Task #10: Just What The Doctor Ordered!

Well, Level Up Book Club, it looks like it's THAT time of year again. After 8-10 weeks spent ignoring the alarm and basking in the glow of daytime TV, it's time to cast aside the joys of summer and head back to school!  Whether you've only got a few precious days of vacation left OR you're lucky enough to have a couple of weeks still burning a hole in your back pocket, you've no doubt already started thinking about a new year, new students AND, hopefully, new opportunities to ramp up your instruction with some of what you've learned this summer about game based learning AND gamification.

Which brings us to our next challenge.

While we certainly plan to continue Level Up Book Club into the school year, we feel like NOW is the time for all of us to start doing more than just reading about gamification and how it can empower, engage and impact students.

So... your task for the next couple of weeks is to do the following:

1. Get ready for an AWESOME school year - complete with new game based instruction that offers you and your students opportunities to level up! And as you do that...
2. Use the #levelupbc Wiki Work Space to share ideas, offer feedback and tease us with your shiny new instructional schemes.  There's already so many great ideas listed there.  Besides, as we get ready to head back to school armed with our new found GBL knowledge, who better to plan our attack with than our very own guild?!?!
3. Along the way, keep posting photos to our Tumblr - be they self portraits featuring our latest read or photographic eye candy of the things you're building and plotting at school.  Either way, let's share the story of how our summer of love learning is now being translated into action!
4. And finally, mark your calendar for our next Twitter Chat:  Thursday, Sept. 6th. 8:00pm EST.  We'll be discussing our latest read, I'll Eat This Cricket for a Cricket Badge: A Gamification Novella by Darren Steele and Christine Chung, in a way we've never done before. I promise you, IT'S GONNA BE EPIC!

In short - go get ready for the school year!  We look forward to hearing about how you'll apply gamification and game based learning to your instruction for a truly EPIC WIN!

Video Thank You

Last week's crowdsourced gamification resource challenge pushed Level Up members to share those great game-based learning and gamification resources that we will all want to reference later. It also produced a Diigo group (Thanks, Katy Vance!) and a LiveBinder (Thanks, Jennifer LaGarde!). Our guild's curating strengths can rival that of any on WoW!

The #levelupbc reader with the most contributions was none other than Carli Spina! Carli's prize was a video thank you for all her hard work. I decided to go the gamer-route and customize a popular video game theme song to pay tribute to our dear pal, Carli.

No apologies here. The things we do for love of Level Up. Enjoy!

- Matthew

LYRICS: 

Carli won for Level Up

She had an epic win for our book club

Resources on game-based learn-

-ing… and of course on gamification

Jennifer put her links in our LiveBinder and

Everybody said, “hip, hooray”

Level Up is lucky to have you, Carli

…that’s no joke.

You shared 50 crowd-sourced resources and

Climbed your way up the leaderboard

Others gave some fierce competition, Carli

…and you won

By the end of the week we amassed

One hundred eighty-three

Game-based resources others can share

Way to go Level Up!

And The Task 5 Winner is...

This has been a week of Epic Wins.  Last week we challenged you to locate and share awesome articles, videos and other resources related to gamification and game based learning.  We gave you the option of posting your treasures on Twitter or via the #levelupbc Tumblr and offered a sweet, sweet reward to the person who shared the most.

And boy did you guys deliver! In just one short week, 183 scholarly articles, blog posts, news features, educational videos and other game based gems were shared!  This kind of crowdsourcing takes a group effort, but one #levelupbc member was definitely on fire this week!  Congratulations to Carli Spina whose epic sharing not only rocketed her to the top of the #levelupbc Leader Board but also helped guarantee an epic win for the rest of us as we continue to explore game based learning and what it might mean to our practice as teachers, librarians and other education professionals.  Way to go, Carli!

Just one day after this challenge was posted, Matthew and I knew were onto something big and started scheming a way to curate all the great resources that were being shared.  While you guys were busy researching and revealing, we were busy putting together a collection of the links that were being tweeted and tumbled.  Our efforts resulted in a Level Up Book Club Livebinder - an epic collection of categorized resources for us to refer to now that the challenge is finished.  We hope to continue to add to this resource as time goes on, but are thrilled with its current incarnation - which would not have been possible without all of YOU!

Again, this has been a week of epic wins!  Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's challenge.  Stay tuned for info about next week's task.  Here's a hint:  It's gonna be fun!