SIBLE
Like many schools, mine made the decision to develop a 1: 1 iPad initiative. The twist on
our story is that my principal at
Bettendorf High School (Iowa, USA)
asked me, a science teacher, to design
the professional development. I have
been a longtime promoter of technology use in our building, so when a hole
opened up in my schedule around the
end of March, he asked me to make it
happen.
The amount of financial liability
a school district assumes in such an
undertaking demands that we take the
utmost care in every decision. My job
was to train our staff not only in keeping the devices working but also in
using them effectively and with fidelity in their classrooms.
Assessing the Needs
I had never planned professional development before, but I decided this
was fundamentally the same as planning a lesson. I just needed to gear it
toward adults rather than high school
physics students. I had an audience
who was interested in the subject matter, fascinating content, and a plethora
of personal examples of what not to do
in professional development.
I needed to plan a curriculum, not
just a set of lessons. It needed to be
ongoing, self-paced, and cheap, while
giving teachers a sense of accomplishment. I felt very strongly that successful
professional development was highly
correlated with teacher engagement.
Teachers would get out of this initiative what they put in. I needed to hook
them and inspire them intrinsically.
The program could not be evalu-
ative of the teacher. When formal
administrative evaluation becomes
involved, teachers tend to take a de-
fensive posture, and I wanted them
to be innovative. I wanted them to
buy in to something new.
It was on a random blog that I
found inspiration. If you wander
through enough IT blogs, you will
soon find that there are three topics
that recur: gamification, crowdsourcing, and social networking. I spent
about a week reading and thinking
about these subjects.
Gamification. This trend fascinated me.
After reading a few articles on the concept, it scared me how much of my life
revolved around this topic. Gamification means applying game mechanics
to real life. I watched my son play his
online video games and found that he
could spend hours clicking away at
killing simple monsters just to reach a
higher level or give his character some
new gear. His level of engagement was
amazing! If I could tap into 100th of a
percent of his commitment with my
professional development training, I
would be on to something.
Gamification elements, such as
feedback and rewards, have been used
in the business world for decades. A
primary example is earning frequent
flyer miles from airlines. Karate has
its belts, and Discover card has its
cash back. There have been decades
of research on the topic and numerous blogs and groups affiliated with
its implementation ( gamification.org/
wiki/Gamification_Research). Could
I do the same for educational professional development?
Crowdsourcing. This is becoming a
necessity in many of the applications
hitting the markets. Crowdsourcing
(getting help from the community)
can make a seemingly impossible task
reasonable. Joe Howe coined the term
in a 2006 blog post, and since then, it
has become a natural part of many in-
dustries. Getting help in this way in-
trigued me because I had a very small
support staff to plan and implement
the iPad professional development.
Social networking. The power of tools
such as Twitter and Facebook cannot
be ignored. With 250 million pictures
uploaded to Facebook, 175 million
tweets, and 2 billion You Tube views
happening every day, it is obvious
that people have invested a lot of
their lives in social networks ( bit.ly/
JYZ2cw). These impressive stats demanded that I incorporate some kind
of social networking capability into
my curriculum.
Building the Game
With all this on the table, I set out to
create a system that would reach the
goals of my district and fit my personal model of effective professional
development. I decided to call it what
it was—a game. Classifying it as a
game rather than professional development seemed to lighten the mood
of the process and increase teachers’
willingness to engage.
I presented my plan to my princi-
pal at the first of what would become
weekly project meetings. I called it
“Mission Possible” and developed
the game’s structure over about four
weeks. I introduced it to the teachers
at the beginning of May, and they re-
ceived the iPads around May 16.
Mission Possible is modeled on
many of the popular role-playing
games that my students play. But as
powerful as it is to come up with an
innovative idea, the gory part of any
initiative is the actual development.
Because I had limited funds, I looked
to programs that would be easy to
use, adaptable, and teachable to those
I would need to help me. Fortunately,
Google Drive had all of these attributes.
And it was free! We developed the
websites using Google Sites, with forms
