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Verena Roberts is organizing and open online community around research based gamification in education. We're using this as a resource for the Gamifi-ED project K12 and college students and for anyone who is teaching gamification in education as these resources will be open.

Peggy Sheehy is the matron of gamification and she's one upped her own groundbreaking work in Second Life. She's gamified the Common Core Learning Standards. Wow. One more reason you can't use standards as an excuse to do nothing. "They are also learning to be mighty gamers because Sheehy is gamifying the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). With the command "Go forth and be epic," students pack away drafts and log on to 3D Game Lab where A Hero's Journey awaits. WoWinSchool: A Hero's Journey is a curriculum based in World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which players assume characters and interact within an ever-changing, virtual world.  Sheehy helped to frame the curriculum developed by Lucas Gillespie and Craig Lawson with whom she collaborates on the award-winning WoWInSchool project.  "

Gamification is one response. By embedding diverse achievements into activities and assessments, learning progress can be refracted infinitely. These systems would be able to more flexibly respond to unique learner pathways and abilities, and would further serve as encouragement mechanics -- instead of one carrot stick, there are hundreds. And not just carrots, but every fruit and vegetable imaginable.

The mechanics of games that gamers use as they plan games and design them. I've learned about this from Ray Yan from Digipen in the Gamifi-ed OOC last week.

"Ahmed ElAmin Published Jul 20, 2011 at 9:18 am (Updated Jul 20, 2011 at 8:01 am) Belgians have invented Smurfs, make some of the best beer in the world, and know how to fry a potato chip. However, one must say the country's leading newspapers scored an own goal when they took Google to court last year for listing their content in the search engine's news section and won on copyright. I guess they didn't look at how people arrive at a typical online newspaper site, which derives up to 50 percent or more of their visitors from Google. In addition to taking the group of papers out of its news section, Google also stopped indexing them in its search engine. Now the newspapers are complaining that they are being discriminated against unfairly! (...) Google has big power and the danger is how the company wields it in pursuit of profit. It brings traffic to websites, but the company that claims to "do no evil" can also taketh away ostracising those for good and bad reasons. The company is also stepping up its aggregation news service by trying to attract more volume through the "gamification" of Google News. Google is following a trend among news sites to bring readers in. With their consent, readers will be rewarded with "news badges" based on their reading habits. Badges of varying levels will be given out depending on the amount and types of articles you read. About 500 badges are available to suit a wide range of topics. Google News indexes about 50,000 sources. Keep reading and get those badges! Maybe."

Many options for "making" video games (or simple animations) have emerged. In this short piece, Edudemic shares how one can use GameStar mechanic to make games along with a video. It is well worth a try although, depending on the type of game, Microsoft Kodu or Scratch may also work. There are also some very cool games with the Xbox Kinect SDK app that let you capture a person's body movements much like they do to create characters like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

I talked to Melvina from Hawaii and her students are using Growtopia to build worlds for understanding Japanese culture. Very interesting 2D world sort of like minecraft.

Great resources on gaming in the classroom.

Growtopia has a Science pack that you can use.

LIstening to Lauren Ferro talk about Gamer Types and how it relates to designing games for education in the OOC Hangout now. #gamifi-ed - Great article to read about this. They are relating player types to personality types as they design games. The four main types are :killers, achievers, explorers, and socializers. This is fascinating.

TEacher Alfonso Gonzalez @educatoral is Using World of Warcraft in eight grade science. He's transparently sharing what they are doing and how they're doing it. I'm following what he's doing and many others are as well. I'm fascinated to see how he'll doing but if he's following Peggy Sheehy - she is the one who really knows how to use WOW with almost any subject.

Don't let the title mislead you, but yes, there are many uses of Minecraft in schools.This versatile, compelling but pretty low bandwidth tool gives us so many things Second Life never did - and with minecraft.edu it is affordable for most of us. This list is trending on Twitter which just shows how many people are interested (or how many people don't read to know it isn't really 1001 ;-) You might just find one way to teach coding in your classroom for the Hour of Code coming up.

Great article by Elliott Bristow on the Edublogger about Minecraft in schools and how it is being used. This is a great reference for those of us working to integrate this into our classroom.

This has got to be the funkiest instant poll, quiz, response site around. Create questions, quizzes and polls with optional uploaded images for participants to complete in real time from a computer or mobile device. The users access the quiz by using a pin code. The 'question master' gets the data back instantly and it is stored on the site or can be downloaded. This is superb for checking the knowledge of children in your class or that your audience is still awake. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Got this email from a teacher Hi Vicki- I love your blog, tweets and contributions to flipboard! I am a teacher at a local school district charter high school and appreciate your zeal for teaching and learning. I am not sure if you have heard about Kahoot! but wanted to ask you to check it out by following it on Twitter or watching a few youtube videos of Kahoot in action. I have no financial investment in it or any reason for recommending it other than how much we are enjoying using it at our school and how valuable a tool I believe it to be. Questions can be entered by students or teachers and pictures can be uploaded to each question to add visual appeal. The students can use computers, smart phones, tablets and don't have to have an account- they just log in to kahoot.it and then join the interactive quiz. Everyone gets so involved and passionate and it is great for reviews before tests or for supplemental instruction. The results can be viewed on a spreadsheet and provide formative assessments. It can be used for any ages and any subjects. I am so jazzed about this great new tool and hope you will be too. https://getkahoot.com Kathryn Lewallen Payson, AZ Payson Center for Success High School

This looks like a very cool English game that uses all kinds of shows to teach. Thinking that ESL teachers will want to test this one out. Mau Butler send me this message about this new site: Hello Vicki, I've been an ESL teacher for 20 years, in several countries, and a reader of your coolcatteacher blog for a while. Congratulations. You do excellent work. :) For the past 3 years, I've been building a very innovative approach to teaching and learning English, which is now ready to use. Considering your work, I thought you'd be interested in trying it out. It's called Tripppin and I strongly recommend you see it for yourself on www.tripppin.com but this is us in a nutshell: "Tripppin is an English practice platform, which blends offline and online learning experiences into a game, a music channel, cooking shows, animation, entertaining videos shot around the world, and excellent support for English teachers everywhere." Hope you can have a look :) Thank you.