Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Strategy Games

First of all, I am a huge fan of Big Fish Games, and I really enjoy their hidden objects game. My favorite one is The Black Cat which is adapted from Edgar Ellen Poe’s novel. Since I had read the novel before, I already knew the plot and the ending of the game. But the game treated you with delicate pictures and lifelike sound effects. I was totally attracted by its tense scenes and creepy atmosphere. As you know, hidden objects games always have a lot of vocabulary which you need to know and to pick them out from a mess picture. So you can also learn some new words. And I’m pretty sure that I learned and memorized the word “cane” from The Black Cat because it occurred several times. However, I won’t recommend this to young students for it is not free and the some of the scene is really scary.

    What I would like to introduce is Big Fish’s Games: The Dark Manor (available for PC, ipad and iphone). It is a combination of strategy game and hidden objects. The player is the heir of a ghost manor (still a little bit horrible but I think it is acceptable to high school students). The mission is to manage the manor and try to set other friendly ghosts free. The following the pictures are the scenes from my manor. And I am still a beginner (only level 2).

    If I could apply this game in the language teaching, my objectives will be:

    To enlarge student’s vocabulary: In the game, the player has to match the correct pictures with the words to move on to a new chapter of the story. So during this process, students should know the meaning of the word. If they don’t, they can look them up in dictionaries. What if they don’t want to look up the dictionary and randomly point their fingers on the screen? Don’t worry. The game itself will warn the player and pause the game for seconds. In order to check whether students are familiar with the words that occur in the game, I could make an informal quiz, and the student who has remembered most words will be awarded a prize.

    To improve writing skills in a long-term practice: The setting of the game is based on a narrative story and has a character upgrade system. In other words, the game could be played for a quite long time. Thus, I could ask my students to write a daily “management diary” which let students write down what they did in the game, how long they played the game, or what they feel about today’s game. This will help students to form a habit of writing. Although it is in the form of diary, I will focus on the grammar and content, and give them feedbacks. I think this will improve students’ writing gradually. And I could assess this objective through comparing their outputs and I’m sure I will find the improvements. (Similar as the idea in Casual Game)  

    All in all, strategy games could stimulate players’ autonomous decision-making skills and internal decisions. Thus, we can use the game to catch students’ attentions. And then the game itself will naturally stimulate the language learning process. By the way, if you are interested in this kind of hidden objects games, I am willing to recommend some to you, but the games might not be free.    

Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Casual Games

      Before introducing my idea of applying a causal game in the future classroom, I would like to talk about gamification first.

What is gamification?

      According to 7Things You Should Know About Gamification, “Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior”. In other words, designing a language learning task in the form of a game is the gamification.

What are the benefits of using gamification in the classroom?

      To summarize the answer from Tom Chatfield, there are benefits:

      1. Easy to motivate or stimulate learners’ interests through beautiful and settings.

      2. Clear indications for measuring progress of each learner.

      3. Well-planned long-term and short-term goals for learners to achieve gradually.

      4. Positive reward (fictitious money, trophy or XP) and feedback both for the teacher and the player.

      5. Try to finish some tasks in collaborative and interactive atmosphere.

How to use gamification in the English class?

      This time, I would like to use a causal game as an example. I found a game named Happy Pets through 10Gaming Genres to Adapt in Class. Happy Pets is a webpage game operated by Facebook. It offers players a platform to adopt pets and raise them with care. Although this the first time I play this game, I could easily understand the operations and instructions within 10 minutes.

      I decide to use this game as an assist to help students to practice their writing skills. I can design a topic, such as what pets do you have, why would you choose this pet, or if you can raise a real one, will you choose another pet etc. Or just let them keep a weekly diary to report their pets’ growth. During this process, students should describe the images and explain the reasons in English which will practice their writing skills. Furthermore, since it is a game from Facebook, it would be easier for them to share their playing conditions with their friends and classmates. And Happy Pets has a system of giving gifts to others in order to finish a mission. Thus, I think this game would also enhance the communication or interaction between the classmates outside the classroom. I might not use a walk thourgh and the images from the game because Happy Pets does not contain much techniques. What the studetns need to do is to offer their pets some daily care. And although the images of the game is very cute, it is not very useful in the teaching.

      On the other hand, I could use prizes to keep students to get involved in the game and form a good habit of writing. And the prize will be given based on their writings rather than who has a higher level of the game. In this gamificationized writing task, the role of the teacher (me) is the controller and the judge. I should control students do not pay too much time on the game and judge their outputs both of the writing and the pets (outcome of the game).

      I think I could assess my learning objectives through my students production. Since I decide to make it a long-range task, I will find whether students' writing skills are improves or not by comparing their writings, and I could find out what efforts should I make to better support their writing.

      To sum up, gamification offers teachers an advanced but easy to get students involved in the language learning tasks, and it offers students opportunities for recognition and a positive attitude toward their work.

  

Twitterchat: Q&A within 128 words

       I joined a Twitterchat with the hashtag #Edtechchat. When I entered the chat room, many people were already started talking. Some of the members were new to this chat room just like me, and they tweeted a brief introduction of them.

       Before I joined his group, I thought they talked the specific techniques about applying technology in the classroom or something very academic. But later, I found that their first question of the day was about the bad weather and school. I felt a little surprised and breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t feel nervous anymore because I could say something about this topic. I studied in Buffalo where the cold weather was everyday’s fare and snowing was routine.

       However, a problem came up. The limitation of each tweet was 128 characters, which was apparently long enough for my reply. So I had to reorganize my sentence and chose shorter words instead. At first, I thought this was a little bit annoying. Why should there be a restriction on the letters? But a few seconds later, I told myself that maybe the reason why it named “tweet”, a short, high sound. And I think I could express myself clearly in short words. To be honest, it was interesting when you have to struggling with the words. Maybe I will use “words limitation” in my teaching for some writing tasks or word games. Furthermore, Twitterchat  is a good place for quick ask and quick answer. May be I could use it as a sample to make a similar Q&A responses board for my students to let them ask and answer the questions of what they have learned. And that is also convenient for me to monitor my students’ study.

       All in all, Twitterchat offers me a platform to communicate with other people who have the same or even more knowledge than me. I can always learn new things from them, and the internet tools can always bring me ideas to apply in real classroom.

Let's Tweet!

Twitter has proven itself to be an interesting and useful tool for educators around the globe. If being used appropriately in language teaching, students would learn new knowledge and have fun at the same time. The Teacher’s Guide to Twitter suggests four tips for teachers using Twitter. Briefly, they are creating it, connecting it, sharing it and keeping it.

As a future teacher, I have an idea that using Twitter to form a study group. I can give mu students four course-related topics each week. And ask students to choose their interested group. After they form the group, each member should share a link of related article and post their comments on each others’ sharing. Then appointing one student to tweet a complete review of all the members’ ideas and sharing it with the whole class. In this process, students should first searching articles,  and then selecting the appropriate one. Finally, they should write down their feelings or opinions in correct sentence structure. The main purpose of doing so is to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

I also come up with three basic rules which are inspired by 10 Twitter MistakesYou Should Avoid. Even though there are no official instructions to teach students how to use Twitter correctly, the teacher has the responsibility to remind students what they could do and they’d better not do. 1.  Do not randomly connect or share on your Twitter without concrete motivation 2. Do not provide unfounded or unreliable information on Twitter 3. Show respects to others’ sharing and comments.

To sum up, Twitter is a wonderful assistant to support teaching outside the classroom, which is convenient and low cost than many real books and teaching materials. Twitter will bring infinite benefits to both teachers and learners only if we use it reasonably.

Learning from the Virtual Community

        I joined in a Google Communities named English language learning.The creator of this community is a TESOL certified English teacher with qualifications from Oxford Seminars. And this community is created for people around the world who interested in learning the English. You can feel free to post any questions you may have, the other members of the community could help you to find the answer. This is a community where people with all varying degrees of language proficiency can learn from one another.

        As a non-native speaker, I could learn a lot of new knowledge and informations from this community, such as  specific grammar point (Commonly Misused Adjectives in the English Language; Rules in Using the Apostrophe), culture (Halloween experience in the USA), and using English in daily life(Asking for directions).

        On the other hand, as a future teacher, all the information in this community could be my teaching materials in my classroom. All the knowledge are there, clearly and systematically. What I need to do is digest them first ,and then find an appropriate way to put them out and teach to my student.  For example, if I am teaching adjectives and I want to enlarge my students’ vocabulary, I might only use adjectives part (see the picture on the left side, which is sited from my community) , because the verb part is not related to my teaching plan and that is too much information for my students to digest.

        At last, since all the members are from different parts of the world. I could also ask them about their English learning and teaching situations in their countries and compare them with my in China. I always want to know the similarities and differences about teaching English. Sometimes, it is amazing to find out that the people you never know before have the same idea as yours, and even you all teaching English, but the way people teach is differ in thousands of ways.

The Learner of Today

        George Siemens pointed out in his article, Connectivism: ALearning Theory for the Digital Age, that the foundational principles of knowledge has been changed and is growing exponentially. With the development of technology and networks, the structures and the manners of learning are changing, such as formal classroom to informal one, separate works to cooperative works, or from a small group to a larger group. Seimens(2005) declared that connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations. Thus, he present a new theory as “connectivism”.

        Then, what is connectivism? According to Seimens, “connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual”. Moreover, in the video What is Connectivism, “knowledge is networked and distributed, which is increasingly aided by technology”.  Based on this idea, I’d like to describe the individual learner as the airport. The internet is the airplane. And the knowledge and information that people learned from others are the passengers of the airplane. Different airports send passengers to different destinations through airplanes. In other words, the individual, as the starting point, uses internet as a tool to exchange information and knowledge with another individual. Gradually, each individual will form their own routine and systemic social network.

        To sum up, applying technology is the trend of teaching and learning in the future. It is necessary for the learners to cultivate an ability to synthesize and recognize the target knowledge from the large amount of information and transfer them to own use.

Diigo or Scoop.it? That's a question

Both Scoop. it and Diigo are two great tools to create, share, and annotate the websites that you like. They offer teachers a platform to create or join a group and share knowledge with colleagues, students, and others. But, if someone ask me which one is better, my answer will definitely be “it depends”.

        Here is a brief form I made to compare Diigo and Scoop. it:

        As you can see in the form, neither Diigo nor Scoop. it is perfect to meet every requirement. Well, as far as I concerned, I would prefer to use Diigo. I really like the idea that you can highlight the information that you want. Because I have a habit to take notes, and underline the words or sentences while I am reading. This might make feel more comfortable to continue reading. And also Diigo is convenient for me to track down other articles from the whole collection. All in all, the one fits you is the best for you. 
       
 
FYI: I am not very familiar with these two tools. If there are some uses I missed or misunderstood, please comment on my blog, and I will try to adjust my content. Thank you!