Getting Software Adoption - and Remedy Adoption - Rolling with Gamification We typically discuss gamification in the context of changing performance and culture in a company. But sometimes gamification is about getting the software adoption ball rolling. Because - guess what - when you have enterprise software and no-one is using it, you first need to get adoption right before you talk about change management (BTW - here’s a post we wrote about gamification and software adoption). That was the case for a large customer of ours. They wanted to implement Remedy BMC IT in their organization. There was one catch: employees didn’t use it. Luckily for them, we had an enormously successful gamification implementation. You can see the actual results and project ROI here. We thought we’d share some of the methods we used: Reminders Just like any app or service that is looking to create more traction with its users, we knew that simply reminding our user target base (the employees, in this case) of the existence of the software, would already be a step in the right direction. We started a simple email campaign, sending employees teasers about the game that was about to start. This rapidly evolved into: Explanations about the intricacies and rules of the game Updates about user milestones Reminders about how much time was left before the game ended and more. The result? an immediate jump in adoption post-emails, and a hugely successful last minute push for participation. Habit Formation We understood that in order for users to engage with Remedy through gamification, we needed to do more than to get them to use the software here and there. We needed to form habits - one of the main objectives of any change management initiative.  We set up a gamified, fun narrative which works well for knowledge management and eLearning scenarios: City Building. The goal was to build a city. The more articles one had, the more city assets (such as buildings etc) they had. If an article was useful, it also contributed to the city’s growth. We implemented both individual and team challenges, and also added external game communication. Usage rates went up. Long-term view So, although we were measuring a short-term uplift in user engagement, we also wanted to make sure that the software would be used several months down the line and in the future in general. This means that at a certain point in time, the purpose of the gamified solution shifted from being about adoption, to being about performance. It’s a great tool to allow employees to see how they’re doing, how they rank in comparison to their colleagues as well as in comparison to their own past results. Gamification can also be used for knowledge sharing between the different employees, as a means of accurate monitoring and feedback for managers, and as a great encouragement tool which allows you not to "miss" any of the employees who are having more of a difficult time. Our results: Gamification ROI This is where it becomes interesting. We saw: X7 time increase in usage rates (654 articles created by 121 employees). 69% of the articles created during the gamification project were created by game participants. Employees that participated in the game created twice as many articles than those who didn’t. In the knowledge sharing department, articles were marked as useful 836 ties. All in all, this was a total change in the attitude towards the Remedy software in the organization. What we’re even happier about, is that months later, the situation has stayed the same and users are still engaged. You can see the results infographics here.

Adi Ben-Nesher, an Organizational Development Consultant at Accenture, is a change management visionary with considerable experience in deploying gamification as part of the change management toolset . We met with him to discuss his views of gamification in transactional employment environments, adoption and change.  Gamification for the Transactional (and Transitional) Workforce Q: Can you talk about the verticals in which you implement gamification? A:  Gamification is easier for workforces that are mostly transactional: sales, customer service, technology service desk or a field workforce. Some of them don’t even work for the company, they are what we call "the extended workforce" - contractors or managed services - so employment isn’t a necessity. Actually, according to our research some of these jobs might even disappear in the next 4-5 years because the work will be done automatically by some type of machine or robot. Think about associated press, they have a robot that writes a lot of their articles, not by journalists. Think about bank tellers, what added value do they actually provide today to a customer coming in to the bank? If you just want to withdraw money or deposit, you can do it with a machine and most of the transaction is done electronically. So, as the workforce changes, you need to shift people’s talents to different avenues. Once you’ve identified that, you need to make that shift very very quickly.  Transformational journeys can’t take 3 years, they need to occur quickly. Gamification plays a critical part in how you do that transformation very quickly. Gamification for Transformational Journeys Q: How do you see gamification in the context of change management? A: Gamification is not a new concept. I mean, as a term, it has been around for about five years. At Accenture, se’ve been doing change management for over 40 years. It’s always about changing, making something new or changing peoples’ behaviors or activities. Actually you can say gamification is an old concept: brownie points, generals getting medals etc. Today, for the workforce, it is about giving challenges that you want to accomplish and then driving you through the journey to accomplish them, and breaking it in to very small chunks that are digestible. And giving you the right reward, which can be an actual reward or just recognition, for your achievement. So it’s not a new concept. However, in the last five years technology allowed us to have more details of how you can actually operate at work and given us tools to track that and analyze it. At Accenture we use digital technology to accelerate that process, so we usually use the accelerator next to the thing we are trying to achieve. We have accelerated adoption, when we are trying to do adoption of behaviors, or systems, or processes. We have accelerated culture change, when we are trying to shift culture change, or when we are trying to merge two or three different cultures together in to one or creating a new one. Sticks and Carrots? Q: What’s your metaphor for gamification? A: In performance management the metaphor is usually a carrot and a stick. So you have a carrot and that’s your reward, and you have the stick if you misbehave. The truth is that there is no stick. You will not fire someone if they refuse to use software or applications if they do their job. You can’t use fear to create motivation either. You can’t force someone to do something, and you’re not going to get rid of someone just because they don’t want to comply with something. This leaves us with the carrot. My objection is that the carrot is too healthy… It’s something for diet. It isn’t really motivating; a carrot gets you to only a certain level of performance. What you really need is a carrot cake, right? Q: So the stick is this illusion of control  over employees, control that doesn’t really exist. A: exactly. Rules for Success in Enterprise Gamification Q: What is special about enterprise gamification? Should it be long-term in its implementation? A: I think that when gamification is not designed correctly, when you just deploy a system without doing the thinking behind it, or when it is looked at as just another tool without seeing how it links to other aspects of the workplace experience, there is a chance that it will fail. I think that when you look at gamification, there’s a feeling that in consumer marketing it works, and in the enterprise it doesn’t. People seem to think that in the enterprise we don’t have gamification success stories, and I think there are a few reasons behind that. One is that many applications of gamification aren’t called gamification. We call it adoption, change journey but change management, but it is the same concept as gamification. Two, when you have an uplift of three percent in the KPIs relating to your consumer clients, it’s a great success. We’re talking millions of people and for a small investment you can a great change. In organizations, anything less than 75% engagement is considered a failure. If you didn’t capture 75% or 80% of your workforce, which covers the 15% of high performers and the 60% of the "frozen" (i.e. average performing) majority, you failed. You didn’t create a change. It didn’t stick. This means there are more challenges to running gamification inside organizations. It requires more thinking and better design. This also means that the gamification campaign is longer running and you need agility to change it as you go. In marketing campaigns running on gamification, it’s usually a very short term plan which is very focused on a specific product or a specific brand or a specific loyalty trigger. And as soon as it’s done, you move on to the next thing. In an organization you can’t afford that, you can’t run something and stop. Because of the inertia of the organization, projects must continue. That’s why enterprise gamification has to be something more sustainable, something which is more for the long term. You need something which can give you quick wins in the short term, show mid-term gains, and something that will put your organization in a better position in the long term.  

The topic of gamification and its impact on employee engagement is "hot"; but what does it all really mean?  Is gamification a video game implemented in the work place, a new form of corporate performance management, a FitBit for work, or ruthless competition between workers? It is important to fully understand what gamification really before contemplating using it in your enterprise. I tend to agree with Brian Burke, Gartner’s research vice president and the Author of "Gamify - how gamification motivates people to do extraordinary things" who defines gamification as: "the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals." The following five books  provide invaluable insight into exactly how and why gamification is applicable in the work place: 1:‘Gamify’ by Brian Burke Let’s start with Burke’s book. As mentioned, Gartner’s gamification expert explains that gamification is about motivating players to achieve their goals and not about making employees more productive or having fun at work. Burke is adamant that gamification engrosses people by creating motivation and meaning. In his words: "If the player’s goals are aligned with the organization’s goals, then the organizational goals will be realized as a consequence of the player achieving her goals." Burke also discusses how gamification can be tied to corporate culture. 2: ‘Drive’ by Daniel H. Pink Gamification is not about driving people by using monetary rewards or competition. Why not? Because money and competition are not real drivers or motivators of human nature.  Daniel Pink explains in his book that people are motivated by a sense of autonomy or mastery which he has coined the "third drive." Drive, he says, is an intrinsic motivation, the sense of "flow". Pink’s opinion is backed up by  scientific data and this fascinating book is full of interesting experiments showing that extrinsic motivation and rewards can actually impair an employee’s performance. 3: ‘For The Win’ by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter This is another excellent read especially for those wondering about the power of gamification as a tool and how it is implemented. The authors contend that a business can be transformed through engagement and motivation by addressing issues like a game designer. They also back up their premises with real-life examples of various corporations from different industries using game thinking. In addition, they include a useful guide and structure for implementing gamification and when it makes the most sense to use gamification as a tool. 4:‘Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They can Change the World’ by Jane McGonigal McGonigal explains in her outstanding book the science behind why games are so good for us. She maintains that games make us more creative, more resilient, happier, and better able to handle change. However, before you go ahead and gamify all aspects of your life, McGonigal cautions that not only can some games suit some and not others, but also that too much gaming can be bad. What I also love about this book is her notion that games can be "hard work" and a concrete need that we have to fulfill. Gamification can only be a success if it touches these deep motivations within us.. 5: ‘The Small Big’ by Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein, and Robert Cialdini This book, as its name suggests, discusses how small insights can have a big impact. Note that the book is not only about gamification, but one of the inspiring stories within is that of an experiment by Professor Adam Grant from the Wharton School of Business. Professor Grant took as a case in point the university office responsible for fundraising from alumni. He studied how reminding staff of the greater overall goal, or outcome, of their actions — i.e. helping college students get scholarships, would affect their performance. He compared this to reminding them of their personal benefits, such as salaries, bonuses, etc. Employees with the greater or "higher goal" were much more productive. Bottom line, communicating the core of the company makes workers perform better. Gamification is the perfect tool to achieve this.   These books provide an in-depth look at the real meaning of gamification. I truly believe that by penetrating the fog of buzzwords around gamification and what it really is, is the first step in using this incredibly powerful tool correctly in the enterprise.

How Gamification is Engaging Customers and Employees Alike In this piece, Entrepreneur.com has a great overview piece of the current state of gamification. The article has a new and interesting definition of gamification, too: It’s the practice of synthesizing the best ideas from gaming, loyalty programs and behavioral economics, with the aim of driving user engagement over indifference. You can find the piece here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250093 Need Reasons to Use Gamification? This piece from Learndash.com is about the advantages of gamification for elearning platforms, and specifically for learning management systems. We too think that gamification and elearning go hand-in-hand. They explain how gamification can boost engagement, enhance motivation, improve knowledge retention, promote team building, and offer valuable feedback. It’s a great read, but to be honest, what really got me excited was the infrographic in the article. A Review of "SuperBetter" in the New Yorker Jane McGonigal, the author of "Reality is Broken" recently published a new book "SuperBetter" about turning life’s challenges into a game. The book has received an extensive review in the New Yorker, which is a worthwhile read. How Gamification can Transform Business Processes If you’re interested in some research being done about the state of gamification and how it will affect businesses in the future, check out this article in the Canadian Huffington Post. The article talks about the expectations people had from gamification several years ago, and how they haven’t all panned out due to different factors (spoiler - bad design has a lot to do with it). Another interesting nugget in the article is how different people are attracted to gamification and to games in general for different reasons, and what those reasons may be. What Works Better: Money or Gamification? Continuing with the research theme, an interesting article came out on the cio.com website, addressing what motivates employees. According to the research cited, the top gamification benefits include an increased desire to be at work and feel engaged, and an inspiration to be more productive. The areas in which gamification is used the most are team building, and training. The article concludes that monetary rewards are more effective, ignoring research that shows this is not the case.  

 

Oren Stern is Senior VP of Product Strategy at Verint. We met him speak about gamification and Employee Engagement Management. Gamification and the Employee Engagement Management Practice Q: How long ago did you start looking seriously at Gamification? A: About 2-3 years ago, in parallel to evolving our engagement management practice. Employee engagement is a significant differentiator for us, and is part of our general customer engagement optimization vision. Q: Are there specific verticals where you view gamification as important? A: Verint generally works a lot with B2C verticals, so everything from telecommunications to financial services, and even government. Employee engagement is important for any vertical, but especially when employees do customer facing work in a transactional environment. Studies show that more engaged employees drive more successful organizations with better business results. Q: Gamification has many flavors. Is there a specific flavor that fits with Verint’s vision? A: We like to see gamification as a better way to engage employees and to drive employee performance. The idea is to enrich employee interaction with customers. People who are really interested in what they do strive to provide a better experience for the customer. Gamification creates an environment where the employee feels that they’re more in tune with the vision of the organization and are focused on executing that vision. Q: So would you define gamification as a form of performance management for customer facing employees in a very transactional environment? A: I agree, but employee engagement is just as important where there isn’t much customer interaction. Think about back office operations and knowledge workers, such as a claim processing environment. The employees need to come in to work and have a sense of belonging to what they do and have a sense of interest and engagement. Gamification provides this platform. Q: Can you explain how gamification ties in to the different pieces of your customer engagement platform? A: Gamification touches several main areas of our business. At the core level, gamification touches Verint’s workforce optimization. Workforce optimization is focused on driving and optimizing the workforce in customer engagement centers, and sometimes outside of those in areas such as back office operations or branch operations. As part of workforce optimization we offer coaching, we offer learning, we offer performance management. Gamification ties into them, enhances them and provides a better end user experience. Another part of our business is the actual engagement management part, managing the last mile with the customer. Whether it’s chat sessions, or social, or even voice interaction in the agent desktop. When gamification is integrated into the agent desktop, you can incorporate more complex gamified experiences. The third one is "voice of the customer". Many organizations are starting to build ‘voice of the customer’ and ‘voice of the employee’ programs, and here we can use gamification to solicit feedback in a fun way. It also captures the voice of the employee, and makes the employee feel their voice is actually heard. Knowledge collaboration. It’s common to think about employee engagement in terms of the individual employee. Yet people work in teams. Gamification can drive knowledge management and collaboration between employees. If you create a game where you’re managing a team, and the scores of the individual employees add up to a team score, it drives collaboration and knowledge sharing. Gamification and Coaching Q: can you speak about gamification and coaching? A: Employee engagement needs to use coaching and learning as leveraging mechanisms. The idea is to measure employee performance, understand where there are gaps and then leverage coaching and learning to drive employee performance improvement. Gamification helps do this more effectively. First of all, gamification provides an understanding of where an employee has gaps and challenges. It also provides an engaging environment where these coaching sessions or micro-learning elements are offered to the employee, as part of the game. In many cases, employees are reluctant to take coaching or learning opportunities if they don’t readily see the value in it. When it’s part of a game, they often do so more willingly, better retain knowledge and better apply it to their work. Q: Can you speak about gamification and change management? A: Organizational transformation is always difficult. There’s a lot of resistance in the organization if you’re trying to implement a new methodology, or change the way you’re processing elements in your business. We deal with Fortune 100 companies. Moving their course is like moving a tanker, not a speedboat. The technology and systems we provide drive significant changes in the organization. Gamification can take a transformation program, translate it into measurable and manageable KPIs, and then create a game that drives that organizational transformation. When those goals change over time you can tweak them, you can add them in to the game, and change course. So if you think about it it’s kind of a self-feeding loop - you identify a challenge, you adapt your KPIs to that, you change the game to drive that, and then you see results and you can continue to tweak that and change the course over time, to get to those end results.   Q: where do you see gamification in a few years from now? A: Gamification is certainly evolving. When we started to look at gamification a couple of years ago, it was influenced by the consumer space and was more about fun and less about employee engagement. I think that the perception today is still that gamification is more about the fun factor, making work cool, and less about driving performance. But now organizations are looking very aggressively into finding more ways to engage with their employees. Millennials are changing how organizations need to communicate with employees. Millennials demand more, they want to be heard, they want to be more engaged in what they do; they leave otherwise. And so organizations leverage different mechanisms, such as gamification, which "talk" better to this younger generation, to drive employee engagement

Time for the monthly gamification roundup: our favorite gamification stories from the past month. Why Making Predictions Makes Your Outlook Better I’d like to start with an article that was published in lifehacker.com. At first sight, this may not look like what we’re usually interested in here at GamEffective, as it doesn’t deal with enterprise gamification software, or with software at all for that matter. Even though, I found this article fascinating since in my eyes it highlights what is so powerful about gamification. In short, and without too many spoilers, the article discusses the mechanisms of playfulness in our brains and how we can activate these mechanisms and harness them towards the goals that we want to achieve.  It shows how making predictions (of any kind, from how many red cars on the way home to how many sales closed during a working day) just lights up the brain and makes us more engaged. It’s a great read that combines valuable and practical tips, information about neuropsychology and a fresh look at how being playful allows us to enjoy life and work so much more. The article is part of Jane McGonigal’s new book, SuperBetter. You can find the article here. Habit Formation & Mobile Apps Next, we’re moving from playfulness to habit formation. Gilad Bechar writes in Venturebeat about how getting users to use your mobile app involves the creation of new habits, and what the best way to do that is. While most of us may think of the smartphone like a bad habit that we want to kick, mobile app marketers want users to get a habit of using their app: otherwise the app is likely to be deleted. Bechar notes that to make something a habit,  a good way to keep people engaged is to insert gamification mechanics that will retain the users during the time it takes until your app becomes part of their routine. Otherwise, many app developers get frustrated when all their hard work results in a resounding "meh" from the appstore audiences. If you’re an app developer, it’s well worth your time to dive into this article. Innovation Games Ania Rodriguez wrote a great piece at Entrepreneur.com about how her company is creating ‘innovation games’ - games that allow all employees in the company to exchange ideas and impact the company they’re working at. The games have names like ‘sacred cows’ and ‘bad idea’, and they deal with issues such as getting away from constricting and limiting patterns of thought, or having the freedom to play around with ideas the would be considered terrible, just to get the creative juices flowing. There are also games for prioritizing what to work on and for raising the level of motivation in the company. If you’re heading an organization, or deal with HR on a daily basis, this is a great read to open your mind to a new way of tackling some pressing problems that we all encounter at the workplace, this is a great read. You can also read our post on gamification for innovation here. Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play Lastly, there’s a new book out by Andrzej Marczewski, called ‘Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play: Gamification, Game Thinking & Motivational Design’. In the book, Marczewski goes through the different theories on which gamification is built, and also surveys practical advice for building gamified solutions. If you’re just at the beginning of your gamification path, this is a great way to get in to the thick of things and achieve a fundamental understanding of gamification.

The human brain is unbelievably complex, but sometimes we’re able to find simple "hacks" that can really improve our lives. Jane McGonigal wrote about a hack like this a few weeks ago in Lifehacker.com (it’s an excerpt from her excellent book, SuperBetter). Apparently, attempting to make a prediction about your day is one of the most reliable ways to activate the part of our brain which is responsible for rewards. McGonigal says these predictions can be anything, from how many emails you’ll get in the next hour, to how many red cars you’ll see on the road. Every prediction we make increases the level of dopamine in our brains, and dopamine is the neurochemical responsible for happiness, as well as motivation, learning and desire. The reason for this is that every time that you make a prediction, two possible rewarding outcomes are available to you - either you’re right, in which case you’ll receive a dopamine boost, or you’re wrong, in which case you’ll have learned new information about why you were wrong, and since your brain loves learning this also rewards you with a dopamine boost. You can think of it as a kind of a neurological win-win situation. Betting is attempting to predict Betting is actually always an attempt to predict the future, even if you’re just using your gut to create these predictions. When you pick a horse to win a race, you’re predicting that this horse will be the one to finish first. Many times, it is a very lousy prediction, since we have absolutely no information to rely on, but still it is a form of prediction. This is also a possible explanation to why we enjoy betting so much, and can even become addicted to it. The rush of dopamine to the brain after every hit or miss, gives us a pleasurable experience that we desire to recreate, again and again. So how can we use this to enhance employee performance? When we became aware of all the literature on how prediction and attempting to foresee the future can improve well-being, we had a feeling that there must be a way that we could utilize this in the workplace to enhance employee performance. We started experimenting with very simple betting experiences on our enterprise gamification platform. Essentially, what we did was that we set a mechanism that encouraged employees to predict how they would perform. If your "bet" (actually this is a wager) is successful, you receive double the amount of points that you were supposed to receive for that task. The results of this mini-experiment were astonishing. We found that allowing employees to predict how they would perform in comparison to their KPIs made them substantially more engaged. In fact, the "betting" feature became one of the most popular features at the GamEffective customer where we first implemented this. So why does betting on performance work in a gamification environment? In the time that has passed, we think we understand why this happens: Commitment: Attempting to predict your own performance makes you commit to a certain level of performance. Autonomy: the level of predicted performance is set solely by the employee herself, so the motivation to uphold the prediction is intrinsic, which is the most powerful and sustainable motivator. It is also willfully chosen by the employee. Rewards: An attempt at prediction allows you to reap the benefits of your own performance. In other words, if you are able to uphold the KPI’s that you declared you would, you are awarded for this. Reflection: During this process, employees find themselves reflecting on their performance at work, strategizing on how to make the most accurate prediction, and planning out their work load. These are all things that make them much more engaged. In order for the betting/wager game mechanic to not be abused, the system is programmed so that an employee can only bet on their own performance twice a week. This means that employees have to strategize further and think when the best time in the week is for them to use this betting mechanic. We are always looking for new ways to improve both performance and the well-being of employees. We’ve found that allowing employees to attempt to predict how they themselves will perform is beneficial both to how they feel at the workplace and to the performance of the organization as a whole. Learn more by scheduling 1-on-1 time with our gamification experts.  

We are all familiar with the famous rule - ‘it takes 21 days to form a new habit’. If you can just stick to those 21 days, resist the temptation or keep up the effort (in accordance with the habit that you’re trying to form), you’ll be fine. Well… apparently you won’t. And this is actually a good thing. I said "at least!" It turns out that even the guy who coined this famous rule didn’t actually say that it took 21 days to form a new habit, but that it took at least 21 days. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who noticed that it took his patients a minimum of 21 days to get used to their new physical transformation. He published a book where he stated this fact but always mentioned that this was the minimal amount of time required, and not an objective and absolute time span where people always adjust to a new reality. Somehow along the years he’s been systematically quoted wrongly, which is how we wound up with the famous 21 day rule. Psychological research from recent years actually points to quite a different reality. Philippa Lally from University College London, arrived at two fascinating findings. Firstly, it was found that on average, it takes 66 days for something to become a habit. Moreover, this changed vastly from person to person and from habit to habit, so that the shortest period of time to form a habit was 18 days and the longest was 254 days (!). Secondly, the researchers trumped the idea that habit formation is an ‘all or nothing’ situation. In other words, if you miss one day of your routine, this doesn’t mean that you’re now doomed to giving up on this habit altogether. Habit formation at the workplace It’s interesting to look at our work-lives as a set of habits that we perform daily. When wanting to improve performance at the workplace, this allows us a novel way to approach change management, or the implementation of new processes. Instead of having stressful goals or quotas that we need to reach, we can approach the question of getting better at work as something constructive that has to do with how we can learn to improve. This is relevant in so many areas of work: transitioning employees to new tasks and responsibilities, organizational change management, onboarding processes, and many more. Habits also come in to play in the way that your contact center employees handle their calls or in the way that your salesforce handle their deals. These are all habits and norms that can be taught and enhanced. This is becoming more and more common, as Adi Ben Nesher from Accenture told us in his interview a few weeks ago. Gamification and habit formation Using gamification isn’t new, it’s actually been used by lots of organizations and companies for a while now. One of the best examples is Fitbit. Fitbit basically gamifies your fitness for you and helps you manage your diet, your exercise routine and anything else that has to do with your physical well-being. The app allows you to track all the different parameters that effect the state of your body - what you’ve eaten, how active you’ve been, how you’re resting and sleeping, etc. These "activity trackers" track many different metrics at once, which enables the system to remind us and coach us according to our own specific performance. The app also sends you reminders and notifications about different goals that you set for yourself and encourages you to fulfill those goals. The beauty of it all is that this is done through a game-like experience. So there are game-like indications of how many of your goals you have completed and gauges that indicate how you’re doing in comparison to what you set out to do. Competition is also available by sharing your progress with your friends and seeing how you rank on different leaderboards. This is just one example of how gamified solutions are being used by different companies to help their users achieve their goals. We even dedicated a whole post to this subject a while back, so you can read more about it here. Communication, reminders, and habits Along the same line of the habit forming apps, communicating reminders to your employees about how you would like them to behave is a great way of forming encouraging desired habits at your organization. In a post we wrote a few weeks ago we explained how different methods could really assist in the adoption of gamification and in the formation of new habits. These could include creating teasers for upcoming campaigns or competitions that are set to begin in the near future, giving positive feedback for good performance, or simply reminding people of the rules of the game. … Forming the right habits is a great way to preserve a high level of performance at the workplace, and gamification is a great tool on the road to forming these correct habits. This is becoming more and more pervasive in different industries and organizations but the idea is always the same - Give employees a way to state clear goals, an easy and fun way to know how they are doing, and a system that helps them keep on the track towards toe goals that they set for themselves, and your organization will be on the healthy road towards great work habits.  

I recently came across an interesting article by researchers from the RMIT University in Australia. The researchers were interested in creating a taxonomy of the enterprise gamification industry. They were interested in understanding how the market understood gamification solutions and in investigating the claim of high failure rates of gamification projects (Gartner 2012 - see what we wrote about that here). in order to identify probable causes and potential solutions. Finally, the researchers felt that as part of the information systems sector, where taxonomies are prevalent, gamification was in need of a taxonomy in order for it to be able to integrate with other similar software in the enterprise. The researchers came to some really interesting insights. I’ll go over them briefly here, but it’s worth reading the actual article here, to get in to the finer details. Primary purposes of gamification software in the enterprise The researchers found 17 different purposes for gamification software: education; entertainment; innovation; staff productivity; sales and marketing; PR/promotions; recruitment; operational process efficiency; training and skill development; problem solving; motivation and morale; build community; customer loyalty; events; safety and compliance; social or community good; information and awareness raising. In a later analysis the researchers aggregated these purposes into the six following categories and represented their portion of solutions: Customer loyalty 18% Marketing, sales and promotion 16% Education, training, and recruitment 18% Innovation and problem solving 19% Community good or development 12% staff morale, motivation and productivity 15% The researchers mention that this relatively even spread of purposes shows that businesses and organizations are experimenting with enterprise gamification across a broad range of business areas. Target audiences for enterprise gamification These were the target audiences that the researchers found: Internal staff; Customers, clients or patients; Suppliers; Industry or community specific; General market or public The general market or public consists of 37% of the target audience, while external customers, clients or patients are responsible for 33%. These two major target audiences are followed by internal staff (19%), industry or community (9%), and suppliers (1%). Technology approaches A total of eight technology strategies were identified: digital game; digital simulation; vendor platform (API or plugin); custom platforms or operating systems; simple modification products; significant modification products; playful experience with no or low levels of technology; playful experience with high levels of technology. The researchers found that the largest sub category is platforms, which forms 46% of the market and is equally divided between vendor solutions (23%) and self-built systems (23%). Other sub categories include digital games (19%), simulations (6%), playful experiences (8%) and product or service feature modifications (20%). Types of gameplay and key game mechanics in enterprise gamification A total of 12 common core gameplay types were identified: territory acquisition; social; prediction; spatial navigation; survival; destruction; building; collection; chasing or evading; racing; trading; puzzle or problem-solving prediction; spatial navigation; survival; destruction; building; collection; chasing or evading; racing; trading; puzzle or problem-solving. Collection of points or other items to build scores was the most prevalent form of gameplay (57%). Other less common but important forms of gameplay were prediction (6%), survival (5%) puzzle or problem solving (10%), and social/role play (3%). 10 key game mechanics were identified: status, success, recognition; achievements (badges, trophies); points; leaderboards; social (friend, connect, chat); progression; experiences; narrative; missions and quests; currency, rewards (real or virtual). Game mechanics were fairly evenly spread according to the researches. Points consisted of 43% of the mechanics, badges and trophies were used 52% of the time. These two major uses were followed by currency and rewards (35%) and missions and quests (29%).

When the option of using gamification for workforce engagement became "hot", most industry pundits explained gamification along generational lines. The generational argument goes like this: Employees are disengaged The Y generation is even more disengaged, having grown up alongside technology and gaming (and having grown up with a strong sense of entitlement) While other generations can be engaged through their acceptance of hierarchies, focus on competition (or anything else, for that matter), generation Ys (aka Millennials) are unique in their need for "digital" engagement Therefore, gamification works well for Generation Y. But in reality workforces are a cross-generational affair - mixing Gen Xers, Millennials and even Baby Boomers. That’s why I often hear a question that makes a lot of sense given the frame of mind described above: "will gamification work to engage all my employees or just work on my Gen Y staff?". The question is legitimate, but the discussion that frames gamification along generational lines is confusing and not correct. The short answer is that gamification works across all generations. This article explains how and why. Another worry we hear is that non-Gen-Y staff will be alienated or unlikely to engage with gamification. That too is an untrue assumption, as you’ll see below. A brief generation overview Today’s workforce contains three generations: Baby Boomers Generation X; and Generation Y (also known as Millennials). Baby Boomers (born between the mid- 1940s and the mid-1960s): are typically described as being optimistic, idealistic, and inner-directed. Many of them are early technology adopters; others do not even possess a mobile phone. Most of the workforce from this generstion are now in their 50s or 60s. Generation X (born between the early/mid-1960s and the early 1980s): are typically described as adaptable and technologically competent. They have grown up through a period of extraordinary technological progress, and keep themselves upgraded and trained on technology so that they can remain employable. Generation Y (Millenials) were born after the early 1980s. They are typically viewed as optimistic, smart and cooperative and have grown up with technology all of their lives. They are quick to make use of new technology and are considered as having a higher willingness to work within rules compared to the two previous generations. Does this mean that they are more likely to be engaged by games at work? That they are the generation where the gap between work and play will become non-existent? Is gamification a way to engage generations that grew up on gaming? The response to these questions is multi-layered, but let us begin by stating that gamification isn’t a game. As we will see in the research discussed below, framing gamification as a "game" can result in confusion, since gamification is about using game mechanics (from the exotic "bet on your performance", through completion mechanisms, on to points, badges and leader boards), but all in a NON-GAME context- the context of work. So, in reality, gamification is the art of analyzing the elements of fun, interactivity and reward that make gaming so addictive and working out how to apply those same principles to non-game environments. The internal definition we use here, at GamEffective is "using game elements to drive behavior, engagement: communicate, feedback and coach to performance". We’re more fascinated by thinking of gamification as a sort of fitness tracker for work than by thinking of people playing games at work, since gamification isn’t a game layer on top of work. It is game elements - that aren’t a game - to make work better and to drive employees’ emotional engagement. Just as an aside, some industry pundits argue that just like generational differences may result in different engagement levels with gamification, other argue that males and females play differently and therefore will react differently to gamification. This post is an example of this argument. I must say I disagree, since game mechanics need to adapt to the company’s employees and their modes of engagement, by checking this early in the process of implementing a gamification solution (see here for an infographic of the process). Additionally, women are known "gamers". Actually, 52% of gamers are women, but the industry behaves as if it doesn’t know it. Proving the opposite - KPMG shows that all generations are engaged by gamification Luckily, we have a report by KPMG, which used a gamified tool to improve staff awareness of KPMG’s service capabilities. The challenge was a classic one for gamification: KPMG Australia had over 5,000 staff working across 150 different service offerings in Australia, and it wanted to ensure that employees were aware of the many service capabilities the organization had, so they could connect them to KPMG clients. In short - this was an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity that could be realized through training/learning. But KPMG discovered that current tools and resources (whether digitally available on the Intranet or actual paper-based materials) were not engaging enough. Other methods of engaging employees with the service offering did not make sense from an economic or labor perspective. That’s why KPMG opted to try gamification (before you read more, you can see the report here. The results were a success - a 21% knowledge increase) They decided to check gamification. Consultants that they are, they set goals, one of which was that the gamification effort: appeal to all employees, regardless of gender or seniority. Voila!  We have an answer - we can tell whether gamification work well across a workforce made of generations, hierarchy or gender. The game was a Q&A game about the firm’s capabilities, and good answers were translated into a faster progression of the employee’s avatar in a race. One of the fears KPMG initially had was that junior employees - more likely to have had gaming experiences and obviously part of generation Y - would be the only ones to log into the learning game and play it. Actually, usage was spread across roles and divisions. While junior users were more likely to login post the first game announcement (but not by much) the more senior employees were more likely to become power users (i.e. reaching higher levels in the game). The report writers conclude that "more mature individuals can be more responsive to gamification experiences than their younger peers" - the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. Interestingly enough, solving the "retention" problem observed by KPMG (the fact that younger users logged in but didn’t stay long enough to become power users) can be easily addressed by using notification mechanisms, reminding them, through emails and in-app notifications, of the need to login and re-engage with the game. In addition, 80% of employees, when surveyed, felt that "playing games" was a legitimate tool for training - deflecting the fear that employees may find the use of games offensive or inappropriate. As to the youngest users in the gamification pilot - they were the most likely to log in and try to game but also the most likely to "dropout" of the game? Why - some of them responded that they expected it to be like a game and it wasn’t. This is an important take-away. While the gamification project may fall under the gamification definition, perhaps using the term "game" for communications can backfire - the expectations of real games are totally different, thinking of intricately narrated and produced games. Another result was that "not only did a person’s gaming status have a negligible impact on their participation, it also didn’t influence the level of improvement in their awareness or level of enjoyment of the game". KPMG conclude the report by noting that "gamification techniques can be used to improve the awareness of a topic that people may otherwise not be particularly excited about". We’ll add that it works across all generations.      

It’s that time of the year again: the time to look back at the year that ended; the time to predict where the next year is going. This thought exercise is especially fascinating as I write these words, since 2015 was a heck of a year for HR technology, and employee gamification specifically. I believe this rapid evolution will continue in 2016, mightily impacting organizational culture, HR and gamification. My main point is that we are moving away from SUBJECTIVE EVALUATION of employees to OBJECTIVE AND PROACTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF EMPLOYEES. Here are 5 key HR trends in 2015 that prove this, and my guess-estimates at to where these are taking us in 2016: 1.The death of the performance review During 2015 both Deloitte and Accenture announced they will be doing away with the performance review. A story that ran in the Harvard Business Review discussed this too. What was once the gold standard for HR management and evaluation - rating all employees on a bell curve once a year and adjusting their salaries, status and future - suddenly became an incredible waste of time. Why? To put it plainly, performance reviews consume too much time and resources and provide too little value. Performance reviews are important, of course, but maybe not as a once-a-year process that refers to targets that were set too long ago (i.e. last year). Additionally, some organizations felt the need to depart from the rank-and-yank culture - it was cited as a source of stress. Employees perceive ranking as threatening and not as a positive process. Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that performance reviews are focused on the past. What if the same energies were directed at future performance? What if future performance could be directed based on realistic short term goals? What if employee evaluation (=the performance review) was replaced by employee development (=real-time tracking and coaching, relative to clear short-term objectives and goals)? As a side note, an additional issue with performance reviews is that despite their creation through a lengthy structured and documented process, the results end up highly subjective. Researchers concluded that "most of what is being measured by the ratings is the unique rating tendencies of the rater. Thus ratings reveal more about the rater than they do about the rate." 2. 2015 was the year of the OKR OKR stands for "Objectives and Key Results". It is a way to define and track objectives in the workplace, and was pioneered at Intel, and is used today by Google, Linkedin, Twitter and others. In 2015, OKRs became all the rage as a management method, with articles titled "This is the internal grading system Google uses for its employees - and you should use it too". In general, Objectives are ambitious, while Key Results are what make the objective achievable, quantifiable and objectively gradeable. Many systems have various degrees of transparency, where employees can see each other’s objectives and key results, aligning employees with corporate objectives too. More interestingly, the world of OKR was productized by companies like BetterWorks, which strive to make goals open, transparent and aligned. In many ways these methods mean that the death of the performance review is replaced by a system which shows employees where they and others are in real-time, defining work goals objectively and tracking their achievement in a fair and transparent way. All this isn’t for some idealistic view of transparency or fairness - it’s to make work better for employees and for the company. Focusing on shorter-term OKRs also make the evaluation of work more development-oriented and future focused, rather than being evulation-centric. 3. The Internet of Things is Moving into the Workplace The Internet of Things isn’t only about your refrigerator being empty or full, or predicting your food cravings. The Internet of Things - as a concept - is also about knowing what people do by tracking their work badges, smartphones and more. For today’s workforce, the most relevant metaphor is thinking of tracking their performance at work as an activity tracker at work. Again, similarly to the OKR approach described below, tracking in real time provides real time feedback to the employee about how they are doing and can be a strong motivator, encouraging employees to reflect on their work performance. 4. The geeks have arrived: people analytics This subtitle is based on Josh Bersin’s article. Its main point is that HR is increasingly reliant on analytics to understand workforce performance. Bersin says that the fuzzy HR department is changing, with analytics and data science, and that businesses are getting serious about it. After years of theoretically discussing the application of hard analytics to HR, businesses are actually beginning to do it. Yet this isn’t Taylorism alone, since tracking employee performance or predicting it is again not about evaluation but rather about development, by focusing on how employees can improve their performance. 5. The largest generation in the workforce is millennials In 2015, Millennials have become the largest generation in the workforce, and by 2020 they will form 50% of the global workforce. So what does the emergence of Millennials in the workforce mean? It doesn’t mean that we need video games at work. In fact, using lame video games at work can even backfire, with gamers disappointed by the lower quality of the game. But what Millennials do mean is that the needs of a generation that expects transparency and is more digital than any generation that preceded it should be taken into account in terms of workplace design and culture. Millennials are generally considered to be less comfortable with rigid corporate hierarchies. They expect information to be widely shared, and not kept in silos. They expect to rapidly go up the ranks at work, and get constant feedback. In other words, they are looking for a culture and workstyle that is different than the worlds that baby boomers and gen x feel comfortable in. Yet, all these characteristics can be addressed by employers. The transparency inherent in the IoT in the workplace, or the OKR method can work well for them, as well as the feeling that their boss sees they are doing well and commends them for it. If getting tracked or measured at work helps them get better, see what their goals are and results in social and managerial recognition, together with clear communication of corporate goals, they can love that. In this respect, for Millennials feedback is a killer app. For a generation that may prefer digital communication to a face to face conversation, getting that feedback digitally - through gamification, recognition, OKR systems - may be just what they need. Gamification in 2016? What does all of the above mean for gamification? Enterprise gamification was all hype in 2012, but the practice of using game elements to engage employees seems to be coming of age in 2015 and in 2016. We’ve seen a lot of interest in gamification in the past year, from companies looking to drive performance and motivation to others recognizing the strength of gamification when it comes to e-learning and onboarding. The understanding of gamification has become deeper, with books like Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter, and an industry reflecting about the meaning behind Gartner’s 2012 prediction that 80% of gamification projects will fail. Enterprise gamification can drive the communication of corporate goals and objectives, show objectives and key results to employees, track performance in real time and coach it. Feedback is the killer app for Millennials, but it also does wonders for other generations in the workforce. Using gamification like an activity tracker for work may well be the defining factor of workforce software in 2016.

What if I Just Make the Font Smaller? If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking similar thoughts in order to jam more content onto the screen of your e-learning course, there should have been alarm bells going off in your head. Unfortunately we’ve all succumbed to pressure to add more content even though it may detract from the learning outcome. Make sure to use visual storyboards to help you literally see what will be on each screen. This is a common problem that I see in e-learning development - the urge to continually add "just another explanatory paragraph" into a module or onto a screen. It’s easy to add a lot of words into an outline in a Word doc, but trying to cram a lot of content onto an e-learning screen not only causes design issues, it creates learning barriers. Visual storyboards help people realize in the early stages of development what is and is not possible or more importantly, useful. Best of all, you get to see these things BEFORE the course goes into production. Storyboarding is an often overlooked, powerful development step that should be utilized whenever possible in e-learning production. I have seen many types of storyboards from clients over the years; Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, paper outlines and even audio recordings. I have found that the best type of storyboard is one that is visual; that graphically shows what will be on the screen at all times and indicates how screens relate to each other navigationally. PowerPoint and Keynote seem to be the most common and best tools for this task. As a best practice, include on each slide the background graphic of the course at real dimensions, this way you will really know what will actually fit on the screen and be readable. Placing photos, text, video and graphic placeholders and temporary navigation allows you and your team to see final screen mock-ups while in the early stages of development, saving you time, money and re-work due to information overload on screen. Benefits of Visual Storyboarding Pictorially depicts the entire learning module from beginning to end; providing a big picture look at the module. At a granular level, it allows everyone on the team to actually ‘see’ each page and judge its readability and clarity of message Helps to better understand placement of all elements within your course and how objects relate to each other Aids in figuring out navigation, interaction and feedback sequences for each screen and its content. Serves as a visually clear consensus document for all stakeholders to review and sign off on, helping to avoid surprises down the road. Is a helpful communication tool to programmers/authors by demonstrating interactive activities, such as when a pop-up occurs, when a quiz is introduced or when some kind of supporting audio or video clips should be played. If you find yourself asking; "What if I just make the font size smaller?" or, "Can’t you just put that in a scrolling text box?" Don’t succumb! Let narration, graphics and images speak for you; use text only when necessary. Use white space to your advantage, and keep your screens clean, organized, and interesting. Retention and interest will improve as well as your learners’ attitude toward the course.

Let's go to London... for the New Year celebrations! London celebrated the New Year 2014 with one of the world’s most dazzling firework displays ever. The 'London Eye' ferris wheel was the focus for much of the pyrotechnics, which lit up the entire capital.   Big Ben was illuminated against the night skyin one of the most spectacular fireworks displays ever.  Watch the video!"Hell is paved with good intentions." Samuel Johnson "New Year’s Day:  Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."Mark Twain "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account."Oscar Wilde "For last year’s words belong to last year’s languageAnd next year’s words await another voice.And to make an end is to make a beginning." TS Eliot What about you? Do you think it's important to start the new year with some good intentions?What are your resolutions for the new year?Some advice and some wish for you...  Now it's up to you!

I have just tried Versal to prepare an interactive lesson about the UK.With Versal you can create interactive online learning experiences (from full courses to short lessons or homework assignments) to share with your students. It could be great for a flipped lesson. You can add text, links, images and videos; you can create slide shows, quizzes, diagrams, maps and timelines. This is my example.

Hotel Transylvania is a 2012 American 3D computer animated fantasy comedy film.It tells the story of count Dracula, the owner of the Hotel Transylvania where only monsters can go. On the occasion of the 118th birthday of his daughter Mavis, Dracula invites some monsters for a party, but the hotel is unexpectedly visited by a "human" young boy, Jonathan. Dracula must protect Mavis from falling in love with him.Hotel Transylvania 2 was released in 2015 and the story takes place seven years later. The hotel is now open to human guests, too. In the meanwhile, count Dracula had a grandson who is not a pure-blood vampire…     Hotel Transylvania - Trailer"The Zing" songHotel Transylvania soundtrack Let' s meet the main charactersI made this Piktochart poster for youSTUDENTS' TASKAnswer the following questions after watching the filmDid you enjoy the film? Why/why not?Which is your favourite character? Why?What is your favourite scene? Why?Would you like to be Jonathan? Would you like to have an experience like his own?What would you do if you were Mavis, would you always obey your overprotective father or would you try to win more freedom?

Pat Yongpradit, a Microsoft Innovative Educator, is now Director of Education for Code.org. He has a track record for helping girls become interested in STEM and programming. In this example, his student, Anh Vo, created a game for the Magic Cup Kodu Cup Challenge 2013. She created a game about cleaning waste water from factories to keep nearby villages safe. Listen to Pat Yongpradit and student Anh discuss the game she created Pat Yongpradit - Show #32 - Engaging Students Through Competitions, Contests and Code Pat Yongpradit, a computer science teacher at Springbrook High School, has a track record of teaching students students to code for creating authentic applications. His former student, Anh Vo, used code to create an award-winning game about waste-water cleanup. In the game, waste water from factories is cleaned to keep nearby villages safer. Anh used resources she found at code.org to create her game, which won 3rd place in the Kodu Challenge 2013 at Microsoft’s ImagineCup. Listen to Show #32: Engaging Students Through Competitions, Contests and Code Every Classroom Matters is a bi-weekly podcast by Vicki Davis on BAM Radio network. Every classroom matters because every child matters. Listening will help you teach with better results, lead with a positive impact, and live with a greater purpose. Subscribe. Need help listening to the show? If you’re clicking "Play" on the BAM Radio Site, this often works best in Internet Explorer. Or subscribe in a podcatcher. To get help use this tutorial. Show notes prepared by Lisa Durff, Production Coordinator for Every Classroom Matters. The post Engaging Students Through Competitions, Contests and Code appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

Social Entrepreneurship: 7 Ways to Empower Student Changemakers @edutopia blog - by Vicki Davis November 11, 2014 Tired of disheartened girls thinking they didn’t match up to the divas on teen beauty magazines, Grace Miner started Real Girls Matter. The group has a state-wide conference in Rhode Island next year. When six-year-old Joshua Williams wanted to give ten dollars to a homeless man, his young eyes opened to the plight of the hungry. Joshua, now 13, runs Joshua’s Heart to feed the hungry in Miami. On his website, Joshua says: "Whenever I work, I will give some of my money to help." And the stories go on. Whether it is wells in Africa or standing against genocide, today’s students are more than willing to tackle big problems. Their social media prowess and passion can make them an unstoppable force — when they want to be. (Can you say Ice Bucket Challenge?) How can we unleash more social entrepreneurs? How can we empower more students to make a difference? Click here to Read the rest of this over at my Edutopia blog  It is an important topic and I would argue and important aspect of student engagement. The post Social Entrepreneurship: 7 Ways to Empower Student Changemakers [Link] appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

How can students brainstorm collaboratively using technology. On page 177 of Reinventing Writing, I discuss collaborative brainstorming and why it is used. There are many tools that you can use. I’ll share with you how my students create ideas for an app that they will program in Crescerance. I’m a huge believer in prewriting but also in brainstorming and planning. (See Thrash Early for why this is so important.) Collaborative Brainstorming Step 1: Ideation: Create Ideas with the Group (Padlet) Padlet is an excellent tool for brainstorming in this phase. (See our App Idea Padlet we used for app planning.)  Before they took to padlet, they had to create as many ideas as possible but at least 20 in 7 different categories. I’ve found the best ideas usually come after you’ve emptied your mind of your first ten. Then, I have students circle their three favorites. If we’re doing this as a whole class on the whiteboard, we have to get 50! You could also use Google Docs but it isn’t quite as visual. If you’re connecting across classrooms (like shared in the 2nd level of Flattening your Classroom - -see Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds) — you can have students brainstorm. The next class can come in and follow up and join in. Padlet used to be called Wallwisher and is one of those go-to resources when you brainstorm. Created with Padlet   Collaborative Brainstorming Step 2: Team Mindmapping (Mindmeister) In this case, I start with Padlet to help teams form around a concept for a mobile app. Then, after students know their teams, they move to Mindmeister to map out how their app will work. Each individual screen is a node on the mindmap. This student, A, wanted to create a Money app with tips for students. Here is his mindmap created with the Mindmeister plug in he used within Google Docs. Collaborative Brainstorming Step 3: The Group Pitch (Google Presentations) After my students have worked through the app concept and how it will look. They work to present in Google Presentations to the entire class. (They could really use any group presentation builder. I like to look at the edits to make sure everyone is contributing.) Students collaborate across classes. In this collaborative presentation, a 10th grader and 9th grader created a presentation about their app to encourage budding artists. This presentation is in Google presentations which can be far more attractive than the early days when there were just a few basic styles. (If you’re curious about "Start Timer" that is my Toggl app I use to track my own time.) Their pitch must include their audience, their concept, and an overview of how the app will work. After they present, then they get one of three options: Green Light - They are a full go to build their app. Yellow Light - They are almost a go, but have to answer a few questions before it is a go ahead. Red Light - There are issues that will prevent this app from moving forward. Thus far, I haven’t had any red lights but three yellow lights and five green lights. G Production Next week we will head into production. After they develop their app in Crescerance, they will go into a "Shark Tank" experience where they pitch their app. One will be selected to be released on the Apple and Google Play app stores. How Can This Be Used in Any Classroom? Having done genius projects for three years now, it is vital to make sure students clearly investigate their proposed project. If you  have extended genius projects, consider using this brainstorming/proposal/pitch method. (After you’re done, you can track in Trello as I’m about to do with Crescerance. I couldn’t live without Trello and our genius projects!) Lots more collaborative ideas where this came from! Pick up my newest book Reinventing Writing or the definitive guidebook on global collaboration Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds. You can do this! The post A 3 Step Collaborative Brainstorming Process (Tools & Tips) appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

Cat Flippen talks with Vicki Davis about her dissertation on gamification creating community. She is an ISTE Emerging Leader 2014. Cat argues that game like environments can occur anywhere, not just face- to face, or online, or virtual. Listen now to find out how Cat believes games are a great addition to education. "A lecture online is no different than a lecture in person… you need to enrich the video, and you need to make it shorter."Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Cat believes that gamification, when applied correctly, can create community, specifically in high-risk high-needs situations. She talks about the difference between using game elements and  gamification. She also talks about current thought on brain research and flipped classroom techniques Listen to Cat Flippen Add @CatFlippen to your PLN @CatFlippen Ctrl+Alt+Teach Cat Flippen - Show #86 - Serious Games: Rethinking Gamification in Education Cat Flippen is currently working on her dissertation on gamification. She also is interested in using videos to engage students. She believes smaller content and assessments using video. She advises teachers to front load video content - plan the video and time the video. Listen now to find out her views on videos and wearable technology. Listen to Cat Flippen share gamification, flipped classroom and mobiles Flipped Classroom Strategies Cat also has well-informed opinions on using videos in education. She shares about how you should stop and summarize at age plus 1. Break it and then have them summarize. Mobile and Wearable Technologies We’re no longer a 1 to 1 society, we are frequently a 4 to 1-we should leverage that.Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Cat shares her thoughts about 24/7 learning. She also talks about the very cool TechSmith Fuze app! (Tip: If you’re using Chromebooks, you should be using Snagit!) Listen to Cat Flippen Every Classroom Matters is a bi-weekly Radio Show by Vicki Davis on BAM Radio network with best practices for busy teachers. Subscribe. Show notes prepared by Lisa Durff (and tweaked by Vicki Davis), Production Coordinator for Every Classroom Matters. Need help listening to the show? The BAM Site is new and awesome, and the #ecmatters episodes play on all platforms! Or subscribe in a podcatcher. If you need help, use this tutorial. If you have questions about the show, use the hashtag #ecmatters on Twitter! The post Serious Games: Rethinking Gamification in Education with Cat Flippen appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

This post written by Angela Watson Maintaining balance is impossible without a clearly defined vision for why you teach. No matter how others may choose to evaluate your work, you can’t define your own success as a teacher according to whether students pass a standardized test. That’s a recipe for frustration and burnout.   This month on the Global Search for Education by Cathy Rubin, we are reflecting on How do you balance preparation for high stakes assessments with teaching and learning in your classroom. I asked an amazing teacher, Angela Watson, to share her wisdom. Her show, Angela Watson’s Truth for Teachers, is my must-listen to podcast every Monday morning. She is a helpful part of my PLN and I hope you’ll add her to yours as well. Manage Your Mindset Instead, go into the classroom each day with a single-minded focus on making a difference for kids or igniting a passion for your subject matter. Having this kind of clear vision for teaching will permeate everything you do in the classroom. It will bring a deeper sense of purpose to otherwise disheartening test prep activities. It will help you maintain your (bigger, healthier) perspective even if everyone around you is anxious about test scores. Staying focused on your vision will also help you keep your enthusiasm, which makes learning more enjoyable for kids. If you’re stressed out from focusing too much on high stakes assessment, students will sense that, and it creates anxiety in them, too. Motivate Students in Positive Ways One of the best things you can do for students is to stop reminding them about the importance of standardized tests. I used to get very stressed out because I felt like I cared more about my kids’ scores than most of them did, so I would constantly remind them, "You need to know this-the test is in 2 months! If you don’t pass this test, you’re going to be in third grade again next year!" I cringe when I think back on how much I pressured my students. Kids need to know the importance of the test, but more importantly, they need to know the importance of learning and hard work. Stay focused on getting them motivated and helping them take ownership of their learning. Practice Tested Skills in a Non-Test Prep Format Students do need to know test-taking strategies and be familiar with the format of the standardized tests they’ll be taking, but most kids don’t need daily (or even weekly) exposure to the format. Look for creative ways to help kids practice tested skills in authentic, meaningful contexts. Experiment with alternative strategies for implementing the test prep activities and worksheets you’re mandated to give. Here are 5 ideas: Problem solve collaboratively. Instead of passing out a review worksheet each day as a warm up, occasionally project the page for your class to see, and have them work with a partner to solve problems collaboratively and talk about their strategies. Make it a game. Try reviewing the answers together in a fun game format. Have kids award themselves a point for each answer they get right, and challenge themselves to reach a set number of points by the end of the month. Get kids moving. Set up test prep questions in a "scoot" format so students can stand up and move in between answering questions. Use individual dry erase boards. As you display each problem for the class to solve, have kids write on their boards and hold them up for you to give immediate verbal feedback. Screencast. If you have iPads in your classroom, students can use a free app like Show Me to explain their thinking and record their work. Simple strategies like these keep you and your students from feeling overburdened with worksheets, and help integrate test prep seamlessly into the more meaningful activities you do in class. Ultimately, we teach students, not standards. You are more than a test score, and so are your students. Don’t wait for someone in your district or state to reiterate that: make it true in your daily practice! Maintaining balance is impossible without a clearly defined vision for why you teach.Maintaining balance is impossible without a clearly defined vision for why you teach.Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Angela Watson is a National Board Certified Teacher with 11 years of classroom experience. In 2009, she turned her passion for helping other teachers into a career as an educational consultant based in Brooklyn, NY. As founder of Due Season Press and Educational Services, she’s created 4 books, 2 webinars, a blog, podcast, curriculum resources, and conducts seminars in schools around the world. The post 5 Tips to Triumph over Test Prep appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

A New Every Classroom Matters Episode In this episode, Minecraft EDU creator Joel Levin talks with Vicki about Minecraft in schools. Want your school to use Minecraft? This is THE episode to share! Get those kids excited about learning! You can use Minecraft! Important Takeaways for Listeners Minecraft makes great student-centered student-led projects. Joel gives examples. How do you talk to kids about Minecraft in the classroom? What are the differences in Minecraft EDU in the classroom and the traditional Minecraft? How you can lead even when students know more about Minecraft than you do. Joel rants a bit. How machinima is changing. How to turn students from consumers into creators. If you listen to one show on Minecraft, this is it. Scroll down for 2 quotes for you listeners out there who love to pin them! ;-)  Educator Resources Minecraft Educator Summit - The first Minecraft educator summit was held in early 2015. Joel gives us the skinny on what happened. Minecraft EDU - Joel shares: ways teachers configure Minecraft, resources, and one group every Minecraft teacher should join. Minecraft Educator Portal -Microsoft bought Minecraft and unveiled this teacher portal. Minecraft Builder Bowl - Joel mentions the emergence of live gaming events. Here’s a Minecraft competition happening summer 2015. Interview Links @MinecraftTeachr Results come from fostering a great relationship with your students @MinecraftTeachrPowered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This What Teachers Say The conversation exploded about this show on the ECM Awesome Educators Network on Facebook. Some highlights. Listener Joli Barker Erwin says, "I use minecraft edu as an assessment tool and a project tool. I’ve used it for measurement, as a virtual lab, as a digital diorama for books, as environmental science exploration…sooo much. Students even created games for a global empathy project." See Theheartcode.wikispaces.com Listener Michelle Baldwin says, "My kids ask to use it to demonstrate something they’re curious about. One year, we were talking about how people organize themselves into different types of governments. One group wanted to learn about oligarchies and said they could share what they were learning by building a capital city in Minecraft. They could articulate a LOT about what they had learned as they shared their city (these were grade 3-5 kids): http://architectsofwonder.edublogs.org/…/our-capital…/" Teachers shared Zoe Branigan-Pipe‘s blog post "Proud to Be a Minecraft Teacher." Minecraft transformed Zoe’s classroom. Some people labeled her, though. (I wonder if people do that to excuse themselves from giving it a whirl?) You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. Want to talk about Minecraft If you want to talk about the show, join the conversation on Twitter or Facebook. You’re invited! Join the Every Classroom Matters Awesome Educators Network on Facebook. The post 3 Ways Monsters and Minecraft Can Drive Great Teaching and Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.