Games Can Be Serious

The game I played was Third World Farmer. The game requires people to experience the life of poor farmers, earning money and raising kids. All I do is to make the family survive from year to year. I played it for twice, and I found it uneasy, even frustrating sometimes, especially when I just realized that a kid somehow disappeared (I guess he died. Oh God...I am so sorry.). I grew up in a big city, and I have never experienced such life. This game gave me an illusion of struggling to live a little bit.

Comparing to casual games, such serious game might do a better job in improving students' ability of solving problems. Instead of simply enjoying the fun given by games, such games might actually offer students opportunities to solve real problems.

With this game, I can teach counting numbers in English, because there are plenty of numbers available in it. Besides the numbers, I can also teach other words appear in the game, such as hen, pig, and corn. In addition, I can make a competition based on this game. For example, students will be asked to play the game individually to see who survive the longest time. The winner will have to present his/her "blueprint". To see whether the objectives have been met, I can just ask students to present their solutions, in which target words will be used.

Learn Through Play

It is important to make learning fun, especially for kids. Therefore, applying game to teaching is an amazing way to reach that goal. According to the article THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT GAMIFICATION, gamification is the application of game elements in non-game situations. Through games, children will be able to comprehend what they are learning or have learned, apply knowledge to problem solving, as well as enjoy learning new knowledge or skills.

The game I played was Polleke's Blue Room, and I played it for twice. It is a nice game for teaching, because it supply many English words for players, which is good for them to learn vocabulary. It also provides many sentences. Therefore, it will be a nice tool for grammar teaching, either.

When the teacher use this game for teaching, it would be better if the teacher pretends to be a person "who needs help". Standing in front of the classroom, the teacher controls the game which is shown to the whole class and asks "what should I do next". Students will have to tell the teacher what should be clicked or dragged. In other words, students have to help the teacher finish the game.

Walk through is necessarily used in such activity, especially when students are stuck in the game. However, it does not mean that the teacher should show the walk through directly to students. Instead, the teacher learns the walk through, and orally offer hints. Images, on the other hand, are not necessary in this activity, since the teacher can use the pic in the game for teaching.

To assess whether the objectives are achieved, the teacher can use pictures to make an Q & A activity, either asking students to speak the names of pictures, or asking them to make sentences on the pictures.

Twitter for Teaching

     

     Known as an efficient and effective tool for communication, twitter can help with teaching and learning as well. Based on my experience, it is not rare to see that students forget due dates and thus lose points on their homework. And twitter will do me a great favor. According to Teaching HUB, twitter can help with posting due dates. Reminding due dates via twitter can be a good solution to such problem. Twitter can also work as a tool for assignments. Teachers can also post homework on the twitter, and let students post comments. Besides using twitter as a tool for reminding due dates and post assignments, I will use it as a tool for question answering. It is amazing that twitter can be a place for Q & A, according to Teaching HUB, especially during the lecture. 

     Education should not be limited in the classroom. It will be awesome if students who are not able to attend class learn together with their fellow students. In my future teaching, I will use it to help students catch up with class. According to the article, Twitter - Expanding our Classroom - Shrinking the World, "it broke down the walls of our classroom and allowed students in classrooms across the country to interact and learn from each other." There should not be walls between in-the-class and -out-of-the-class. And breaking the wall is one of the responsibilities of teachers.

Tweetchat - Reflection

I attended #langchat.In the chat room, different topics were developed.I can either post my questions, or reply other people's post.It is a nice place to share ideas and suggestions with each other.I can get immediate response from other educators, which is awesome!

A problem with tweet chat is that since it is a chat room, things can look a little bit messy. Sometimes I lost track on the topic I am interested, because people kept posting and changing topics at any time.