PLN Part 2:

For my PLN I created a live Twitter Chat to talk about Gamification in Education. I offered a live
“coffee chat” to my colleagues that teach PE with me at my school on Twitter. I had a few other
classmates from this course like my comments as well. One of my colleagues mentioned Plickers, and
then Plickers twitter page liked one of our comments! To start this lesson, I attended an informational
TEAMS call that Meghan ran teaching us how to make a GIF using PowerPoint. Next, we learned how to
set up a scheduled meeting on Twitter. The TEAMS call/meeting was very helpful, and I learned a lot
from it that I will continue to use!

The first thing that I did was put out a tweet about Gamification to get people’s interest. Next, I
set up a time for the Twitter Chat and included and article to read and four questions for people to
answer. The article explained to everyone what Gamification is and some of the benefits from using
game like application in your classroom. Some of the benefits and motivational points mentioned in the
article were: 1) Giving points for meeting academic objectives 2) Giving points for procedural objectives
3) Creating playful barriers 4) Comparing and reflecting on performance to personalize for each student
5) Wide range of rewards 6) Levels, checkpoints, and scoreboards.

In my tweet I set it up to ask a question (Q1) and then prompted people to respond to question
one using (A1). Question 1: Have you ever heard of gamification in schools? What are some of the
benefits from using it is in schools? Question 2: What gamification tools have you used in your
classroom? Why did you choose to use those? Question 3: Are there any tools you would like to learn
more about? Question 4: What advantage do you see using gamification in your Health classroom? At
first some of my colleagues were like I am not sure if I have ever used gamification before, but after
prompting them to read the article they were surprised to see that they have used some of the game
applications. Kahoot was one that many of them had used before. All of us have used PBIS Rewards-
which is a school wide behavior intervention system. This is classified as a gamification tool since
students are earning points for positive behaviors or for following procedural or class expectations. One
of my colleagues mentioned wanting to learn more about Plickers. I plan to follow up with her and
teach her how to use that application. Another colleague mentioned Booklet. I personally have never
used that one, so I followed up with him to ask how it works. He mentioned that this one has a
leaderboard that can be displayed during the lesson so students can see how they are doing. Overall,
everyone agreed that using gamification tools for their health classes was a great way to keep students
engaged and motivated to learn! Using Twitter to host our PLN was fun and I think everyone enjoyed
meeting and discussing new tools they can use in their classrooms. There are so many applications out
there to use!