Aira Soon's Blog: How Any Teacher Can Use Lee Sheldon’s Multiplayer Classroom Model

Powerful Pedagogies for Every Teaching Professional

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Star Trek script writer and professional game author Lee Sheldon has designed his entire college course as a game. His book The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game is a favorite of many game based learning experts. Quizzes and tests are fighting evil. Students earn experience points for coming to class. Student study groups are called guilds. You’ve got to hear it to believe it! (And you don’t need any technology.)

In fact, Lee welcomes his students to class with this comment:

“Hello everyone, welcome to class. You all have an ‘F.’ But you can level up.”

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Thank you JTouch by InFocus, Today’s Sponsor

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My Interactive White Board (IWB) is gone, and I’m never going back. In today’s show, I’ll tell you how I’m using the Jtouch Interactive Display Board in my classroom. It is much more than an interactive whiteboard. (In some ways it is like a massive touch screen computer.) But with Airplay and also a cool tool called LightCast, every single device in my BYOD classroom can broadcast to the Jtouch display at the front of my classroom. When I’m not teaching, I even show huge moving scenes from nature on the board. I love it. Listen to this show to learn more about how I’m using the Jtouch from Infocus or click here to see it in action. Thank you Jtouch for sponsoring today’s show.

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Essential Questions: Balancing Learning and Fun: How to Create Riveting Lesson Plans

How teachers can be Game Masters.
Why Lee Sheldon hates the term “gamification” and what term he uses instead.
How Lee harnesses student intrinsic motivation to learn instead of badges and points
How teachers can start into game-based learning.
How to use guilds, solo quests, and group quests to teach.