One of the ideas that I have been interested in a lot over the last couple of years has been gamification.  As someone who grew up as a gamer with the original NES and as someone who loves to play tons of board and card games, I think there are a lot of ideas in gamification that can help with PD (not to mention in the classroom). Luckily we had the chance to have a district-wide professional development day this last fall and we wanted to use some gamification to increase engagement and sharing.

There are a lot of ways you can do gamification when it comes to professional development but our goal was to acknowledge the work that our teachers are doing and to have some fun with it.  We created badges and a scoring system to help with this but one thing that I really wanted was to make this as easy for teachers as possible.  To improve participation, it has to be easier for people to do it.  We made use of Google Forms, Google Sheets, and a Google Site (with Awesome Tables) in order to make it so teachers did not have to learn a new username or password.  I created the badges using Credly but hosted them on a  Google Site so I could get them to show up in our Awesome Table.

We had some good participation during and right after our professional development day but we are working on some revisions to improve it and keep it going.  We will consider this version 1.0 and hopefully will have version 1.1 ready to go soon.

The part that many may find confusing if you watch the video below, deals with the equations I used in my spreadsheet.  In order to make the spreadsheet do most of the work with me only having to enter a little bit of info, I had to make use of some of my favorite equations (vlookup, concatenate, if/then) as well as host the badge images on an external Google Site.  You can not host images in your Drive so I would upload them as attachments to a Google Site on my personal account and just use that to host them.  I highly suggest you look at the copy of the spreadsheet to see the equations working and note that there are some hidden columns.  The heavy amount of work that I did to set up this spreadsheet means there was a lot less work later while keeping it all in our system using Google Apps.

You can watch the video below to see how I got everything to work.  You can also to the site we have for our PD (https://sites.google.com/a/ames.k12.ia.us/acsd-workshop-spring-14/home/acsd-tech-game) and you can also see a copy of spreadsheet to get an idea about the formulas I used (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dQzZBjBJdYJTG8oicVEqgdnQus6I4oMK0hXpOo2I5nk/edit?usp=sharing)