How To Make A Great Lesson in 2 Hours After Midnight - My First #BreakoutEdu Game

I've known about BreakoutEdu for almost a year and a half. I've facilitated the "Decoding the War" game a couple different times at events with Connected Learning, and I've had a few different conversations about the game with other educators, but I would not have called myself really enthusiastic about the experience. Truthfully, the thought of playing the game myself made me a little nervous - having the answer key always makes the game seem easier. :)

Fast forward to last night - a combination of feeling a little under-inspired for the week on Sunday afternoon, randomly jumping into the #tlap chat on Twitter (Teach Like a Pirate) where one of the questions challenged us to "wow" one of our lessons this week, and a cup of coffee I drank to late led me down a rabbit hole.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, let me give you dessert - photos of kids in action, having a GREAT time at school!

Having a student take charge as the "write everything we know on the board" kid is important to a team's success

Step One: The Lock
I've had a rifle lock from my summer at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School hanging on the pegboard in my basement for 10 years with nothing to do with it. I'd forgotten the combination. Somewhere along the way of going to bed, that lock caught my eye last night and beckoned me to crack it. After spending 10-15 minutes trying to crack the combination the "right" way, I found the tutorial for drilling into the back. Bingo. I had a combo lock for a BreakoutEdu game.

The one lock in the center is my model. It ended up being great for wrapping around a duffel bag!

Step Two: Setting Up the Game

The first decision was on content for the game. I'm in a linear equations unit, so I knew that I wanted to throw some equation writing and solving at the kids. Next I planned out the puzzles/activities of the game.

Step Three: Generating QR Codes (Beware, they all look the same!)

To get a QR code, I did a Google search for "qr code generator" and found several options. All of your choices basically all do the same thing - they give a text box for inserting text or a link, you click on "generate code," and then you download your image file. Here's where you need to be careful - notate somewhere on paper or in another file what each QR code file name points to aid in sorting them out when it comes time to print or embed them somewhere. The quickest way to ruin your game could be a QR code that points to the wrong source. I made a separate code for my X and Y values (but didn't say what the numbers were for), and one that pointed to a file with equations to solve that would reveal the combination to the lock.

Step Four: Learning More Stuff (How Can I Password Protect a File?)

One of the things I like best about the Decoding the War game on the BreakoutEdu website is when you have to enter a password to open a spreadsheet for the next puzzle. I imagine this was done with some CSS or Javascript, but as the title suggests, I didn't have time to figure all of that out. I found this Google Apps script and tutorial and ran my information on an encrypted spreadsheet. In looking for the link to the script I used today, I found DocSend, which seems like a better solution, actually.

I also found this tutorial, that utilizes Google Forms and data validation!

Step Five: Gather All Your Materials

Given that it was now after 1 in the morning, I didn't want to leave any of my memory to chance, so I made a Google Slides deck of things I needed to do to set up the game in the morning, a few notes for myself, and a backup copy of the QR codes so I could print them quickly if they weren't scanning from my SMARTboard. In between my sections of this class, I also added a slide for explaining the game. 

Step Six: Advertise!
The best way for others to "get" what a BreakoutEdu game is all about is to see one in action, so I sent an email to all my colleagues this morning letting them know that my 2nd and 5th hour classes were going to breakout of the room. That's really all I said, because I wanted them to come with their curiousity. As an added bonus, my principal came and threw in an informal observation. :) (Kudos to my student who perfectly articulated what was going on).

What Will YOU Learn?
One of my classes worked really well together on attempting to breakout, the other did not, and it was completely emblematic of the dynamics of each group during "regular" class days. My morning class trusts me and each other, takes risks, they help each other, they challenge each other... it was fun to watch. My afternoon class is cooperates/collaborates much less, they barely know each others names, and they didn't really listen to each other OR me (when I gave hints). It was disappointing, but I hope to make a teachable moment tomorrow!

Should I Play a BreakoutEdu Game with MY class? 
Yes! Creating the game myself, while more "work," (it was a labor of love, really) had me more invested in committing the class time to it. The clearest testimonial for the power of the game, however, is all of the passes I had to write to class when kids couldn't bear to leave because they wanted to crack the lock!

This Convinced Me Students Should Be Playing Chess

via Instagram http://ift.tt/1q4kKse

I didn't truly buy-in to "chess builds problem solvers" until my 6 year old started drawing out chess boards in her free time to prepare for victory in our matches before bedtime. It's great practice sharing our thinking together. 😂😍

I quite randomly began teaching her chess several weeks ago after telling me about a playdate with some friends. She said they played "chess," and asked if we could play, too. I was pretty sure she meant checkers, but I offered to try and show her "real" chess anyway, and she's taken a lot of interest in learning. She's even taken to trying to teach her 4 year old brother the game so she can have playmates while I'm at work.

We've been able to talk about patterns, cause and effect, and practiced sportsmanship and endurance in just the small number of games we've already played.

I'm really not very good myself, but its been a great experience learning together, and I hope that my own experience (and lack thereof) is encouraging to you that we don't need to be grandmasters in order to introduce the game to our kids. 

Emergency Lesson Plans: AP Statistics

Someone came to the blog via this search a few days ago and found this post about my son's hospitalization as catalyst for my decision to finally MAKE emergency sub plans, but I'm sure they left disappointed, because I didn't actually share my plans in that post. :)

Principles for Emergency Planning

In the previous post about emergency sub plans, I laid out these principles I was going to follow as I crafted my plans:

1. When choosing learning objectives, I'm going to focus on things we are currently addressing in our PLC Smart Goal, or critical skills that consistently need reinforcing. 
2. Have a back up to the emergency plans in case students finish quickly
3. Crowdsource your emergency plans with co-teachers.
4. To give yourself ultimate flexibility (particularly in your emergency back-up), keep a class set or at least enough for 2 kids to share of your course textbook in a closet or cabinet nearby.
5. Make it something you'll at least consider grading when you return.

Emergency Planning for AP Statistics
I have three thematic goals for my AP Stats students throughout the year: data gathering, data crunching, and technical writing, so all of the options listed here, so if I stick to those goals (principle #1), I'll have something that can be mostly applicable for students no matter where we are in the curriculum.

• AP Practice Exam: The College Board releases items from old exams on their website. Might as well take advantage.
• 1997 Released Practice Having students complete this all in one hour would be an impossibility, so you've got at LEAST two days of material here. I would have students work in pairs on either the multiple choice or free response and collaborate quietly.
• Free AP Stats Practice Exam This test is secured behind your College Board Course Audit login, so be sure to have that info handy.
• Data Collection/Experiments
• "How Long Is a Minute" Materials and resources are usually intentionally scarce on guest teacher days, so its impractical to have plans that require elaborate handouts or materials list. This experiment is my current emergency plan, and I love it because its easily approachable early in the year before we've done a TON of stats work, and only requires a clock in the classroom with seconds.
• Probability Simulator TI 83/84 app + this handout The handout is actually for a more extensive project, so you'd have your students BEGIN the project on this day (and work on it periodically over a matter of days), or just have students complete a portion of the work.
• Probability Based Gaming
• Ever heard of Perudo or "Pirate Dice"? I blogged here several years ago about using it in my freshman seminar class. (Handout Included)

ClassBadges.com and Standards-Based Grading

The badge art I uploaded.

 Kids LOVE competing, right?

What I appreciate about the grading reform away from A-F that we've seen the last several years is that there is less comparison between letter grades amongst students and more emphasis on "what do you know?" More students have a chance to be the "smart" ones because their failure on Standard X does not always mean they will fail on Standard Y, which traditional letter grades can suggest and sometimes lead to.

However, standards based grading can get a little black-and-white cut and dry sometimes, and kids can get overwhelmed by charts, so why not gamify your students' standards growth and get your kids to compete with each other than against?

This summer I was "strongly encouraged" to use Accelerated Math, a system we use mainly for intervention during the school year. AM is an adaptive, differentiated learning system that links in with the STAR assessments which everyone in the district uses for benchmarking. I'd been previously trained on AM, but never actually used it myself, but one thing I'd remembered from my colleagues' feedback was that AM is a great program for kids that can set goals, kids that can pace their work, and kids that can monitor their own on-task behavior. As I mentioned in my last post about summer school, these are not usually qualities I see in my students, so to mitigate the summer being a total disaster for 3/4 of my class, I decided to use classbadges.com to track their objective mastery (and other, more PBIS-type accomplishments as well.)

Above you'll see all of the badges I created to award to the students. Technically our program this summer is "credit recovery," so they need only to get 60% or higher (the black token) on the objectives I assign in Accelerated Math, but I knew some kids would work harder to get better badges (just like someone might spend hours getting a certain achievement in a video game), so I made the grey "master" badge for 80%, and the gold "expert" badge for 95% scores on an objective.

I'm still going to work on more traditional goal-setting with my students, and today's early results with the Pomodoro Technique were positive, but these badges were a fun way to give a few kids an extra, whimsical incentive.

Playing School: Using Badges and Achievements for PBIS

Thanks to +Keith Sorensen for the great badge summary post that sparked this one! If you're not familiar with uses of badges to reward achievement in Scouts, the military, and even videogames, head on over there, first.

The Five Points of Technology and Education: We need more stinkin' badges (or, how to increase student participation without using grades as a reward).

Badges work well into PBIS strategies, as well. 

The purpose of PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports) is to craft a welcoming, positive school culture in which students doing the right things are noticed and rewarded, as opposed to traditional behavioral strategies that highlight the bottom 10% and heap upon them punitive damages.

We give out tickets at my high school that can be redeemed for stuff, but I wonder if badges would be cheaper (most of the rewards cost the school something) and perhaps even more "meaningful" because peers will know WHY a student got that badge instead of the generic tickets we hand out.

I like the idea of the tickets, and perhaps the staff gives out more of them because they can be given more on a whim ("Hey, what you just did was great. Here's a ticket."), but I can't help wonder how effective they really are.

If you use Edmodo, Khan Academy, Manga High, or even Study Island, badges and achievements are built right in (to varying degrees), so you wouldn't even need a new service, if if you want one, Keith highlights Class Badges in his post.

There are more than a thousand badges already created for you to apply to your own classroom content or goals, and if you make your own (just like you can in Edmodo), the possibilities are endless!  I searched only in the "math theme" and got more than 100.

There are 4 more pages of this gold.

I haven't set up classes yet, but in less than 5 minutes, I was able to set up my account and create my first badge for what we're doing in Algebra 2 right now (which I wrote about here)

ADAPTATION FOR YOU:
Do you have an "A" wall, or a star wall where students get to put their good assessments or projects? If you didn't want to use electronic badges, it would be pretty simple to make your "A" wall a badge wall and be more specific about your achievements. 

Playing School: 6 Easy Ways to "Play" in Your Secondary Classroom

I know my 3 year old daughter has a bit of a misconception of what I do at school...

We're part of a great Parents as Teachers program that comes to our home once a month to work with the kids and "assess" them every few months according to developmental norms for their age. From Lucy's perspective, Ms. Chris comes over to play with her and Landon. She doesn't know she's learning, and she certainly isn't aware that sometimes she's being tested. Its just fun.

She knows that Daddy goes to work and is a teacher, so when I told her that Ms. Chris is her teacher, she made this connection:

"My daddy's going to work to play with boys and girls."

I'm not suggesting that your entire curriculum needs to be game-ified (although MangaHigh is my favorite) or that we need to change teaching styles (if you're generally a curmudgeon, you'll feel and seem fake if you try to do what someone else thinks if "fun"), but that everyone in the room will be more productive when a little bit of play is introduced.

And honestly, I think its good for all of us. Some days, I feel like this:

My wife, who stays home with our two little ones, is a great blessing to me because she saves me from most of those days. She has her own struggles as our children's first teacher, which she blogged about yesterday and has me reflecting more on today. (Being a good mama on a bad day)

Do you ever get so caught up in learning objectives, your curriculum and or mastery of content that everything else going on in your classroom gets lost? I did this to my daughter yesterday morning at the breakfast table. Good. grief.

Per the morning tradition, I was reading to Lucy out of the Jesus Storybook Bible during breakfast while she ate her cereal. Beth reports that the kids usually really enjoy this time and always ask, "More Bible, please! And cereal." This is where my "teacher" training totally got in the way of Lucy totally enjoying the morning's reading of The Prodigal Son - instead of just reading the story, showing some excitement, doing my very best character voices, and letting the narrative do its work, I kept checking for understanding and comprehension. With my 3 year old. Sure, she was able to answer my questions and was "engaged," but she certainly didn't really seem to enjoy the story. She asked for more, but kind of in a "this wasn't as great an experience as usual" kind of way. LOL

After some gentle(?) encouragement from Beth (who always supports my character talents) to just read the story, I'd say Lucy and I both had a much better time, and she was asking the questions the second time around.

Kids expect to have fun, enjoyable, memorable experiences at school because that's how they begin their educations. Somewhere in the system, we (I) kill a lot of those expectations because there are tests to prepare for, kids that don't "deserve" to be rewarded with a fun lesson, and content that doesn't readily lend itself to games.

1. Listen to music (and I don't mean classical).
I believe the research that classical music helps students learn, or raises tests scores, and have a Mozart playlist on Spotify for my "everyday" music, but sometimes its good to indulge yourself, or your students and play something you and/or they really like.

If you're afraid of the lyric factor, allow yourself to have a lyric-check policy. You don't want to play anything offensive, so go ahead and check those lyrics with any of these 5 tools. You can also search on Spotify, Playlist.com (or even YouTube) for "clean" or "edited" versions.

2. Laugh at yourself.
I shared this image with a few of my classes last week. I used it as an example of how I always try NOT to stand, and then the kids told me the ways I DO stand. At least they're watching. :) (Apparently I have this arms crossed, shoulders hunched thing)

3. Give high fives, elbows, fist bumps.
This is my number one ice breaker when I have a crummy attitude toward a student or they have one with me for the day. Its also a day-maker for a lot of kids. Henry Wong advises in The First Days of School that you give out hugs as students enter the classroom. That's obviously inappropriate (and often times undesired) to do with secondary students, but free high fives in the hallway? Just make sure to pump the hand sanitizer.

4. Use color.
Students don't suddenly lose their taste for colorful, welcoming, designed classrooms just because they're older. Sure, you probably didn't have that bulletin board class in your secondary ed courses that all the elementary teachers rave about, but that doesn't give you an excuse for boring, blank walls.

And don't stop the color there - let your students color. Your interactive whiteboard, tablets, and even regular whiteboard have dozens of colors of available to them. Don't YOU get bored writing only in one color? (Bonus points for having your students color code their notes. For example, each step of a  solution in a math class is color coded to show process, or in a Lit class, character notes one color, themes in another, and foreshadowing in another).

5. Have kids create.
Lucy's teacher recently just told her to draw a picture. Lucy was just doing something she loved, but Ms. Chris was assessing all kinds of spatial, kinesthetic, and imaginative benchmarks from just a few marks. With proper pedagogy of learning expectations and scoring guides, I think its possible to do the same with secondary students.

Giant rolls of butcher paper, video tutorials, stop-motion lego, ebooks, regular books, songs, websites, images, etc. Here are some iPad specific examples. They can even create mobile games for assessment, review, or constructive activities. (Free game designing tools)

6. Play boardgames as a class or in small groups, but make requirements for moving correct responses to questions.
I like this for:

• Differentiation - you can ask different groups different questions
• Immediate feedback
• Collaboration
• Quick gratification

Implementation tips: 
I see my kids collaborate more willingly and effectively in their game teams when I stick big whiteboards in front of them.  There's magic in those insanely expensive pens.
Project a physical gameboard with the pieces using a document camera, create your own simple version in your interactive whiteboard software (I did this fairly easily with squares and rectangles for Monopoly, and was able to make 3-way Connect Four), or find your favorite web-based version.

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What's most important? 

Making the effort, and trying play that feels natural to you. Just like different instructional strategies have higher yields in different settings, what play works in the classroom next door may well flop for you. Don't give up, and don't punish yourself. 

Have fun.

Logic with Minesweeper

Have you ever played minesweeper? You know, that game with the smiley face on any Windows PC? Most people know about it, as in, they know it exists, but far fewer actually know how to play it. Besides randomly clicking on boxes (which can sometimes lead you to victory by chance on beginner), there is reason and logic built into the game.

Which of these do you identify with?

I've chosen to focus on logic this fall in my Saturday morning SMART Academy classes for a few reasons:

• reasoning and logic make us better, more creative problem solvers (math and real world)
• logic intellectual building blocks are probably done forming in the brain long before a student gets to me, but I can at least build on what a student does have, and nurture/encourage refinement
• students often get lost in the middle of solving problems because they don't know what to do next, or they run out of gas. Practicing that perseverance in minesweeper or a logic puzzle lowers the risk of failure.

Coming next, we'll see how my kids did.