Games in classroom? Yes, it’s for learning!

For this part, I am so happy to talk about my own experience before. I like to play all kinds of games, like most of the players, I think it’s very good way to get relaxed and at the same time to obtain the sense of achievement when you conquered one difficult obstacle. When I was preparing for the exam of TOEFL, I only had 3 months to study for it which always made me feel nervous, so that’s when I wanted to play games to get calm down. At that time I found some good strategy games designed by Big Fish game company (actually I am a big fan of Big Fish games, sometimes I even pay to get the full version), all of which had very fantastic scenes. Also by playing these games I’ve learned lots of new words, because they had many levels to let you find the listed things in a messy picture.

By connecting the pictures with the words, I could remember them much easier, like the words caterpillar, rifle and many things in daily life that I didn’t know how to say in English. The games I used to play were: HiddenExpedition: Titanic, Azada, Hidden Expedition: Everest, PuppetShow: Mystery ofJoyville, Awakening: The Dreamless Castle, Drawn: The Painted Tower, HiddenExpedition: Amazon, Hidden in Time: Mirror Mirror, Hidden Mysteries - CivilWar, Awakening: Moonfell Wood, Secret Mission: The Forgotten Island, HauntedManor: Lord of Mirrors, etc.

My objectives for playing these games were to memorize vocabulary, and sometimes I can also practice listening through the narrative of the story background. I think the learning result was good, because it involves repetition of finding same things in different levels, then you could practice new words more times and finally build the connections of words and pictures in your mind.

If I use one of these games in my future classroom, I would choose Titanic, the following is my teaching plan:
1. Before playing this game, I would introduce the background knowledge of Titanic, the history of the event, so that students will learn vocabulary within relevant context.
2. The theme of this game is to find things according to the list in each picture, so in this step I would group students into 4, and each group will get a different picture and a different list.
3 To avoid students tapping things randomly, each group will receive a blank form to write down the things they find and give their explanation of each word.
4 To make this game more challenging, they would finish the task under limited time, so by the end of the game, there would be a winner team.
5 After this game, teacher would collect all the forms in order to find out difficult words and wrong words, so that in the following class teacher could pay more attention in teaching those words.
This game could be applied repetedly until students master all the words in this game. To assess students' learning effect, students could be asked to write a short description of a particular picture by using all the words listed below as shown in the picture.

Games, Not Only for Recreation

As the development of teaching methods, games are no longer an enemy of all teachers, they can be treated as efficient assistant now. Gamification is not totally new in education area, which is defined in the article ‘7 ThingsYou Should Know About Gamification’ as: the application of game elements in nongaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.

Gamifacation being applied in classroom has many advantages. Firstly, gamification has the potential to help build connections among members of the academic community, drawing in shy students, supporting collaboration, and engendering interest in course content that students might not have otherwise explored. Secondly, gaining success in these learning games will give students sense of accomplishment, those emotional, individual and collective rewards make learning process more funny and appealing. Lastly, with the help of particular game activity, teachers could make important knowledge point more salient. The second and third point has been mentioned in the video‘7 ways games reward the brain’.

Let’s talk about concrete games that I think are beneficial for learning. One of my favorite game   genre is Escape the room, it’s not only good for language learning but also helpful for logical thinking. Also it can be used to teach different kinds of knowledge. For example, if we are aimed to teach new vocabulary within a particular area, like tools, take lighter as an example (in the real class, there will be more tools like scissor, can-opener, pliers, tweezers, magnet, magnifying glass, etc.) so the class would be designed as the following steps:
1. firstly I will put all kinds of tools in different places of classroom.
2. each students will get a handout of the instructions about how to find out the tools they need to escape the room.
3. on the handout there are the steps they should follow, for example: for the students who trying to find a lighter, they should follow something warm and bright. So the place where they could find the lighter could be by the window, where is full of sunshine.
4. after students find the lighter, they can light up a candle to look for the key in a dark corner, then they can escape the room.
As for assessing students' learning effect, I would group students into 4 to 5, and let them describe to each other how they use the tools they found to escape the room successfully. During their discussion, I would walk around and talk with them to find out their questions around this game class. After playing this game, students would not only know the names of different tools, but also how to use them. If students are too young to use those tools, which might be a little bit dangerous for them, teachers could replace real tools with pictures. Another example is using the game of escape the room to let students practice listening skill. Teachers may give the instruction or hint using particular key words or sentence structures to make students get more familiar with those grammar usages.

As for assessing whether the learning objectives had been met, it’s easy to be observed through whether the problem had been solved or directly from students’ behaviors. Thus teachers can know which part is particularly difficult for student or which part should be improved by spending more time.

Twitter as a useful tool for Teaching and Professional Developemt

Through the article—‘A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom’ and ‘Using Twitter for Teachers’ Professional Development’, I have found so many useful strategies that I could apply to my future classroom and my own development, I list them as following:

1, Classroom Management:

       Firstly, using twitter as a bulletin board is very convenient for informing students all kinds of news, like reminder of the due date of their homework, brief introduction of the content for the coming class. Secondly, twitter could be an efficient communication tool between teachers and students. Twitter could provide ambient office hours for students who have problems and wish to discuss with teacher privately. Thirdly, twitter is a reliable assistant in managing classroom discipline. For students who have trouble making it to class on time, send reminders before school to get them in the door earlier. Also, if encountering extremely bad weather, teachers could send their students weather alert to inform them keep warm and take care.

2, Teaching:

       Firstly, teachers could share helpful articles and materials via twitter, also we can hold interesting online educational games to engage students. Secondly, if students have any questions, teachers or other peers can help them even after school through twitter. Thirdly, teachers could use online survey to get to know what materials and topics students prefer to apply and discuss in class. Fourthly, Twitter makes it easy to get instant approval and disapproval of discussions, issues, and more right in the classroom. Lastly, teachers can assign online homework which students can complete and post online before due day. It’s more flexible for them to arrange their own time, just like what we do for this course.

3, Professional Development:

       Teaching is never constrained within individual subject, it’s associated with other knowledge from all fields. By learning educational psychology, teachers could understand their students much better. Using twitter, we could find articles and talk with experts in this area.

       Also using twitter we can get to know up-to-date pop culture which can help you pull your students closer. And by applying these new cultures into game design, students would be willing to get more involved into these hands-on games.

       Through twitter, teachers could exchange each other’s experiences on applying different teaching methods. By discussing the advantages and disadvantages, it can save much time not to repeat the same mistake that others had made.

First contact with Twitterchat

Actually it’s the first time for me to get to know twitter, I knew it’s a social application before, but I’ve never considered it as an assistance for learning and teaching!

Firstly, by following each steps in the instruction article what is a twitterchat and how can it help you in 15 minutes or less, I finally found the group of #edtechchat, which holds two meetings each week, on 8-9 pm EST, every Monday and Wednesday. Through instant chatting, people share their opinions, experience and thoughts on how to use technology to create a better classroom, tips, strategies and so on.

Secondly, by reading some good articles and webpages shared by other participants, I’ve found        

some useful and inspiring materials for future learning and teaching. However, I think this chat was a little chaotic, that you might get lost in people’s diverse thoughts. Perhaps it’s the first time that I attended a twitterchat, and with more and more experiences attending twitter chat I will summarize my own way to gain benefits and give constructive suggestions too.

Lastly, there is one thing about twitterchat that I think is very helpful, which is you can post your questions around the topic during one chat, and then you can get instant solutions. That’s very efficient.

About EFL Classroom 2.0

It’s the first time for me to know about this website--EFL Classroom 2.0 --about English as a Foreign Language teaching. The first impression is that the website looks like a communal blog that English teachers can share each other’s experiences. As a beginner in the field of English language teaching, I found many useful materials in this networking website, such as 50“Best Practices” For Language Teachers which taught me 50 useful strategies to color the language activities up. And also, just as Alan Levine said in his video that you can post whatever you need to be solved in this site. Because you can meet many smart teachers here who will give you good suggestions.

Learners today

With the changing happened in humans’ lives, many common things nowadays cannot even been imagined in human kinds’ brains many decades ago. The way people learn knowledge shouldn't be an exception. Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. Information development was slow. The life of knowledge was measured in decades (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). However, in recent decades perhaps no one can guarantee that he/she would never change a job which belongs to another brand new field. The pattern of education many decades ago was more like cultivating plants. The moment people entered school was like a seed being planted in its own place. Teachers were like gardeners that through watering and fertilizing each little plants with knowledge, someday they would grow up to what they were already decided to be. Nowadays, this kind of education mode should be altered undoubtedly because the changing of knowledge is so fast that maybe after students graduated from college they would find out what they learned were already obsolete. Just as the article of The Role of Blended Learning in the World of Technology describes: One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD). To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.

With the coming of digital era, today’s learners are more like individual digital player with its own USB wire. We can learn what we choose efficiently and accurately by simply connecting ourselves with the terminal which stores all kinds of knowledge online and copying or replacing the old knowledge that we already have. Once the process finished, we would own updated knowledge which could make us adapt to the ever changing world much better. But one skill must be mastered before we connected ourselves with the knowledge terminal, which is: the need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). Moreover, learners can not only download useful knowledge from the databases, but also share what they thought was helpful to themselves with other learners by uploading their thoughts and knowledge to the terminal. This point has also been described in Siemens’s journal: The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual.

Further more, through the video What is Connectivism, I learned more about connectivism. The explanation of connectivism is that we build on the foundation of how we engage with others and how we interact with the world. Knowledge in its many forms of representations was networked and distributed in nature. The experience of learning is one of forming new neural, conceptual and external networks. Also it occurs in complex, chaotic and shifting spaces, which could be increasingly aided by technology. In other words connectivism defines the process of learning just like how neurons in our brain handle all the information by connecting with each other. Such connections create meaning. One thing we should pay more attention to is this connected learning process could not be apart with the assistance of modern tools, which could not only optimize this process but also save us lots of time.