classroom managment

Classcraft is one of many tools available to teachers and educators that “gamifies” the learning experience. But what sets Classcraft apart is that it’s more than a technique applied to one lesson–Classcraft gamifies the entire classroom experience.

Here’s how it works: students create their own role-playing game (RPG) style characters and form collaborative groups or “parties.” Classcraft helps you to create an enthusiastic, motivated, cooperative classroom by rewarding positive behaviors and punishing negative behaviors through a graphically beautiful and highly immersive system. Award your students experience points for turning in homework on time, answering a question correctly, or making an encouraging remark to a classmate. After accumulating enough experience points, students can purchase “abilities” that are tied to real-world rewards such as getting to turn in an assignment a day late or getting a hint on an exam. Bad behaviors such as tardiness can be punished by taking away “health points.” If a student loses enough health points, just like in a video game, they “fall in battle.” What’s more, when one student falls in battle, everyone in their party loses health points. This incentivizes students to work together and hold each other accountable for keeping the class on track.

classcraft treasure chest — [www.classcraft.com]

This is just the beginning of the adventure with Classcraft. Transform your lesson plans into interactive “quests.” Use a “volume meter” to keep your students working diligently and reward treasure to a silent classroom. Convert grades into experience points to further motivate students. You can present formal assessments as exciting boss battles!

Getting Started

Request a free trial of Classcraft here. Once granted access, you will be able to do a host of exciting things, including:

Reward experience and deducting health points for effective behavior management
Transform your lesson plans into interactive “quests”
Use a volume meter to keep your students working diligently
Convert grades into experience points to further motivate students
Present formalized assessments as exciting boss battles

Related Resources

Educators interested in adding even more gamification into their classroom may also be interested in:

As I mentioned in a recent blog post I’m teaching a seminar this summer focusing on Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Technologies. I concluded the earlier post by sharing the following:

In keeping with the principles of Web 2.0 I encourage the participation of everyone with an interest or expertise in this topic. You may contribute to the discussion and fun by using the following tag/keyword: idt7078. Be on the lookout for ways (Ustream, Skype, Twitter, Plurk, etc.) to informally participate with us. I would certainly consider making it possible for those wishing to enroll in the course and participate from a distance, too.

Greg R. Fishbone replied to my earlier post and asked the following question regarding my concluding statements.

I’d love to participate informally, but how does one follow a keyword?

I think this is a GREAT a question and I suspect Greg is not the only one wondering about this. I’m sharing this information here in hopes of helping Greg and anyone else that may be interested in being part of our learning community this summer.

Google Keyword Search
You can add the following RSS feed to your aggregator (such as Google Reader or Bloglines). New blog posts, wiki entries, bookmarks, videos, podcasts, etc. tagged with idt7078 will then be “delivered” to you as they show up in Google.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=idt7078&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

An alternative to this strategy would be to setup a Google Alert for idt7078.

Twitter Search
You can also add a keyword search for idt7078 to TweetDeck or similar Twitter platform if you are using one. If not, then you can add the following RSS feed for the Twitter Search of the course tag to your aggregator.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=idt7078

Plurk Search
Add idt7078 to your list of Saved Searches in your profile’s dashboard.

Tag: classroom managment

Bring Adventure to the Classroom with Classcraft