Employers: Look to gaming to motivate staff

Recent article in itNews that discusses Lee Sheldon's idea of using game design to evaluate the students in his class instead of grades. (Mentioned in this previous post)

Game-ified Life

Interesting article over at The Technium. Kevin Kelly recommends a talk by Jesse Schell that speculates on the future of games.  He gave this quote that had me hooked:

"He offers a vision where ordinary life is gameified. Cheap tracking technology turns whatever you do into a "game" that accumulates points. As the gameification of life becomes ubiquitous, you go through your day racking up points and "getting to the next level." Instead of getting grades in school you graduate to the next level. It's a head spinning scenario, with lots to love and hate, but well worth considering."

I watched the video and can't stop thinking about the implications.  Worth the 29 minutes. 

At 19:30 in the video he mentions Lee Sheldon who teaches a class and instead of grading uses the accumulation of game points to determine grades.  I tried to find more information on this, but no luck. Anyone else out there have info on this?

[Image: "I lost the game"; Flickr; Uploaded on July 29, 2008

by scragz; http://www.flickr.com/photos/scragz/2715186206/ (CC:Attribution Generic)]

Powerpoint Game Templates

Joe teaches in the computer lab the period before me and he is my hero. He is knowledgeable about his subject area. He has great relationship with his students. He is creative. Always seems to be on top of things....even when he's not.

Walked into his classroom recently and the class was broken into two teams and they were playing a trivia game off the internet. His previous lesson had run short. Really short. So, he fired up a site and had the kids working on something for the rest of the hour. They thought they were getting some free time. Joe had his kids on task....although not quite the task he had originally planned. I was envious of how quickly he changed direction on the fly. I probably would have tried to stretch the short lesson out long. Painful for me. Painful for the students.

So, one of the things I want to add to my bag of tricks for this next teaching year is some filler ideas. I want some of those web sites that I can send the kids to if I need to fill in a little time. I want to have some activities ready when I run short. Have a bad lesson. Need a change of pace. I want some fun ways to check for understanding before they walk out that door.

This site gives me a few tools I plan on adding to my repertoire. It has templates for creating games in PowerPoint like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Bingo.

[via Free Technology for Teachers]