often times students seem disinterested in pushing themselves to read more.  How can I use my time to influence their want to read and improve their reading?  Enter gamification.

I first heard about gamification on a tech blog featuring Michael Matera, author of Explore Like A Pirate.  While I have yet to pick up his book, it is on my list of must reads.  During his blog he talked about the engagement level gamification brings and how students go above and beyond to learn more to reach these different levels (essential skills).  As a gamer myself I love this idea and I see how motivated my students get when we play games.

I decided to try to do a game, or challenge, that didn't require too much in class work and see how it goes.  Here is the challenge: https://sites.google.com/isd109.org/headlineschallenge/your-mission_1

The goal of this challenge is to get students reading as many articles as they can in a month.  With each article is a comprehension quiz that focuses on a variety of reading skills.  With PARCC approaching, these quizzes are similar in style to the quizzes they will see on PARCC.  Many students need all the practice they can get so by making it a game hopefully students will challenge themselves to read more and more.

I've also decided to track our progress along the way using information from the newsela website.  The information below was captured on Sunday, February 26th, one day before the competition.  The total number of articles read by users, which includes the entire school of roughly 600 students, is 2,711 in 5 months.

Here you see 918 quizzes have been taken since September 2016

Here you see the proficiency level of students who have used the program.

I will track this weekly.