Serious Games for Autonomous Learning

The game I played is Third World Farmer: "an experiment in the genre of Serious Games, it simulates some of the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd world countries."In the game, the player gets to run a farm located in Africa and is faced with difficult choices that bring by poverty and war.

In the game setting, players will see many different reasons that result in money loss or even the death of family members, for instance: civil war, corrupt officials, corn harvest fails, etc. After each turns, the player will get a brief summary of balance and a short description of reasons lead to this results. 

 To better understand the meaning that game designers want to convey through, students/players should fully comprehend the explanation/reasons of "Event of the Year", this often provided randomly, however, after playing several turns, the player will gradually realized one accidental events can lead to serious outcome like starvation or family death. This is unimaginable for people who lives in industrialized society because none of these events will happened on us. After playing this game, I will ask students to write a report of what events they've encountered in this game and what kind of actions they think can takes to prevent those happened. 

To assess the students' understanding, they need to summarize the issues and events which lead to a specific results; put forward suggestions of how they think can help to improve the current situation. Finally, through playing, I hope students can understand the initial intent of game developer, start to make change from them own.  

Gamification in L2 Classroom

This week's topic is gamification, by a definition provided from a website called Gamification Wiki:"Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging". By this definition, we can understand that one important reason to introduce game into learning and education is game is able to create fun and engaging atmosphere in the process of learning. 

To get a better idea, I read 10 Gaming Genres to Adapt in Class, in this article, the writer wrote about which kind of games can be used and how to apply it in real classroom environment. Next, it's time for me to try one of those games! I choose Bathroom Escape because I've already played similar games like this before. The key to this sort of game is try to find out every details, collect all useful items and try to apply those in the right place.  For this game, I was lucky enough to get through in one time. During the process of playing, I considered that if I use this game for my language teaching classes, my teaching objectives might focus on vocabularies and grammar (directional propositions), I will have my students try to play this game and remember the words and items names that appeared, also I will ask them to describe the place between two or three objects. For example: in this picture, I will ask the position between the picture on the wall and the vase on the floor. The expected answer should be: the painting is above the vase or the vase is under the painting.  

In a large classroom, if I decided to adopt this game, I might divide the whole class into several different groups, each group can finish this game independently, try to make them compete with each other. Me, as a teacher, I will play the role of monitor and observer, if they come across any difficulties during the game, I can give them explicit/implicit hints. I will not use a walk through during activity, but if they fell this game is really too difficult or get stuck with last few steps, I will demonstrate a walk through in front of the whole class. Also, for the review of vocabulary and grammar, I will use the screen shot from scenes of the game to help them reinforce knowledge. Last, to assess whether students have acquired the things I want them to learn, I will have a quiz in the following class to check their understanding. 

Connected Classroom

When I first get in touch with Twitter and that sort of tools, I always think twitter is just another popular chat website. Never thinking about education and social media entertainment could somehow blend together. In this week, after I joined my first twitter chat and browsed several articles which concerned with professional development between education and twitter, I realized all this time I have been underestimate the power of twitter. 

First thing is, there are a lot people don't realize twitter is a powerful search engine just like google. As in one of blog It's All about Hashtag mentions that "if you know how to search effectively, you can find pretty much everything" and one of search skill is using hashtag. For example, I mentioned that I joined a twitter chat last week, which is about foreign language learning, the hashtag used in this chat is #langchat. If you need to find resources or join this chat, simply type #langchat, then you can see all the instant results of all discussions under this topic. On the other hand, you can also create hashtag, build some topics that you want to discuss with people who also interested in the same question. With the effective use of hashtag really makes you become more informed and open-minded. 

The second blog post I read is called "60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom", in this post, the author is quite straight forward in introducing the ways that twitter can be used in classroom. By listing and explaining 60 different ways of twitter works between teachers and students, I really inspired by some of practicals that mentioned in the post. One is "student engagement in large lectures", since how to involve many students as possible in a large size class is always a question that teacher needs to be answered (especially teachers in China, because it is normal that there are 50-70 students in one class). It is difficult for 70 students doing group work at the same time because it might cause chaos, however, if students can use twitter to participate the discussion in class, their ideas can be pop up instantly in screen and teacher can choose some of tweets to ask further explanation. The rest of these tweets can still be discussed after class due to time limits. In a nutshell, I think this is another effective way of instant communication. 

In summarize, twitter can be a good mediator for learners and students. There are many possible ways to use it for effective learning and teaching. Therefore, from now on twitter is playing an increasing important role for professional development. 

Twitter Chat#langchat

Today I joined a twitter chat #langchat, which topic is foreign language. It is really amazing that I can see so many people post their thoughts and share useful links at the same time, and I scroll down find out something I really interested on about foreign language learning.

I found a website called"Speak to the Future", there is a learning campaign named "1000 words challenge", the writer said "not everyone will become a fluent linguist, but the aspiration of everyone to have 1000 words in another language is realistic and achievable". I found this quite convincible so I decided to give a try, sign in with my Facebook account and the screen begin to show japanese words with English explanation. After introduce those words, the system will test the meaning in English immediately with time limit. Since I have learned a little Japanese before, the result is fine and I felt really good about this learning website because I think I  can actually learned something might useful in future. (The picture below is my test result)

Overall, I found twitter chat is really form for professional development because it provides so many ways and possibilities for both educators and learners to follow. You are the center of learning, you can choose what content you'd like to follow and browse. Moreover, you can find people just like you, share common interest and have connected through this way.