Story: Gamification's Secret Weapon

I've become more and more keen on gamification, fancy talk for applying the principles of gameplay to other contexts to enhance engagement and, in the case of education, understanding.

These two articles, one from Matthew Farber, one from Vicki Davis,  provide both a nice overview of the concepts of gamification as well as direction for the future of this transformative pedagogical framework.  (Ahh, there's the academic voice again.)

In reading both, I noticed a little gap in their discussions.  One element surfaces in every compelling, cognitively-engaging game I've ever played -- whether digital or no -- and that's story.  Great games are thick

Vicki Davis makes reference to the emergence of story in games when discussing a student's relationship with gaming and learning.

My so-called "killer" student (and we really should rename this when applying it to education!) simply saw things as a battle between good and evil and wanted to fight on the side of good in an epic quest to make the world a better place. Points don't matter in gameplay, and grades don't matter, either. But when we tweaked the kinds of work he was doing in ourGamifi-ED project to focus on "world-changing games," he was suddenly engaged.

 "Gamification in Education" on Edutopia

And I think it goes even further than that.  I'm of a mind, and mind you I'm just starting to explore these ideas, that if you've got a great story, you've got a great game and vice versa. 

Mario.  Full of pathos?  No.  On a mission?  Yes.  Lowly plumber fights against a tyrant and legion of minions to rescue a princess.   Mario-centric games require not just hand-eye coordination but strategy, management of multiple variables, quick recall of information and such.  Why do players keep playing and keep wanting more?  Why does he continue to be relevant: the story.

Pac-Man the original is fun, but simplistic.  And every effort to make him relevant again?  Fails. Really.  He's a bit of nostalgia.   Why hasn't he endured?  The story is just four ghosts want to get him and he wants to get away.  Who cares?  No one.  Why? There's no story.

Think of games you've heard students talk about lately.  Minecraft. Assassin's Creed. Animal Crossing. Call of Duty.  Halo. World of Warcraft.   Titanfall. Even if these games do not feature singular stories, they provide worlds in which players create their own narratives.  Produce their own stories.  Play out the scenarios that interest them.   (One should note, Assassin's Creed has a rich mythology, as do games such a Bioshock and Portal.)  

Sandbox games such as Minecraft offer huge opportunity.  Players literally build a world and the journeys through them.  As players, they start right in the middle of things with little available to them.  They build skills.  They acquire materials and tools.  They achieve.  They face struggles and conflicts, with opposing forces and themselves.  There is story.  And players craft protagonists to their specifications.  

And they may keep coming back because it is fun.  Why is it fun?  I believe it is because with every restart, they are telling another story.  Every restored saved game is a chance to continue the story.

If the game mechanics stink, you can't craft an effective story.  You can't tell the story you want to tell.  That's what really drives players nuts -- when they can't make the character DO the things, experience the things, go through the narrative arcs, they have shaped in their heads just moments before.

Can this explain Cookie, Candy and Tooth Decay Crush?  No.  Does Cookie Crush have the opportunity to teach us much?  Not really.

However, pattern-recognition games have been developed to help map genomes & explore possible cures for cancer.  What makes people want to keep playing those more meaningful versions?  Well, the game play is familiar and "mindless" fun, yet now people are part of a story.

And becoming an active part of a story?  That's what excitements me about bringing gamification to students.  

Unit Plan Outline & Guiding Thinking

Folks have been asking about expectations on the unit plan.  As this is the first time the course has run, I don’t yet have a full-sized unit plan model to share.  However, I can provide a template and some some sampling reference.

Here’s what I don’t want. Anyone familiar with UMF’s undergraduate program has seen the lesson plans and unit plans pre-service teachers create.  Those are new educators still proving they have a grasp of the essentials.  You folks are engaged professionals and don’t need to articulate four pages of detailed thinking around differentiation and learning styles and multiple intelligences as such.  I’m expecting those considerations to be self-evident in your plans.

Here’s what I do want.  A plan rich enough in detail that I can read it over and have a clear sense of how you are integrating digital storytelling, the goals of each lessons, clarity in the purpose of each lesson as a scaffold toward meeting the standards and demonstrating authentic understanding through student-generated products, and the tools by which you will measure the success of this.  If you look over your lesson plans and think, “I could share these with a colleague and they would have a strong idea of what my students are doing,” then you are likely in good shape.  If you look over your lesson plans and think, “I’d have to explain a lot of this in person,” then add some more detail.

I visualize one to two pages per lesson plan plus whatever rubrics or other materials you need to link. (I'm not counting pages to assess this work.)

Daily Objectives

One, two or three measurable objectives for the day.  Bullet style.  Keep Bloom’s taxonomy in mind.

• Students will identify the atmosphere/mood created by a given piece of music.

  
  

  Students will compare and contrast the atmospheric/mood effects of pairing different music selections with their slides

Alignment to Local Standards and/or Common Core

One, two or three standards you believe this lesson is working toward.  It may be the lesson is around hitting a specific learning target or performance indicator.  Copy and paste from the original.  No narrative needed.  If I have questions about alignment, I will ask.  In an effective lesson plan, it will be self evident from the rest of the details.

Example:8th Grade GEOMETRYProve, understand, and model geometric concepts, theorems, and constructions to solve problems.A. Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area, volume, and angle measure. (CCSS 6.G.A, 7.G.B)Source: http://www.greatschoolspartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PBLS_Mathematics_Standards.pdf

Your unit as a whole should be realistic in terms of how many standards you are working toward.  More standards doesn’t mean a better unit plan.  It is about the depth of understanding you are looking for with your students.  At the same time, ten lessons around a single standard may not be in the best interests of your long range planning for your year.  

Which standards nest well together?  Which ones can be explored in the interest of the others?

Handy dandy reference tool:

http://www.sacscoc.org/institute/2014/2014SIHANDOUTS/Monday/Cleary2Mon.pdf

Love the second page of this particular document because of the “phrases to avoid” section.  

Formative Assessments

A description of what students will do during that class period to build toward an understanding of those standards and to meet the given objectives and how you will be measuring their success.  These formative assessments may be anything from observation and oral feedback to exit tickets to blog posts.  Consider this an opportunity to create -- or implement if you’ve already made them -- rubrics that can ease in these sorts of measurements and tracking of student achievement.  What might a classroom participation rubric look like?  What might an exit ticket rubric look like?  How might that data help inform instruction?

Today students will explore the scientific process by creating visual pictographs that tell the story of an experiment.  
1. We’ll start by reviewing the steps in the scientific process that I introduced to them in the first four classes using the slide deck I created on Google Presentation.  (Link here.)2.  I’ll introduce the concept of pictographs by using images from the Noun Project posted around the room in place of the objects that are typically there.  Thus, where students would usually see our clock, instead they will see  
Alarm Clock designed by Matt Brooks from the thenounproject.com

3.  After a brief discussion of how images can include as much meaning as words and some other samples displayed on the projector, I will give students a few minutes to explore www.thenounproject.com.  
4.  After some exploring and sandbox time, I will show them how to set up an account and how to attribute the images they choose to use for our activity today.
5.  For the rest of class today, they will be using images from The Noun Project, or self created images, to tell the story of an experiment from beginning to end of the scientific process.  They can use the experiment I’ve walked them through earlier in the week, one they’ve seen from the YouTube playlist I’ve created of sample experiments (link here), or one of their own creating.  I will encourage them to go with the sample I’ve walked them through in the interest of time, because I really want them focusing on how to tell an effective story through images.  This should help them with their lab notebooks and creating quick visual information that makes sense when put in sequence.  
They will be putting those pictograms in order on either a Google Docs word processing document, Pages document, Keynote slide deck or Google Presentation slide deck for easy sharing.  If they create their own images, they will take pics of those images and put them into their product.
6.  This is a formative assessment so I will be assessing student progress using my standard classroom participation rubric, observation and oral feedback.   (Link here.)  Students will be posting their experiment stories to their blogs as well, where I can provide more feedback.  Our blogs are assessed using my blogging rubric.  (Link here.)

Summative Assessment.

Big project.  What are they building toward that demonstrates the culminating understanding of the content and how will you assess it?  How are you working storytelling into that product?

Rubrics.

Create rubrics to assess student understanding.  Provide them in your plan.  

Keep alignment to standards and four-point scales in mind as you do so.  

Consider the language of the rubric and your user: is this for your students to read and use or for your administrator?  

Materials.

Reading, videos, audio content, tools you are using. A master list is helpful but not necessary if they are included in the lesson plans.

Student/User Impact Analysis

Here’s where you explain in a narrative (appx. 1 page) how you believe your unit will create a value added digital storytelling-fueled learning experience for your students/users.  To what extent does your unit demonstrate the higher ends of the Puentedura’s SAMR model?  To what extent have you provided an effective delivery of content and technology instruction per the TPACK model?  This serves as a narrative self-assessment of  your unit.

UMF EDU 571: Boxes & Storytelling

Boxes are great. 

They hold things very well.

They protect things very well, as well.

They keep things hidden and easily stored.

They provide structure where there is none and create order where it is needed.

Watch this short film.

The Adventures of a Cardboard Box from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Several of you may have seen this film and that’s okay.  It’s good to watch things again after having not seen them in a while, informed by new experiences and new purposes.

How many stories did you see in this film?  One?  Three?  Seven?  Fifteen? More?

What would this story have been without a box?

What would this story have been without a camera?

What would this story have been without music?

What would this story have been with dialogue?

How might this story inspire a scientist hoping to prove a theory?

How might this story inform a mathematician trying to solve a problem?

When I watch this film, I see possibilities.  I see who we are before we become encumbered by expectations and self-awareness.  I see empathy and tragedy, acceptance and nostalgia.  

And I see a filmmaker who knows that we don’t need to see every detail to know the entire story.  I see deliberate camera framing that creates a box into which we look to see outside of that box.  I see a well-chosen handheld camera shot to capture the chaos of the moment and the ease with which an audience may recognize grief at a distance.    I see the power of silence.

I don’t know that writing this story would achieve the same goal.  I don’t know that drawing it into a comic book would have the same emotional resonance.  I am inclined to think that an oral telling of this story, in hands and lips of a deft storyteller, might come close.  And then I watch that final montage and I’m not sure.  Showing students the power of effective piece of editing, then providing them the opportunity to exercise the same power, makes them not just the audience for the films they watch, but critical colleagues in the culture of meaning making.  

And then I watch the film in a classroom full of students who have not seen it.

I gauge their maturity, sensitivity, empathy, discomfort, insecurity by their responses to a single moment.  Whether a tear or a laugh, both provide an opportunity for me to learn more about those individuals.  Why the tears?  Why the laughs? Conversations rather than judgements.  (A laugh can come from a sad place, just as well as it can from cruel place; I learned this the hard way.)

Gifts sometimes come in boxes.

One gift we may provide our students is the opportunity to think outside of the box.

It is a gift we may present to ourselves, as well.

UMF EDU 571 Summer 14 Week 5: Analog/Digital Symbiosis & Remixing Story

Welcome to Week 5.

We are over halfway to the end of the course.  How are you folks doing?  If you haven't done so already, please take a moment to send me a quick story that lets me know how you are feeling about the work so far, the structure of the course, the content, really, whatever your thoughts, be they brimming with compliments or overflowing with constructive criticism.  It is not too late for me to make some adjustments headed into the last half. 

Week 5 and Week 6 are the last two structured and required blog and tweet weeks.  Of course, I'm hopeful people will want to continue sharing their work and showing their work via those avenues.  And I'm also well aware that people have already pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and are quite all set with those particular forays.

I've been thrilled with the regular tweeting from folks.  It has provided me a vantage point into your understandings and opinions.   Please do keep it up.

I've also been enjoying the blog posts, particularly those entries that find these sublime connections between the course texts and content,  professional application and relevance, and personal experiences and memories.  I would encourage people to look to the course texts even further as we go into these last two weeks of blogging -- see what ideas from Kleon, Pink and the Brothers Kelley may inform your unit plans, your artifact development, your meta-analysis.   Find a great quote? Delve into the context of that quote and see what other insights wait to be discovered just out of sight.  

Speaking of those bigger assessments, return to the syllabus and check the suggested due dates.  If folks would like some formative feedback on their unit plans, I need those drafts/outlines by July 28th for there to be ample time to get feedback.

And final housekeeping,  self assessments.  Before I assess your Week 4 blogs and tweets, please self assess.  I didn't make this expectation as clear as I could have before.  So, moving forward, please self assess.  That will be the signal to me that you are ready for me to come in and apply my lens to your work.  Similarly, before I assess your artifacts, or other major assessments, please self assess them -- this way I know just what you intend for me to consider one of your artifacts.  There is a place there in the assessment tracker for your self assessment.  These are not due until the close of the course.  I just want that expectation clarified.

Now . . . on to this week's content.

Links for Week 5

Remixing Story

Watch this 2012 TED talk from Kirby Ferguson, documentary filmmaker of Everything's a Remix and more.

Embrace the Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

While the later third of the talk gets into legal implications of such thinking, there's a broader idea about creativity to be considered here.

Walt Disney.  Stan Lee.  George Lucas.  Steven Spielberg.  Masterful storytellers.  Remixers.

Uncle Walt and his team remixed fairy tales and European children's stories into shapes more pleasing to his audiences and his medium.

Stan Lee took chunks and pieces of other heroic tales and figure, drawings and sketches of artists who worked for him, and created a universe of  troubled teenage and young adult super heroes.  (Actually, he co-created them.  He'd work out the outline of a story, an artist -- most famously Jack Kirby --  would draw that story, and then Stan the Man added dialogue that fit in the spaces left and matches the action -- for the most part.  So really, he remixed himself.)

George Lucas took the archetypal heroic journey, his loves of Japanese samurai films and World War II news reels, mashed those ideas together and ended up with Star Wars.

He got together with Steven Spielberg and the two of them just recalibrated around a love of pulp serial adventures and ended up with Indiana Jones, an amalgamation of all sorts of ideas they'd seen before, just packaged for a more modern audience and sensibility.

Consider even young adult literature.  Suzanne Collins.  Lord of the Flies and The Most Dangerous Game both share a great many elements of The Hunger Games, but the Japanese manga, Battle Royale, has even more in common with her initial premise.  Still, there's originality within Collins' work -- it's up to critics and consumers to decide the degree to which is it is original or derivative.  (And if we weren't such a litigious and commercial world, we might be more willing to just admit when we got ideas from others, rather than worried we'd have to share a piece of the profits.)

If everything is a remix, how might we teach our students how to remix responsibility, critically and with intent?

Also, if everything is a remix, how might students remix stories as a means of demonstrating understanding of the themes, characters, conflicts, and details of the original?

If everything is a remix, how do we pull out the critical elements that we found endearing about the source material, keep them recognizable enough to serve their intent, yet transform them enough to make it feel wholly original in our hands?  Awesome responsibilities.

And yet one kids already take on in their day to day.  They just may not realize it.  Listen to any elementary school age kid retell a story they heard from someone else -- they often add new details, put things out of order, and come just a few made-up names short of a brand new story.  What if we help them to do these things on purpose to tell the stories they want to tell?  What does that do to their understanding and value of the source material?

And adolescents do the same thing.  They are just more prone to doing so with more intention.

First Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week

Using ____________ , remix a well-known fairy tale, myth or legend into a new work that helps students understand a key concept, understanding, or skill from your content or impact area.

Suggested Digital Storytelling Tools
Storybird
Wideo
Narrable (Does Play Nice in Chrome for Some Reason)
Google Drive Tools

Bonus challenge:  Try doing the same, but using narrative poetry or narrative music instead of fairy tales, myths or legends.

Second Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week (This One Is HARD.)

Using clips from pre-existing films that share common elements, similar plot lines, and relevance to your content, create a remix/mashup that tells a complete -- if compressed -- story.  You might focus on the audio.  You might focus on the visuals.  You might find it possible to do both.

Alternative:  Use a collection of films that share any sort of unifying commonality and create an original story.

The thinking here is showing students that to be successful in such an endeavor requires a close examination of the source material.  You really need to know what is happening there to put  the content to effective use.

Suggested Tools
Popcorn Maker (A very powerful tool that can do lots of neat things that we will look at in Week 6)
Wevideo
Garage Band
YouTube Editor

Analog/Digital Symbiosis

We've spent so much time talking about digital environments in this course, it can be easy to overlook the power of the analog -- drawing, writing, cutting, pasting, moving, taping, measuring, mapping, doodling -- all with our hands and paper and markers and scissors and yarn and who knows what all else.

Yet we don't have to have it one way or the other.  When we start fusing the two environments, we start taking more advantage of each's unique properties.

How might we blend analog and digital experiences to create a unique storytelling experience?

How might working away from the computer enhance student creativity?  And vice versa?

Third Digital Storytelling Challenge of the Week

1. Create a set of story stones.

2. After creating your stones, take a photo of each stone.

3. Upload your story stones to an online white board tool.

Padlet
Realtime Board 
Sketchalot

4. Manipulate your story stones in real life to then tell a story on your whiteboard.

5. Invite another individual from class to your whiteboard and have them create their own story using your stones.

Alternative: You don't have to create stones.  You could create most any small, paintable/markable object into a storytelling icon.  I've got a Jenga set that is going to become a set of such this fall.

UMF EDU 571 Summer 2014: Week 4: Moving Storytelling

This week we explore the power of the moving image (not to be confused with the MUSEUM of the moving image) which has become the most ubiquitous format of storytelling in our modern culture.

How might we harness the power of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction for good rather than evil?  I'm not sure.  Though I will say this: start with separating the content from the form, as Scott McCloud does so expertly in his work Understanding Comics. Steven Johnson advocates for the same in his work, Everything Bad Is Good For You.

The key is to look at how the format, the medium, and the vehicle can be employed to deliver meaningful content and provide opportunity to exceptional storytelling, rather than focusing upon the content and stories others have created that may or may not elevate the form or may or may not have value to our students.

Also, consider the power of short films.  Vimeo's Editor's Picks are a tremendous resource for finding strong, quality SHORT FORM content.  We constantly worry about having enough time in class; shorts, ads, trailers, these provide us complete narratives at a fraction of the chronological capital.

You may have noticed as the weeks go along, the list of resources and links provided grows.  I continuously uncover little gems worth sharing with you folks and I worry we will reach the end of the course and I'll have twenty dozen links I wish I had shared with you.

Good time to remind everyone to take a look at the syllabus, the suggested calendar for due dates to maintain a solid pace, take a look at your possible unit ideas, blog about those readings, and ask lots of questions.

LOVED Twitter this week.  Fantastic conversations and resource sharing.

Be certain to browse my digital storytelling curated link collections on my Diigo.

General Digital Storytelling Tool Lists
Digital Storytelling

And of course this week's focused collection

UMF EDU 571 Summer 2014 Wk 4

I am also presenting three digital storytelling challenges this week.  Remember, you need not complete any of these.  Any of them could become a great artifact -- and since you have three of them due by course's end, it may be of benefit to go after one of these three.

First Digital Storytelling Challenge

Using ______________  to create your product, combined with your content knowledge and your understanding of the essential elements of story, create a :30, :60  or :90 teaser trailer for an upcoming reading, unit or experience in your content or impact area.

Explore the trailer sites listed in Week 4 above to seek mentor texts to emulate.
Identify the core elements of powerful storytelling you want to use as you appeal to your users.
Consider how this might be used to increase student/colleague engagement in your impact area.
Imagine how students/colleagues might create such products to solve problems, demonstrate understanding.

Suggested  Tools
WeVideo
YouTube Editor
iMovie (though I don't care for it)

Second Digital Storytelling Challenge

Use _____________, your understanding of the essential principles of storytelling as it applies to both narrative and marketing, and your content/impact area curricular needs to create a short animated advertisement that sells the viewer on the importance of a key item, concept, skill or understanding.

Explore the ad sites and animated videos in the Week 4 list for mentor texts.
Identify the key item, concept, skill or understanding that needs to be advertised.
Craft a story that demonstrates the value of that item, concept or skill.
Employ the animation tools to create a way of conveying that story.

Suggested Tools
Zimmer Twins
ABCYA Animate
Wideo

Third Digital Storytelling Challenge

Using ________ to annotate or signpost a video that would be meaningful in your content/impact areas, coupled with your knowledge of the essential elements of storytelling,  help your users develop the most vital understandings of the content through story -- whether that story be in the original video, your annotations, or both.

Suggested Tools
Videonot.es
Blogger (Embed video & put annotations below)
Any Word Processor App (It can be this simple)

UMF EDU 571 Week 3: Building Upon the Oral Tradition of Storytelling Using Technology

UMF EDU 571 Week 3: Building Upon the Oral Tradition of Storytelling Using Technology

This week our thoughts go toward audio storytelling and building upon the oral traditions started well . . . at the beginning of all culture ever.

Essential Questions to Consider for the Week

• How does oral storytelling impact the meaning behind a story?
• When does oral storytelling create add value to understanding classroom content?
• How do we maintain the strengths of tradition while leveraging new capabilities to create content?
• How might audio-centric storytelling reshape the assessment of student understanding?

As you browse through the various mentor texts, articles and links posted for Week 3, apply the lens of the TPACK and/or SAMR models as well.  This is where we make that shift from storytelling as a tradition to storytelling as educational tool and then to digital storytelling as transformative educational experience.

• How might we use the suggested tools to move from substitution and augmentation into modification and redefinition?  
• What do these tools enable students to do that a tape deck or a campfire does not?
• What sorts of technical and content knowledge need to overlap to make a meaningful and successful product?
• How does adding layers of audio content (i.e. music, sound effects) enhance the meaning and demonstrate deeper understanding of the subject/impact area content?

As you build your various artifacts for the course, you might ask yourself

• How can I layer as much meaning and intention into each artifact as possible?
• How will students/colleagues benefit from my creation of this artifact?
• How might I share my process of creating to encourage and empower students/colleagues?

As you are reading the various texts for the course, you might ask yourself

• How might I apply this thinking to my work with students/colleagues?
• How might my students/colleagues benefit from reading these words, experiencing these ideas themselves?  
• How can better understanding the process and power of creating inform our students/colleagues’ abilities to create digital stories?  

You will notice more and more of the links point toward applying storytelling to the business and marketing worlds.  We can can a great deal of better understanding about how people think and what engages audiences -- and cognition -- by thinking through different lenses.  It may be uncomfortable and that’s ok.

Now for the challenges of the week.  Remember, these are not required.  These are just structured suggestions to help you generate artifacts.

First Digital Storytelling Challenge for the Week

1. Identify an important concept or skill from your content/impact area

2. Craft an oral story that underscores the importance of students developing that skill or understanding that concept

3. Use an audio-centric digital storytelling tool to package that story for students

Suggested Digital Storytelling Tools

SoundCloud

Audioboo

Audacity

Second Digital Storytelling Challenge for the Week

Using ____________ as your storytelling mentor text, tell a story about solving a challenging problem using _______________ digital storytelling tool and applying __________  music and/or sound effects to enhance the meaning/experience.

Suggested Mentor Texts

This American Life

The Memory Palace

RadioLab

Moth

StoryCorps

TED

Suggested Digital Storytelling Tools

Soundation

YouTube Editor

Audacity

GarageBand

Suggested Music/Sound Sources

Creative Commons Music Community (Multiple Links Here)

FreeSound.org