A serious game outside the classroom

This week I tried the game called The Garbage Game. It requires players to design a garbage plan for New York City. It starts by questions about waste sorting.

 After making one choice, it will provide some statistics that relate to the decision.

After waste sorting, it also ask players to decide the way of transportations and how and where to recycle the garbage. 

I played the game twice and I got two different results. I only change one type of waste sorting and one way of transportation. The only difference is the reduce of CO2 emissions. 

I think this game helps language learners develop their reading and comprehensive ability. First, it provides a lot of instructions. To understand the game, learners need to read thoroughly. Then when making choices, it also gives learners comments. Then with the results based on the decisions made by the player, it actually shows the learners the relationships between the steps and results. 

Revised Part:

The learning objective of this game is to use meaning clues and language structure to expand vocabulary (pictures,background knowledge,context clues) (According to Michigan State Standards).

The learning objectives of this game are learning vocabularies and understanding the gist of the reading. To understand the game, learner might have to look up the vocabularies and make notes of every steps to figure out the best way to solve the problem. Thus I believe this game belongs to the problem solving according to Kyle Mawer's task types . Each step leads to a different consequence. In order to come out with the best solution, players need to analyze each step. It allows learners to improve comprehensive ability by reading and analyzing. 

I will try to adopt the game in my future classroom as a post class game when I want my students to learn and deeper understand vocabularies and the logic concerning garbage recycling and environment protection. In order to assess the game, I would have them report their plans orally to practice speaking or in written form to practice writing.

Revised Part:

I would use it as a pre-class activity to impress students with the vocabularies and then require my students to do the writing. For example, write a letter to the government to introduce your garbage plan.

Learning can be fun: playing games in ESL classroom

Playing games doesn't always mean wasting time. It can be entertaining as well as educational especially in learning languages. The purpose of using games in language learning is to put students into more practical environments. Larry Ferlazzo proposes that walkthroughs, instructions written by game players to help others to finish the task step by step, also plays an important role in the learning process.

I played a game called Anna Hospital Recovery. It is a game that helps students to learn surgery vocabularies. Anna is injured and the player needs to be the doctor and gives her treatment. 

There is a list of the steps you need to do. After finishing each step, there will be a check mark on the list. For example, I cleaned her wounds, the fourth step "Disinfect" was then checked.

     

I found this game very interesting. I played three times. The first time I actually didn't pay attention to the words carefully since I was attracted by the pictures and background sounds. I just followed the instruction given by the finger on the screen. The second time, I was aware of the words on the list and tried to make each step with the word. The last time, I made dialogues with Anna. Though seems crazy, it actually is a way of reviewing the words.

Revised Part:

The learning objective of this game is to use meaning clues and language structure to expand vocabulary (pictures,background knowledge,context clues) (According to Michigan State Standards). 

I believe this game helps students focus on vocabulary learning. It not only provides students the connection of physical items and abstract words, but also shows how the words can be applied in practical situations. Moreover, as the game uses the well-known character among children, it is more attractive to students. Teacher can develop more possibilities from this game. If I had a chance of using this game in my future class, I would request my students to make dialogues or tell a story of the steps. 

In this game, I think the walkthrough is embedded in the game. There is a finger pointing at the thing needed to finish this step. After it is completed, this step on the checklist would be marked. It's more direct than other games like treasure searching. It is suitable for lower level learners. 

To examine the extent to which the students actually learn, I can design other forms of assessment such as quizzes or matching questions. 

Why is Gamification? How to apply into language learning?

According to 7 Things You Should Know About Games and Learning, gamification refers to the dynamic games based on content of the courses that benefit future teaching and learning. The aims are to increase engagement, enhance learning and explore new models of education. Gamification means
In this article,  “Just” Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning , the author discusses the application of digital games in language learning. Digital games can not only overcome difficulties like intercultural competence and pragmatics, but also modify the learning and teaching process and influence many aspects of language acquisition. It mainly focuses on the goal, interaction, feedback, context and motivation. When involving games into classroom, we as teachers need to always keep in mind the purposes like what language point I want my students to practice. Interaction is very important. We need to make sure that students are engaged into the games. Thus we need to make the games challenging while attractive. To increase interaction, we can also have students work in groups so that they can be more confident and more willing to put effort. Another important thing for successfully conducting the digital games in learning is feedback. The digital games are very good and effective at giving feedbacks. Thus the learners can be aware of their abilities.
Also in the video Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain, the speaker also discusses some important aspects for successfully applying games into learning. The speaker mentions the importance of breaking learning process into pieces by establishing long and short-term aims. He also talks about how other people are important during this process. Since engagement is one thing that support learning and games are considered highly involved activities, learning through games definitely will improve learning compare to other traditional classroom activities.

Learning or playing: It's your choice!

Many people view Twitter as a waste of time including me. This bias may result from the fact that most people use Twitter to follow celebrities and interesting stories. However after reading articles concerning this bias together with my personal experience of using Twitter, I found out that Twitter can be a very useful tool in education especially language teaching and learning process.

First of all, to effectively use Twitter as a knowledge resource, we should use hashtags to filter the information needed. For example, if you want to search for language learning, simply putting language learning as keywords with # in the front, you can view how other people learn language and what solutions to the problems that are commonly encountered by learners.

Second, we can join in Twitter chat to make realtime chatting with others. We can ask questions or give answers to other persons' questions. Twitter creates multi-media environment in which pictures, videos and links to other useful websites are mixed together.

Last, by following other people in a particular field, we can observe a long term development. Tweets by other people offer the perspectives of how they view this field. Thus we can see changes in this field or in this person by browsing his or her tweets in a period of time.

In my future teaching, I might use Twitter in classroom when I want to discuss a topic with my students. Seeing other people's opinions especially from all around the world can broaden their views and stimulate their creative and cognitive thinkings. One more thing about using Twitter in classroom that inspired me is the idea of creating a class account as a platform to include the ideas and feelings shared by the students. That works like a profile of the class which can record the development of the students. I will definitely try it in my future classroom.

Twitterchat: An interesting Experience

This week I tried the twitter chat for the first time. I found it really interesting. Twitterchat is different from other communicative approaches that I had ever experienced. It is more open and more social. By using the hashtag, people who are interested in a same topic can discuss together.

I followed the #ntchat (new teacher chat) which discuss the importance and current place of social studies in the classroom. We mainly discussed four questions about the application of social studies. The questions are the following:

I replied those four questions with my own opinions.

During and after the chat, I realized how the social community provide resources that we can use in the future teaching. People would offer links to which they consider useful for this question or share personal experience about the certain topic. For example, some people suggested to use mysteryskype with the combination of textbook to better facilitate students with the understanding of social studies. I enjoyed this casual and informal way of communication.