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Educator by day, gamer by night, and a bookworm nerd every day of the year, Kent Turner is a graduate of University of California San Diego, where he obtained his M.A. in Bilingual Education. He is now in his third year of teaching middle school students who, like him, are deaf and communicate in American Sign Language. When Kent is not busy applying Classcraft to his lessons, he enjoys going on movie marathons with his wife and two dogs by his side.
Thanks for talking with us today, Kent! To start, tell us a little about yourself as an educator and what classes and grade levels you teach.
I am an avid gamer who grew up playing Japanese role-playing games (JRPGS) and Western RPGS. I am also a deaf person who signs natively in American Sign Language (ASL) and reads English. For my M.A. in Bilingual Education, I wrote a thesis on the topic of gamification and built a prototype LMS similar to Classcraft’s that gamified the classroom where I did my internship.
I work with deaf students who sign in ASL as well, making the primary language of our classroom a signed one rather than a spoken one. I’ve been using Classcraft for nearly two years now in our 8th grade English/Language Arts class at the Texas School for the Deaf. I also teach Science and Video Production, but I’ve yet to incorporate Classcraft in these classes as I haven’t modified the curriculum to mesh with gamification. It is my ultimate goal to play Classcraft in all of the classes that I teach!
What convinced you to give Classcraft a try with your students at Texas School for the Deaf?
There are many different ways to manage a classroom and encourage a fun environment where students are motivated to learn. With Classcraft, it brings learning into the modern age with elements that our children encounter daily with phone-gaming apps and console gaming. My philosophy is to always accommodate the needs of our students with what they are most comfortable with, rather than expect them to fit into the comforts of the educator.
For example, in most classrooms, students write with paper and pencil, but once they go home, do they continue to use paper and pencil? No, they use touch screens, keyboards, and controllers. I demand the same with how our students approach tasks in the school system. I assign writing projects through Classcraft and attach rubrics along with specific instructions. My students write essays on Google Drive while I give real-time feedback. I encourage research via the Internet and teach them how to recognize trustworthy sources. In all, I model for my students how a regular tech-savvy person would operate in today’s society.
What kinds of customizations have you made in Classcraft to best accommodate your students’ needs?
Since my students are bilingual, I start our day by using the Wheel of Destiny to select a student to come up and sign the day’s agenda/project in ASL to the rest of the class. Sometimes, we have a Q&A session to clarify some points. I also post videos of myself signing instructions with typed transcripts so the students can access information from anywhere outside the classroom with the Classcraft app.
We alternate between team activities and individual activities. As I introduce a new lesson sequence, I model the assignment and/or project for my students in both languages. After that, students work together in Classcraft teams to complete an aspect of the assignment while communicating primarily in ASL. Finally, they focus on individual projects to maximize Experience Point (XP) and Gold Piece (GP) rewards with reading comprehension and expression in English writing.
In most deaf classrooms, flashing the ceiling lights is the best way to grab the attention of students. I use that from time to time, but I love to use the Count Down module in Quests to give a certain amount of time for students to work on assignments. The Count Down is projected on a white screen, clearly visible to all students for them to monitor their progress and keep an eye out for further instructions from me.
Have you encountered any obstacles with implementing the game? How have you overcome those challenges?
I have yet to encounter adverse obstacles as I am fortunate enough to have enough laptops to accommodate the number of students I have in my classroom for using Classcraft actively. I supplement the reading requirements in the Interactive Classroom Content feature with ASL modeling of classroom expectations and lessons sequences.
I keep my classroom student-centered as much as possible in order to give my students ownership over their own learning and process. Frequently, I post weekly and monthly deadlines to meet, so if I am not giving lectures that day, my students can just come into the class, log into Classcraft, and begin working on assignments with minimal intervention from me.
Do you have any advice for other teachers interested in using Classcraft with students with disabilities?
With students who are deaf and communicate through ASL, it is more of an issue of language accessibility rather than disability. Deaf students function as well as students who can hear in the classroom. The only difference is the mode of communication we use for “speaking” and “hearing.” We write and read in English as well as anybody else, but we sign in ASL.
This influences our use of Classcraft whenever information is elaborated and appreciated. For one of the assignments in our English/Language Arts class, the students had to come up with their avatar names and team names in English and give these names a signed version in ASL. This way, I could call on teams or avatars with their ASL names to give the classroom environment a deeper immersion in the game.
To truly appreciate Classcraft, a certain level of reading comprehension is required. I could tell that my students were motivated to understand gaming terms and how they influenced actions in the classroom. This improved the level of engagement in my classroom by leaps and bounds, with my students eager to integrate both ASL and English in their daily learning and advancements in Classcraft. In effect, this accelerated their acquisition of information since they were having fun at the same time. To me, that is the essence of Classcraft.
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