Gambling is serious! Some discoveries live from ISTE 2019

During my adventure at the Congress of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), which is being held this week in Philadelphia (#ISTE2019), I became interested in the notion of play, whether in connection with the gamification of management classroom, serious play, support systems for the development of emotional intelligence or gamification of professional development in teachers. Here are some notes related to the workshops I have attended so far.

Play is part of children's culture 

Learning through play is something that has existed since the dawn of time. An experience that includes a fun aspect creates a context that everyone wants to be a part of. Something that allows everyone to feel included, engaged. “Play is part of children's culture,” says Devin Young (@youngdevin), president and co-founder of Classcraft, after showing an animated image of a youngster doing the “floss” dance, a cultural element referring to popular Fortnite game.

Is it possible to extract these elements that so fascinate young people in video games and use them to promote learning? Certainly. In particular, it is possible to draw a parallel between the psychological needs that video games meet and the determinants of motivation for learning, as seen in the following photo:

Video games as a support for the development of emotional intelligence

For Josh Bound (@josh_bound), founder of Video Game Clubs of America, making room for video games at school, for example through an extracurricular club, is a way of reaching certain young people and of promoting the development of their social and emotional skills. He noticed this when he saw his autistic son's strong interest in video games. Thanks to them, he found a way to connect more easily with him.

He later realized that the young members of the first video game club he founded were attending not only to play, but also to be able to be part of the group. According to him, playing should no longer be taboo because it makes people socially awkward, socially active (making the socially awkward, socially active).

Emotional intelligence, a success factor

Emotional intelligence is said to be a great success factor, both personally and professionally. Its pillars, according to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), are the following five skills:

• Self-awareness
• Self control
• Motivation
• Empathy
• Mastery of human relations.

Gamify professional development

Stefanie Crawford (@MrsCford_tweets) had lost his passion for teaching. She loved to teach, but all the related administrative tasks stifled her days. Fortunately, she found a community focused on educational gamification on Twitter. For her, it was a click. This is what she would develop as an approach to make her students enthusiastic about school.

But that's not all: she took the idea further and trained all the staff of her establishment in the gamification of their professional development! And how do you do that? She suggests simply adding elements from the game world, such: the notion of choice (in tasks, in challenges), competition (creation of teams), unity (within the team) and, of course, lots of fun.

For her part, she created 4 teams in her establishment and assigned each staff member, including management, to one of them. Whenever members completed certain tasks related to their professional development, she invited them to mark it on a Padlet wall and then assigned points to the team. After a certain stage, teams could obtain special powers and use them to, among other things, "tease" each other. At the same time, this made it possible to strengthen ties within the school team. “I work in a district where, like everywhere, nobody talks to each other! », She had explained at the beginning of her presentation.

This is an idea that can inspire many others!

That's all for today, I'll share other discoveries with you soon!