Level Up Your Classroom

In this lively and practical book, seasoned educator Jonathan Cassie shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that’s revolutionizing K–12 education. Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence. The best ones feature meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation, provide a like-minded community of players, and gently punish failure and encourage risk-taking behavior. Players feel challenged, but not overwhelmed. A gamified lesson bears these same hallmarks. It is explicitly gamelike in its design and fosters perseverance, creativity, and resilience. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they’ve learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding. In this book, Cassie covers * What happens to student learning when it is gamified. * Why you might want to gamify instruction for your students. * The process for gamifying both your classroom and your lessons. If you want to see your students engaged, motivated, and excited about learning, join Jonathan Cassie on a journey that will add a powerful new set of ideas and practices to your teaching toolkit. The gamified classroom—an exciting new frontier of 21st century learning—awaits you and your students. Will you answer the call?

This book shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that's revolutionizing K-12 education. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they've learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding.

Learn to design learning experiences that leverage gameplay to increase motivation and engagement, while building classroom community. By the time Lindsey Blass and Cate Tolnai’s paths crossed, both had taken a path from teacher to coach to central/county office roles focused on innovative learning design, all while noticing three trends that extended beyond their classrooms: students who weren’t able to own and connect to their learning experience became disengaged; students and teachers alike had a general fear of failure; and teachers were perplexed at how to design learning experiences that fostered student choice and celebrated failure as an opportunity for iteration. Together, they began to ask … what if? What if we designed learning experiences that leveraged the power of gameplay to create more motivated learners? What if we modeled this type of learning with educators so they could experience the impact firsthand and spread the excitement and innovation in their classrooms? What if learning was fun for both students and teachers? This book: • Includes visual elements that model the theme of engaging in a game with tips, hints and suggestions sprinkled throughout the chapters. • Features a downloadable full-color game board that can be used in tandem with the book. • Provides access to an accompanying website that offers dynamic elements and book study questions. • Features the voices of experts and innovators in the fields of gamification and game-based learning. With a uniquely fun and inviting format, Power Up Your Classroom helps educators implement gamification and game-based learning in their classes to drive student engagement and learning.

The entire town of Up Yonder joins in to help their favorite teacher clean up her messy classroom.

A complete guide for improving the focus and engagement of your special education students by starting the day off right Use a morning meeting to jump-start your students’ day! This simple but effective classroom technique has been proven to help students learn better, build friendships, improve behavior and gain confidence. Offering fun games, great songs and other engaging activities, this book’s 101 ready-to-use ideas are sure to help your students experience remarkable progress in: • Math and reading • Team-building • Planning and communication • Science and technology • Goal-setting • Organization • Problem-solving • Role-playing • Fulfilling a classroom job • Creative arts

This book is a field guide on how to implement game-based learning and «gamification» techniques to everyday teaching. It is a survey of best practices aggregated from interviews with experts in the field. Much of the book draws on the author's experiences implementing games with his middle school students.

Textbooks are symbols of centuries-old education. They're often outdated as soon as they hit students' desks. Acting "by the textbook" implies compliance and a lack of creativity. It's time to ditch those textbooks--and those textbook assumptions about learning In Ditch That Textbook, teacher and blogger Matt Miller encourages educators to throw out meaningless, pedestrian teaching and learning practices. He empowers them to evolve and improve on old, standard, teaching methods. Ditch That Textbook is a support system, toolbox, and manifesto to help educators free their teaching and revolutionize their classrooms.

Learn what a flipped classroom is and why it works, and get the information you need to flip a classroom. You’ll also learn the flipped mastery model, where students learn at their own pace, furthering opportunities for personalized education. This simple concept is easily replicable in any classroom, doesn’t cost much to implement, and helps foster self-directed learning. Once you flip, you won’t want to go back!