Gamification & Serious Games

I tried out a serious game called 3rd World Farmer. I played the game twice and found it to be easy to navigate. Some of the other serious games I tried out were much more difficult to figure out, had more rules to learn and required a more extensive vocabulary. For this reason I think this game could be good for an EFL classroom. I might employ this in an EFL classroom as an autonomous learning tool for students. I think it could be paired with a unit on finances, the condition of farmers in developing countries and farming vocabulary.

My learning objectives would be for students to recognize farming vocabulary, to practice making financial decisions and to be able to make observations about the life of a farmer in a developing country. The students would be responsible for playing the game on their own. In order to assess that the learning objectives had been met I would ask the students to write two short observational paragraphs about their experience. I would ask them to include details of the game they played utilizing farming vocabulary, details of the financial decisions they had to make and their observations on the life of a farmer in a developing country.

Gamification in the EFL Classroom

According to Educause gamification is the application of game-like elements in non-game situations. The intension is to increase interest, motivation and participation. Stephan J. Franciosi discusses how using games in an educational setting can contribute to students' intrinsic motivation to learn. He defines Flow as a mental state where a person experiences the challenge of a task/game which is neither too easy or too hard. Flow Theory has three components which support the use of games, they are: goals, feedback and skill/difficulty balance. If a game has these three components then it is likely to increase students' experience of Flow and engagement and thereby increase intrinsic motivation.

I played an escape the room game named The Great Kitchen Escape. I played the game three times. If I were to utilize this game in class my learning objectives would be that students would be able to identify kitchen vocabulary items through listening to directions, they would be able to follow commands given by the teacher reading the walkthrough, and they would be able to recognize prepositions for the location of items in the game. I would most likely have the students work in groups of two depending on the size of the class and the number of computers available. I would write out a script for the walkthrough using kitchen vocabulary, command words and prepositions of place/location and read it to the students as they played the game. Throughout the game playing process I would carry out comprehension checks to make sure the students were understanding the vocabulary, commands and prepositions. As a follow-up to the activity I would make a worksheet with screenshot images from the game for the students to identify the vocabulary, commands and prepositions that were used.

Twitter in the Classroom

On the website Educational Technology and Mobile Learning I found a great list of educational uses for Twitter. The list was broken up into five categories: Communication, Organization, Resources, Writing Skills, and Twitter Exercises. The more common educational uses for Twitter were listed such as sending out mass announcements, providing feedback and communicating with parents. There were also many ideas that had not occurred to me. For example, under communication there was a suggestion to use Twitter as ambient office hours so that teachers can be more accessible to students. Under organization a suggestion I thought could be really useful to me in the future was using Twitter to recap the day's lesson. A recommendation under resources was to follow Twitter news streams in the target language. For writing skills an idea I liked was assigning a daily or weekly word game on Twitter. Then under Twitter exercises I thought another good idea was to give bonus points for students who use Twitter to participate in discussions that they might feel uncomfortable to join in class.

A second article I read addressed how to establish a Twitter routine in the classroom. The author was writing specifically about grades K-8 who cannot establish their own Twitter accounts but I think the information can be adapted to other age groups. The visual roadmap graphic was really informative. It starts out by pointing out why teachers should Tweet with their class for example to communicate, to practice writing skills and to develop a sense of digital citizenship. The roadmap then moves on to how to familiarize students with the Twitter scene, what it means to be a follower, how to follow someone, and how to evaluate the feeds of others. Finally the visual shows how using Twitter can encourage students to use both lower and higher order thinking skills. I found this graphic very helpful in visualizing the process of introducing and utilizing Twitter in the classroom.

Twitterchatting

I followed the #eltchat on Twitter on Wednesday morning. The majority of teachers who attended the chat were from England but there were also teachers who were living and teaching abroad in places like Saudi Arabia. I thought that having teachers with varied backgrounds helped to stimulate the conversation and produced diverse observations and suggestions. The topic of the chat was the importance of the starting and ending of a lesson. What I liked about the chat was that it was informal, that anyone was welcome and could post a comment or idea. Also, I found that several participants had some interesting ideas of how to organize the beginning and ending of class. There were also some links and references given to reading material and resources on the topic. I found the tone of the chat to be very positive, welcoming and open to ideas. There was a lot of positive feedback and encouragement between participants.

I will say though that the format of a Twitterchat is somewhat confusing and hard to keep up with. There were multiple conversations going on at once so it could be somewhat hard to follow one train of thought. Also not everyone followed the specific questions that were posted by the moderator and a few participants would go off subject and make jokes. Due to the rapid nature of the chat sometimes the new question that was posted was not seen and people kept posting about the last question or they did not like/understand a question and ignored it. Ultimately though a Twitterchat is an informal venue so that is what is nice about it, participants can comment on what they want and say what they want without too much censorship. I liked the experience and can see that it could be useful for professional development and for networking. There were many useful ideas expressed in a short period of time and I felt that there were things that I could try to implement in class.