On October 18, I attended a delightfully interesting and informative workshop entitled “USING TECHNOLOGY TO ENGAGE & GAMIFY LEARNING “. The facilitator is Mr. Zaid Ali Alsagoff, who is the founder and CEO of the AQL Learning Innovation Consultancy.
The Facilitator : Mr Zaid Ali Alsagoff.
Zaid has over 15 years experience as a Learning Innovation Specialist. He even made it to the Top Ten most influential people in the corporate e-learning sector for the Asia-Pacific region. Find out more about him and his works through his blog ZaidLearn and his presentations on SlideShare.
**Note: Don’t mind the choc, sweets and water: all essential elements in fun effective learning IMHO.
Gamification can make a classroom more fun, interactive and effective. In my opinion, it helps create ‘presence’. Too often our classrooms are filled with zombies who are there for physical appearance merit only. We, as teachers, can and should do something about this. If we don’t try, we will never know.
To gamify a lesson we should go through the following:
1- Challenge : Create a challenge, be it slaying dragons or network intruders.
2- Compete: Must have a form of competition, either individual or group.
3- Show : Present your masterpiece. Get feedback and Q&A.
4 – Score: Asses and score through a multitude of interesting ways. These include badges, ranks, polling, avatars, rewards etc.
5 – Celebrate: Celebrate achievement and real effort.
Zaid also introduced many tools that can be used to enhance classroom activities. Some I have tried, some I never knew existed until the workshop. Let me list some: poll everywhere, Quizizz, Goformative, plickers, TodaysMeet, Quizlet, Socrative, Kahoot, powtoon.
I shall try to give you an introduction to these in future entries, so watch this space!
I leave you with some chosen tidbits from the workshop. I assure you there were many more, but hey, you have to keep the audience guessing a little for more excitement.
Some interesting info from the workshop
