Hutch Earth Science WikiSpace Page

After several months of implementing a gamification of my classroom using iPads, here is what I have so far.

The opening page of the Earth Science Wikispace Page has buttons for quick entry into the different places in the WikiSpace. I choose wikispaces specifically because I wanted for the students to be able to edit and add their knowledge and content to the pages as we explored each new topic.

I also wanted it to guide the students through the learning to support them.

The tasks page leads them to a task list for each week. For every task they complete they earn a badge or gold coin. The tasks are designed to allow for time to work on lab work, project work and demonstration of understanding through a variety of activities. As you can see, this particular week's task involves creating an animation using the iPads.

Since it is a WikiSpace, I can monitor all activity and keep it behind a walled-garden to allow the students space to learn and be messy in their learning before they publish their work fully.
It also allows students to display their badges and gold coins just within their classroom space.

When the students complete a task or quest, they send me a wikimessage and then I will add their badge or gold coin to their page.  When students have mastered a standard, which is a quest, they earn an additional quest badge. Though I have started the concepts of quests with the students, they still need more work and elaboration to make them fruitful in my mind. The concept behind them is that they present a challenge or problem to the student to connect the learning to a real-life problem that would require the knowledge to solve the problem. 

I have also created a Learning Books section, which provides information for each of the standards. So that whenever we focus in on one of the standards, I can link it back to the learning book pages and students can utilize it for learning. This is really where the flipped classroom component comes in. We spend most of our class time working on projects, labs and discussing the challenges. Learning the raw content is expected to happen at home or during work time in class.

Students are asked at the beginning of each week to review the Slideshows on the content page, read the chapter or watch a video. They are then asked to add to the vocabulary words, or add additional content/ explanations to the learning pages, based on what they learned. In the beginning, students are just initially asked to answer the questions for the section on their own student page. At the end of the week they then spend more time to add fully learned and corrected content to the learning pages.

The wikimessage system allows students to communicate with me, and ask for help. And the comment and discussion feature on all of the pages allows for me to make suggestions for improvement when they are working on tasks.

Typically when students walk into the room, they grab iPads and want to immediately get started on tasks. They are fairly independent working, and I usually need to stop them and help them work on group process skills and collaboration skills.

Though I think the badges are beneficial to helping students move along, the students still show every sense of diversity by requesting alternative assignments to demonstrate their learning. Not every student feels that they can express their learning through the ipad so I provide coinciding book chapters and questions to support their needs. But the one thing that I always make sure there is each week is at least 1 lab and project time.