Gamified Classroom Management & Learning Platforms

Gamified classroom management platforms and gamified learning platforms help teachers make routine tasks more fun, give kids tangible goals and build classroom community. Game mechanics, such as points, badges, and levels, can be used to promote learning in the elementary classroom. These elements can be used to encourage students to work towards achievements and rewards, which can increase motivation and engagement. Teachers can use these elements strategically to reinforce learning objectives and promote positive behavior.

The Benefits of Gamified Learning

The benefits of incorporating gamification in the classroom

Gamification can greatly benefit students in the elementary classroom. It can increase student engagement, motivation, and retention of material. It can also address the diverse learning needs of students, promote inclusivity, create a sense of competition and boost teamwork, leading to a more collaborative learning environment. By making learning fun, gamification can help students develop a love for learning that can last a lifetime.

How gamification can address the diverse learning needs of students and promote inclusivity

Gamification can help to address the diverse learning needs of students in the elementary classroom. By incorporating various game mechanics, teachers can cater to the different learning styles of their students. It can also promote inclusivity by creating a level playing field where all students can participate and achieve success. Additionally, gamification can foster a sense of community and encourage students to work together towards a common goal.

The Best Gamified Classroom Management Platforms

Class Dojo

Class Dojo lets you award student-created avatars with points for desirable behavior and take away points for undesirable behavior, with more of a silly and cute feel geared towards lower and mid elementary.  This system also lets you connect parent accounts so they can see exactly how their students are acting when in school and allow for private messaging between the teacher and individual parents.  You can also use class-wide parent announcements to keep parents in the loop and upload attachments with your messages, such as handouts, worksheets, or permission slips. The simpler platform is better suited for use by both younger students and less technologically inclined teachers, coming equipped with presets that can later be fully customized.

Bloomz

Bloomz is an all-in-one solution for parent-teacher communication that integrates a variety of tools into a user-friendly platform. One of its standout features is the PBIS behavior management system, designed to encourage positive behaviors and curb negative ones. Bloomz behavior tracking also includes various age-appropriate themes (flowers, monsters, etc.).

Define school-wide behavior interactions and let them automatically flow to classes underneath. Create different teams or “houses” of students to compete with each other as they meet your behavior goals. Optionally allow teachers to add their own custom interactions.

Their Behavior Flags are an easy way to provide feedback and rewards while keeping an eye on all students’ behavior. You can automatically award milestones to students who earns 25 points in a month, automatically notify relevant teachers about a Tier II incident, and generate administrator referral notifications if needed.

Digital Classroom Point System

There are many classroom management tool for behaviors out there that allow you to attribute points for good behaviors and taken them away when our students aren’t making the best choices. The only problem is that some districts/boards have been blocked them for security issues.

Here is the solution, a simple point system built using Google Sheets. It is extremely easy to manipulate. The students get to pick their avatar, and teachers press the “+” to add a point and the “-” to remove a point next to each students’ name. Teachers can then plug these points into classroom rewards, progression and/or level-ups.

Habitica

This app gamifies task lists.  Habitica is a free habit-building and productivity app that treats real life like a game. With in-game rewards and punishments to motivate and a strong social network to inspire, it can help students achieve their goals to become healthy, hard-working, and happy. By linking several students into groups, they can fight in-game monsters by every member completing their tasks! They can then use the currency they earn to buy in-game or custom classroom rewards.

The Fallen Star: A Fantastic (Retired) Platform

We recommended this platform to teachers many times on this very blog.

Classcraft was a fantastic, gamified behavioral and learning management system designed for use in the classroom. Unfortunately, it was bought out and the software completely re-purposed.  The system let you award student-created avatars for desirable behavior and provide discouragement for undesirable behavior using a rich game-inspired interface that allows the avatars to maintain health, gold, experience and magical power.  The Quest feature also allowed you to turn your lessons into gamified journeys to further engage and reward your students through their avatars.  The only real draw-back was that it was a complex system with multiple layers, for both teachers and students, and therefore required tackling a steep learning curve on everybody’s part to be utilized to its full potential. 

There was really nothing quite like it out there at the time, and its removal left a gap in the field of gamified classroom management. There are now other options to explore if you are looking to replace this once-beloved resource, however!

Recommended Gamified Classroom Learning Platforms

There are so many truly wonderful, impactful educational games out there. We complied The Top Educational Apps for Elementary Students: A Comprehensive List to make sure you have great resources to select from no matter what you teach.

For the purposes of this article however, we are concentrating on platforms that are not just built on a foundation of educational games but also have an overarching gamified ideology. Think game elements such as progression through a “world”, earned in-game currency & rewards, and the ability to level up.

Dojo Islands

Class Dojo has a new learning companion to its behavioral management platform. From math and problem solving to building social skills, Dojo Islands lets kids learn the most effective way they can—through play. A magical world where kids explore STEM, teamwork, and creativity together by building creations that friends can visit and exploring a magical world together. 

Prodigy

No cost to you or your students, aligned to state standards for grades 1–8 Math and 1–6 English. In Prodigy Math, students are wizards engaged in epic math battles. In Prodigy English, students collect and harvest resources to build their very own world.

Beast Academy

Beast Academy is an engaging, rigorous math curriculum for elementary students. Through our interactive online platform and captivating comic-based storylines, students tackle tough challenges that move them to math mastery.

Night Zookeeper

Join the magical world of the Night Zoo, inventing their own characters to help Night Zookeeper Will, Sam the Spying Giraffe, and Riya defeat the evil Lord of Nulth from destroying creativity. Their online program makes reading & writing fun for your child, whilst improving their spelling, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary and more.

Teach Your Monster to Read

Teach Your Monster is an award-winning suite of games which help children to master the early learning skills. Their most popular games are:

• Teach Your Monster to Read – an early phonics and reading game that makes
  learning to read fun.
• Number Skills – an early mathematics game that builds a strong foundation of
  number knowledge.

EMC2 Learning

An online members community that now provides hundreds of gamified classroom resources to thousands of educators, schools, and districts all around the world.  EMC² Learning’s fully editable templates challenge students to fuse content knowledge with creativity to take their game to a whole new level. Committed to providing today’s teachers with the very best in student-centered, feedback focused engagement strategies, there are new resources added every week so there’s always more to discover.

Minecraft Education Edition

Minecraft Education Edition is an educational version of the popular sandbox game, Minecraft. With its engaging gameplay and open-ended learning environment, Minecraft Education Edition provides young learners with a fun and interactive way to learn about math, science, and engineering concepts.

Fabulingua

By combining research on how our brains acquire language with the magic of interactive stories, we’ve created a revolutionary way for kids to learn new languages. In every magical tale, 4 Story Modes and 4 Mini-Games alternate seamlessly in a zig-zag path, turning language learning into a fun and rewarding experience that is highly effective.

Frax

Adaptive and game-based, Frax uses the latest research-based instructional methods to create a better way to teach and learn fractions. Fun challenges, personalized instruction, and motivating rewards help students build their skills and understanding, all while exploring the galaxy with fractions!  Along their Frax journey, students progress through three Sectors aligned to elementary grade-level fractions standards.

End Game

Getting points, reaching higher levels, climbing scoreboards, earning rewards and embarking on new quests excites our brains and encourages them to release dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway (the “reward pathway”), which creates higher motivation and makes us continue to chase after those rewards.

By taking the time to understand gamification techniques, aligning them with your teaching objectives, and evaluating their effectiveness, you can enhance your teaching and provide your students with a fun and engaging learning experience.

Gamified classroom management platforms and gamified learning platforms such as the ones we highlighted streamline this whole endeavor, lightening the burden of the teacher implementing gamification techniques in their classroom.

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