Covid-19 pandemic forced us to abandon face-to-face education pushing us to virtual one, and the use of technology was the main key to doing it.The development of it acquired a predominant role in the didactic sequences to achieve continuity in student learning. The digital area experience has become a pointbreak for education nowadays. Gamification was key during this transition.
Gamification in education is "the application of principles and elements of the game in a learning environment with the purpose of influencing behavior, increasing motivation, and promoting student participation”. Edu Trends, 2016 Quoting Alex Games, 2014, Director of Education Design, Microsoft. “Play is the first way we learn and experiment to see what happens, try, try, try… Play is inherent in the game! human beings!".
Thanks to our relationship with Microsoft, our students have a completely free MS Office Pack in their homes, in addition to 1T of cloud storage, digital tools that help them carry out activities that they would normally do on several platforms can now be in a single one and acquire knowledge through gamification with the apps that add to it.
With the Cisco Networking Academy, they acquire practical knowledge about networking, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship, among other topics. In addition, through the use of other digital platforms such as Google Workspace, Zoom, myON, English Attack, and Compass, students not only increase their cultural heritage but also help consolidate strategies for analysis and transmission of information, to give their opinion with solid foundations.
Among the more than 40 apps we use in our online classes as gamification, we can mention Menti, Wordwall, Quizizz, TedX, Mentimeter, Answergarden, Edpuzzle, Khan Academy, CK12, Padlet, Flipgrid, Mobbyt, Kahoot, Socrative, Audacity, Movie Maker. Thanks to their use, the cognitive abilities of the students are potentiated, their knowledge is consolidated and results are optimized.
The mindset has to be set on the future; the future that asks us to be better people day by day. That is why, our main priority is the training of our teachers and the acquisition of new teaching materials to achieve the synchronous and asynchronous learning that now guides our classes. We have learned from uncertainty and pain, but at the same time, we have become stronger by discovering the greatness that each person has inside.
