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What Does it Mean to Have Fun Whilst Learning?

The idea of fun in learning or fun in education can be a hard one to grasp. Yet, at heart, we all know that learning is fun. Or at least... it should be. It shouldn't be so hard to learn and have fun, should it?

Do you remember the last time you sat down just to learn something new or improve your skills at work? Though the idea of self-development is exciting, the process is usually a bit dull. There's a lot of hard, boring work to do before you can reap the rewards. Sometimes it's tough to motivate yourself.

Winston Churchill said, "Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught". This is how most of us see learning and development. That's because the approach to training hasn't evolved since Churchill was yawning at the back of a classroom. The thought of accessing an online learning platform probably doesn't fill you with a sense of giddy joy.

Shouldn't we be excited to unleash superpowers we never knew we had? Shouldn't we wake up each morning wondering what new lessons the day might bring? If that's the case, why is corporate training so... well... corporate? So how do we make learning fun for adults?

The Science of Fun in Learning

Fun has a positive effect on motivation levels, determining what we learn and how much we retain. Learning isn't a one-off event. It requires repetition and dedication. If the experience is fun, learners will stay curious and keep coming back for more.

Learning needs fun, if learning isn't fun, it won't be effective. That's not just a sneaking suspicion - it's a cold, hard, scientific fact.

A study in the journal, College Teaching, found that students could recall a statistics lecture more easily when the lecturer added jokes about relevant topics.

In her book, Neurologist, Judy Willis showed how fun experiences increase levels of dopamine, endorphins, and oxygen - all things that promote learning.

In a study for the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, Michael Tews found that employees are more likely to try new things if their work environment is fun.

Dr Laura Kubansky has undertaken research which demonstrates that fun is good for your health.

Many influential researchers (Dulay & Burt, 1977; Krashen, 1982) have found evidence that people learn better when they're feeling strong positive emotions.

The science proves it, learning is fun. So take the hint and make your training exciting!

These are just five examples from the masses of research into the impact of making an enjoyable learning experience. Though it's a small sample, it's clear to see the impact that fun can have on learning effectiveness, memory retention and in promoting self-led learning. So why not let your students and learners have some fun in the classroom?

Practical Examples of Fun in Learning

If an academic study doesn't do it for you, how about some real-world examples of the effect of fun on human behaviour?

Volkswagen GAMIFY a Staircase

As part of their 'Fun Theory', Volkswagen turned a staircase into a giant fully-functioning piano keyboard. 66% more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator. This just goes to show that fun can change the way people behave in a situation that would otherwise be a chore.

Hubspot - Rooftop Meetings

Hubspot's CEO has a small rooftop terrace where the team gathers for beers after work. Brian, the CEO, believes that these meetings led to the company's success. They bonded the team together and made work a more sociable place to be.

Gigantic Ball Pit Downtown

To test if senior business executives still cared about having fun, Mark Gagnon installed a giant ball pit in a business area. What he found was that inside each business person in a suit there's a carefree fun-lover desperate to get out!

LinkedIn - Walk & Talk

LinkedIn introduced walk & talks where team members can take a stroll to catch up or have meetings. It's a great way to introduce some exercise into the workday and it releases fun-i nduc ing endorphins which reduce stress, improve health and make people happier.

Hendrick - Gamified Learning Platform

Hendrick Automotive launched their H.A.L.O. platform in July of 2015. The gamified elements in the LMS boosted engagement and supercharged learning throughout the company.

This all helped make the last quarter of the following year was the most successful in Hendrick's 40-year history. Read the full case study here.

Why Fun At Work is Good For Business

Life without laughter, entertainment and fun would be grey and downright dull! Life's too short for boring!

Fun at work can take many forms. So, let's explore some of the ways a little fun can make a big difference.

Productive Power of Laughter

It's probably not a surprise that a fun working environment makes us happier at work.

The good news? Happy employees are 12% more productive! The great news? it's not just happiness that increases positivity.

Research shows, simply having a good laugh makes us more productive and boosts accuracy. So, next time you have an afternoon of hardcore spreadsheets, or back-to-back calls ahead of you, an impromptu #joke-off could be just the motivation you need!

More Fun, Less Empty Seats

No, we're not talking about Musical Chairs Monday (but while we're at it, that sounds like an awesome idea!). I am talking about the fact that more fun in the workplace leads to lower staff turnover and less time off sick. In fact, the research found 62% of people who engaged in fun activities at work had taken no sick days in the last three months (compared to 38% of people who had not taken part in the fun at work).

Raising Resilience

Whether you're facing a business crisis, a bad day at the office or just a bad hair day - resilience is essential in times of adversity. That's where laughter can help because it's good for our health and wellbeing.

A hearty chuckle can lower stress and boost immunity. In fact, our muscles relax for up to 45 minutes following a good giggle. Encouraging a positive office culture that advocates fun and laughter helps protect staff against the stresses and strains of day-to-day working life.

Creative Fun!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. It's true - without a little fun in the office people become dull and uninspired - that means creativity suffers. In contrast, 55% of staff who've taken part in a fun activity in the last 6 months feel more creative.

A workplace where people feel free to laugh, helps people feel free to share their ideas. It's clear a little fun can make all the difference when it comes to business innovation.

What Do You Do for Fun?

Fun means different things to different people. Some people's micro scooter may be another person's Harley Davidson. Some people's snowboarding dream-getaway might be another person's vertigo nightmare. So what does fun look like for your employees and learners?

Firstly most people like to have fun but some like it more than others. 79% of Millennials think fun at work is important, compared to only 55% of older staff.

On top of that, fun looks different depending on your role within the company. For example, only 14% of business owners see dress-down days as fun compared to 29% of graduates. The research also shows business owners are less likely to value fun at work than employees.

So next time we're planning the company wellbeing strategy, staff conference or social - it's important to ask people what they want. Make the fun meaningful and inclusive.

This way everyone's ideas of a good time are represented and celebrated. This fosters a working environment of inclusion, diversity, Epic Meaning and of course, shed loads of fun!

Need some inspiration? Pandas sure know how to how fun so take a tip from this guy!

Make Fun a Habit

We can't simply look around a grey office and think 'It's miserable in here - we need to spice things up - let's organise a team away day, party or dance-off (insert random, one-off event of your choice here)." Those activities will probably boost morale temporarily but how long will this serotonin high last?

For fun to translate into happiness and success, it needs to become a habit. Make fun part of the company culture. And of course, make it part of the learning culture to keep your staff happy, engaged and motivated!

How can Learning Technology Help?

Too large, scattered or remote to make this happen throughout your company? Learning technologies can help bring all this fun to your staff wherever they are.

Gamification

What could be more fun than a good game? Gamification, the application of gaming mechanics to non-game environments, allows you to bring all the fun of the Zelda and Angry Birds, straight to your LMS. Points, levels and rewards will keep your learners engaged and motivated.

Social

Use the power of social to bump up the fun element. Introduce chatrooms to your LMS where people can celebrate success, share ideas and cheer each other on. Why not add a healthy dose of competition too with a leaderboard feature? It doesn't just have to be about learning - why not take an idea from us at Growth Engineering and encourage people to share their favourite weekend selfie - best one wins!

Mobile

Whether based at the company's head office or in a remote wilderness out posting - people can stay connected to the fun wherever they are with mobile learning. Mobile means no one has to miss out the leaderboard top spot, office #JokeOff marathon, or the latest company competition.

Learning is Fun: Engagement is the key!

Fun, pleasure, excitement - call it what you will, the essential ingredient in any training endeavour is engagement. When it comes to talent management if you don't spend the time to make the learning experience a compelling and enjoyable one, how can you expect your learners to spend any time on it?

Unlocking engagement in your learning platform isn't some dark art known only to mystics and seers - it's actually a lot simpler than you might think.

In fact, after nearly twenty years perfecting the recipe we've decided to share it in the form of a handy guide. The Secret to Business Impact will help you unleash the power of engagement in your organisation and engage your students.
Click here to download your copy! It will help you engage your learners, whether they're in the workplace or in education. After all, learning made fun is learning made powerful.

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Fun in Learning: Why Entertainment is Essential for Adult Education

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The idea of fun in learning or fun in education can be a hard one to grasp. Yet, at heart, we all know that learning is fun. Or at least... it should be. It shouldn't be so hard to learn and have fun, should it?

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10 Apps That Will Get Your Kids Excited About School

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Summer is almost over ... and that's OK!

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Principle III: Provide Multiple Means of Engagement (the “why” of learning)

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Principle III: Provide Multiple Means of Engagement (the “why” of learning)

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1. Recruiting Interest
2. Sustaining effort and persistence
3. Self- regulation

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There are a variety of sources that can influence individual variation in affect including neurology, culture, personal relevance, subjectivity, and background knowledge, along with a variety of other factors

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When the whole world is practically taken over by mobile apps schools and education system just cannot shy away from this reality. Actually apps should be taken as the new opportune frontier for offering smart education to the children and students of 21st century.

Most children today are familiar with the mobile apps even from their pre-school days. Naturally they have a natural inclination to get engaged with mobile apps. Moreover mobile apps offer the most innovative ways to make learners engage and study. In every year increasing number of schools are coming with new mobile apps. Whether offering learning modules for students or connecting faculty or guardians - mobile apps can effectively add immense value to our educational system.
Engaging teachers, students and parents
Mobile apps more than gaming, shopping and video watching experience offer an array of meaningful ways to engage teachers, students and parents. An app can provide ready in hand news and event updates concerning schools. It can further inform guardians regarding courses, timings, class schedules, school policies, etc. From offering school location in a digital map to suggesting lunch menus to facilitating queries and replies among the students, an app can creatively take the education beyond stereotype boundaries. Apps can also provide a nice avenue to get information on results and individual student information. From tracking attendance record of your son to seeing teacher's comments and suggestions to getting scoreboard, you can always remain updated on your son's education thanks to a mobile app. Many distant learning programs are increasingly viewing mobile app as the best bet for offering real time online education at an affordable price.
Availability of information
You may not always feel to spend extra minutes to open the school website and browse it for finding required information. Many people simply forget to load the site address just as soon as they come across the school's web address. But if you have a mobile app of the school to offer all your students, guardians and faculties, it would fetch far better user volume as all would be able to access the information just with a single finger tap. Moreover, all students may not have a computer at home with internet connection but if they have a smart handheld device to access (which is increasingly becoming commonplace) they can access the school information from anywhere through the mobile app of the school.
Increasing scope of communication
Normally most guardians feel to go to their child's school to have a check on their child's improvement but in most of the times they discover themselves reeling under professional pressure or work stress and naturally they forget about their child. Now thanks to these mobile apps they can be constantly in touch with whatever is going on in the school of their children. Similarly, students will be more engaged as they would find more information sources inside the app. Teachers can come to know student queries and answer them in their suitable time just through the school's mobile app.
More involvement with various communities
Education is no longer just an island for the participants as it was few decades ago. Today students are proactive from their school days to share any interesting content to their social media friends.

Whether for contacting the school board members or for raising funds for a new initiative or for updating some vital event information on social pages - a mobile app of the school can offer you great array of community building scopes.

Today or tomorrow these benefits must be sounding relevant enough to your ears if you are a school administrator or teacher. For making education more engaging, creative, faster and smarter mobile app is a great mean that no stakeholders in the education system can disagree with. Some widely used web tools used by students and teachers alike can serve as the instances in this regard. These tools often empower your desktop at school or home or your handheld devices to give you lesson at your convenience. While learning simultaneously with as much as enjoyable means is continued to be the objective for engaging students, these web apps and tools have a really effective role to play. Let us introduce here some of these learning tools with a creative and differential thinking.

Ejucomm: Ejucomm is a school mobile app with primary focus on increasing communication and collaboration among students, teachers and guardians. The web platform offering an array of mobile friendly educational tools for every kind of purposes including taking notes to translation to collaborative tasks has already been hugely popular.

Buncee: For a kid truly it is a sky-full of creative possibilities for shaping his visual aspirations with engaging multimedia drawings on a digital canvas. Kids possess weird range imaginations when it comes to creating something and Bouncee is the right digital canvas to try their creative brilliance.

Collaborize Classroom: From taking lessons to completing tasks and engaging in collaborative tasks or posting comments and queries, with this great web based tool the whole classroom get nearer and engaged than ever before.

Mindmeister: When a student wants to map his education plan and schedules in a detailed and intuitive order, this tool comes as the handiest one. From taking small notes to scheduling tasks to making a presentation plan, with this you can do all without making yourself too muddled up.

Kidblog: As a teacher if you want to give vent to the creative abilities of engaging students start using Kidblog in and outside the classroom. Each student can create his individual blog, participate in discussions and engage with comments, while the teacher has full control over all the student accounts and discussions. That is pretty superb for engaging students, isn't it?

Voki: This tool became immensely popular with teachers and students simply because it did not miss to address the relevant things. From engaging students with interactive lessons to enhancing skills for as many as 25 languages, from introducing students with tech environment in a fun way to helping them with homework and projects, Voki proves to be irreplaceable for educational community.

Remind 101: As a teacher you obviously want to connect the students in a classroom in an efficient manner and want to have full control over them. That is exactly you can do with this wonderful educational tool. From sending messages to all the students instantly to seeing the contact details of all of them, you can do all of these at ease.

Wordle: Wordle is a simple and creative tool to let students create their own word-cloud from the frequent words they are encountering in their texts. The tool is actually devised to make students more familiar with new words in their text.

Schoology: From offering unique web course pages for learners to making cloud based service available for collaborative sharing and storage, Schoology has many feats that made it one of the most referenced web based educational tool so far. From secure mailing to workload planning to letting teachers access student data, Schoology is a full-fledged LMS.

FlipQuiz: Incorporating fun way of sharing knowledge and engaging students is nowadays more preferred and the whole objective of using educational tools is basically directed towards that end. FlipQuiz does that perfectly enough by letting teachers create game show style quizzes for students.

The Latest EdTech News To Your Inbox

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education community engagement using apps

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How Schools are Using Apps to Engage Students, Parents and the Community

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When the whole world is practically taken over by mobile apps schools and education system just cannot shy away from this reality. Actually apps should be taken as the new opportune frontier for offering smart education to the children and students of 21st century.

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The longer I teach, the more I realize that activating my students' background knowledge about a topic is critical. I find this especially true with ELL students. There are lots of ways to find out what your students already know about a topic and what misconceptions they have. This is also incredibly important - what do students not understand.

There are several ways that I try and get at my students' knowledge beyond KWL charts or having a whole class discussion.

Brain dump - where students draw a picture, give an example, or write down everything that they know about a topic or vocabulary words or a process, etc. I might have students do this as a warm-up activity, an exit ticket, or at the beginning of a unit. If it is an exit ticket, I would assign it before we started a new unit or topic. That way I can collect some information that informs my instruction in the unit. There are many off-shoots or extensions for this activity. After students have written, you can group them using a Kagan structure (like HandUp, StandUp, PairUp) and have them share their thinking (maybe using RallyRobin). This allows them to hear about many sets of knowledge. You need to keep in mind that some students might share some incorrect information. This is why you will probably want to collect their writing - so that you can address these.

What is the topic? - You can use this strategy when you are introducing a new topic. You write vocabulary words on the board (or overhead, etc) and based on the words, the students must decide what you will be focusing on. This allows you to see if your students have any frame of reference for the topic.

What words don't fit? - This activity is similar to the previous, except the students are told the topic and they must decide which words written on the board (or overhead) should be included in the unit and which words should be discarded.

My colleague, Laura Zoromski, has created a great building background activity that she uses in her math class. coordianate-graph-explanation Click on this link to view an example and the explanation.

If you have a specific set of vocabulary words that you will be teaching, you can have the students pre-assess their familiarity with the words. You can create a basic chart that lists the word and options on a knowledge continuum. vocabulary-checklist Click on this link to view an example. After you have taught the unit, have students re-evaluate where they fall on the continuum.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of strategies, but these are some simple, quick, and useful ways to help your students activate their background knowledge.

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The longer I teach, the more I realize that activating my students' background knowledge about a topic is critical. I find this especially true with ELL students. There are lots of ways to find out what your students already know about a topic and what misconceptions they have.

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Teachers Actually Want Students To Use This App in Class

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Remind helps teachers blast assignments to students and their parents

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About UDL

When applied to learning, Universal Design becomes a framework for teaching and learning that addresses the widest possible variety of learning needs, styles, and preferences. It recognizes that each of us has preferred modes of receiving and processing information or demonstrating knowledge and abilities.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 defines UDL as a scientifically valid framework for guiding educational practice that: Provides for flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and Reduces the barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, photo of college student contemplating.including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient. (Section 103(24).

UDL is about creating flexible, accessible learning materials and environments to enhance the learning success of ALL learners. The incorporation of additional assistive technologies and media is a major component of creating flexible materials for learning. The Center for Applied Special Technology(CAST), home of the UDL concept, is a leader in the research and development of technologies to support and enhance learning. The CAST's collection of tools is available on their website.

UDL@UVM

A great deal of research and model development related to UDL in public school K -12 education has occurred and continues to be a focus of CAST. In cooperation with CAST founders, UDL@UVM is adapted this model to higher education and supporting faculty at the University of Vermont with implementation of UDL practices in their courses.

The UDL grant was a $1 million, three-year grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education and ran from October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2011. While this grant is no longer active, UDL practices are still widely used on campus.

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About UDL When applied to learning, Universal Design becomes a framework for teaching and learning that addresses the widest possible variety of learning needs, styles, and preferences. It recognizes that each of us has preferred modes of receiving and processing information or demonstrating knowledge and abilities.

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This principle stresses the importance of holding student attention to maximize their engagement in the task at hand.