It has been interesting in my observations of my current classroom, of the role that technology plays in promoting the competitive spirit in my students. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the technology used is essentially an extension of gameification, but simply extended to a different platform. Technology provides teachers an opportunity to bring their methods to align with the interests and learning styles of many modern learners. It also diversifies competition, as there exists a plethora of resources available to facilitate a broad range of competitive activities. Individual or self competition, peer vs. peer activities, or even activities that face the user against the “system” all exist in multitude through various forms of technology. Let’s explore a few forms of competitions facilitated or advanced by using technology.
Plickers
Plickers is a QR code based scanner app than give educators to give each student an inexpensive way of polling your classroom. Through this, teachers can use the cards to conduct multiple-choice style games with their students. This style of participation still allows for competition to exist in either a peer vs. peer activity or working to better personal bests.
Kahoot
Kaboot is another app that allows for in-class gameification using individual or team participation on a large class scale. With Kahoot, you can create quizzes that your student as can take using the app, with fastest correct answers getting the highest points. This direct peer vs. peer competition is both exciting and provides the kind of motivation that gameification can provide.
Student: https://kahoot.it/#/ Teacher: https://getkahoot.com/how-it-works
RAZ Kids
RAZ Kids is another web-based program where students can read, listen to, and take quizzes on books to work towards improving their English literacy. Additionally, through this reading, listening, and quiz taking, they gain stars or points that they can spend on updating or improving their personalized avatar for their account. By pricing this incentive of reward, the students are competing against the system of the program itself to get high scores on the quizzes to gain more stars. This type of program can also be modified, as I have done in the past, to reflect a style of “reading race” with classes, grades or student competing against each other to read that most books. Using a program like RAZ Kids allows students to participate at school, at home, or wherever they may be as the whole programs library of books is available online.
These example show how technology is a powerful tool to use to assist educators in promoting positive competitive spirit in their classrooms p, as well as making these competitions relative and accessible to today’s learners.