Unfortunately, Heick’s brief article on The Gamification of Education focuses most on making sure the reader is up to speed on gaming, and less on how education will benefit from being “gamified.” Heick mostly discusses how games have become social, and how the games themselves know a lot about players due to the players’ accounts and avatars. Using this information and the connections between players on the internet, players can unlock “achievements” to add to their “trophy cases.”

Heick does mention as important the ability of games to now connect players, reward any and all “achievements” within the game rather than just the ultimate goal of the game, and the ability of players to now take a more central role in the development of their characters, and their adventures.

To me this development of shared gaming has caused me to lose some interest in the hobby. I don’t know that I want that aspect brought into my classroom as a given either. Blogging is about connections, and the views that others can bring to us, and how they can add to, improve, or challenge our work. In the end, this is a good thing, but often times I simply want my writing, my process, my video gaming adventure, to be for me. I think that there is merit in giving students this experience as well, we don’t need everything that we do or think to be “shared” in our social media world of today. That said, there are times when the use of technologies that allow us to share and collaborate would be completely appropriate and beneficial.

It is easier for me to see the benefit of students as more central players in authorship and in rewarding all the steps of a creative process though. Obviously the larger the role of the student in their writing process, the larger the benefit to their writing as they become more engaged with the work. I want to word my support of “reward all along the way” carefully. I don’t believe that students need a reward on every “side quest” involved in the creation of their final project, but I think that if we can teach them to value every step in the creation of the work, they will see the benefit of taking the time to complete each, as they prepare more whole, coherent, successful writings.

As I mentioned in my group introduction, I am not particularly well-versed in teaching with technology. As a reminder, I have taught middle school Language Arts in Arizona with no special technological aid, English to children in China with the support of a smart board, and my EAP courses at St. Cloud State with the support of D2L. I’d be happy to perfect my use of those technologies alone, and to become a more engaging user of PowerPoint, but there is much more to be learned about technology in today’s classroom than just that. I’m hoping also to meet my students more where they are at. They engage with so many forms of technology simply by using their smartphones every day, and then walk into a classroom where that interaction is mostly gone; I hope to change that, and engage them more because of it. Technology is so immediate, and allows for multi-directional communication, not only a teacher-down model. I hope that teaching with technology will open class up to be more of a creative discussion than simply a tired lecture on information that the students could have read on their own. Becoming aware of the options available to me, and expanding my repertoire of tricks will allow me to design a classroom that is balanced rather than flashy (or dry), and hopefully allow students to access information on their own to address the problems we encounter.