A semi-serious, strategy game

          Part of differentiation, to me, is giving students more opportunity to practice their language skills outside of the classroom if they choose to do so for enrichment. An effective teacher will connect his or her students with the opportunity to use valuable resources at home for autonomous learning. In exploring game opportunities to connect gamification and at-home learning, I stumbled upon and played through (once!) the Gotham Gazette Garbage Game (how's that for an alliterative tongue-twister?).
         I like this game because it includes strategizing and it connects to a real-life problem that is experienced across all cultures. All around the world, people have too much garbage and they do not know who to give it to in order to find a resolution for this problem. This game requires students to read (a lot!) and evaluate different options. I personally am not very into video games so this appealed to me in that I don't have to have a fabulous sense of direction in a fictional world but instead have to be able to make decisions and justify them. That falls into the category of things that I can handle. This game is straightforward.

         The learning objective that I would apply to this game is "students will learn to read and think critically about real world problems". This game is all about practicality and I think that my objective should harness that factor while incorporating basic reading strategies.
         This objective is a bit harder to assess in that if students are doing it at home, I would not be able to physically oversee the process but if I encourage students to write a mini-report or bring in a print out, I think that I would be able to evaluate students decisions and possibly give extra credit that would allow me to measure student understanding. For example, I might ask students to tell me what their readout was, why they think it was that way, and if/how they think they could make it better. In this way, I would incorporate simple reflective thinking in a way that would allow me to see precisely what progress students made with this assignment.

          There are many games available to students to practice at home, but I think that this one suits my style best and I think that it is one that I would be able to practically apply and measure.

Gamification

          Gamification, according to Educause is "the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior". Gamification argues that any activity in the classroom can be turned into a game in order to make it more effective. Better games yield an increase in student motivation and heightened learning.
          Games were my favorite part of being a student and my teachers always seemed to work pretty hard to incorporate games wherever possible. But why?
          Games increase student motivation to learn a language because they make learning fun. Students generally want to learn, but if it seems that it is difficult then they will have less desire to do so. By incorporating games into instruction and practice, teachers can make language learning more enjoyable, therefore increasing the probability that students will partake in it. For example, if given the chance to choose between a lengthy research paper about mediation or some sort of game that allows students to match key concepts with their definitions in a fun and interactive way, students will most certainly always choose the fun option. Learning when made fun seems less like learning, increasing students' desire to participate, and increasing their learning overall. Because games essentially make students learn more, why shouldn't they be incorporated? Gamification in the language classroom makes learning more enjoyable and engaging for all.

          A game that I wish to cite that I can imagine myself using in my language classroom is Castaway, a simple html game that creates a situation with options that change in every turn. The game has many optional endings, ranging from starving to death or being eaten by sharks to finding a very successful fresh start somewhere in Canada. I played through this game about a half dozen times in order to figure out the different options and although it loses its interest after about the third time, I thought this game was the most engaging thing in the world the first time that I saw it and I anticipate my students playing through it a maximum of two times.
          If I were to use Castaway in my language learning classroom, I would use it with this objective: "Students will be able to use oral conversation, reasoning, and justification with a partner to complete a castaway scenario." Ideally, students will survive the scenario (points will be awarded for students who do so) but the language objective is for students to use reasoning and justification to make decisions and as long as students are doing that, I would consider this a successful lesson.
          In this scenario, the teacher would walk students through the introduction and get them to the first decision-making page. Students would be placed into effective pairs (preferably with a high proficiency student in each grouping) and they would receive the task. The goal is to get off of the island and students cannot make a decision if they do not both agree on what they choose to do. Each student pair would have a tablet or computer with this website loaded and would be told that no "back" buttons were allowed, nor "restarts". Students would have to work with their partner to reason through the different options made available to the castaway with the goal of surviving. Student teams who survived would receive a prize and if a student team does not survive the first time, they will be given a second attempt to choose different options and hopefully come out alright. The teacher will record the success of student attempts. There will be a first prize for student teams who survive the scenario on their first walkthrough, and second prize for student teams who get through on their second attempt.
          Although the game has clear objectives, the student learning objective will be measured by teacher observation and it should be easy to measure. Are students conversing with each other? Are they presenting their opinions in a clear way? Are they being respectful of their partner? If the students are interacting in an effective way in order to complete the scenario, the learning objective has been accomplished.
          I think that this activity would be very fun for students and I think that the objective would be easily measurable merely by teacher observation.

Classroom Applications of Twitter

In participating in a teacher twitter chat tonight, I think that I have established a pretty good idea of how twitter can be used to connect teachers and help to form professional connections. However, I have never had a very clear understanding of how to use twitter in the classroom and I think that I now have a better concept of precisely how to implement it.

When I was researching the topic of classroom applications of twitter, one source that I found quite helpful was Educational Technology and Mobile Learning's "A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom". This article is excellent in that it gives a lot of different and specific applications for twitter in the average classroom. I always thought it would be used solely as a blog for students to react to given topics or to ask a teacher questions outside of the classroom if super motivated, but this article proved that there are many more practical applications of twitter to be explored. This guide to educational tweeting brought up an excellent point of connectivity: twitter can be used to post updates for parents and students about specific dates or information and it can be used to remind students what they learned that day or what the homework is. A teacher twitter can be a digital bulletin board that is dated and easy to track.
In addition, a teacher twitter can be a source of extra credit for students. Students can be given topics to participate in like pop quizzes or summaries where they are expected to produce a response to a provided prompt or they can participate in link-sharing where they bring information that they found on their own to the attention of teachers and classmates. The best part about a classroom twitter is that if a classroom hashtag is agreed upon, all students can track the class interaction and if a teacher re-tweets valuable contributions, students can get a running stream of what they should know.
I like that twitter, in the examples provided, gives students to show what they know, to interact with other students, to interact with their teacher, and to share found information with all. It creates a very multi-directional conversation which I think is very important in the language classroom.

Another article that I very much enjoyed is "Twitter HOTS & Establishing a Twitter Routine in the Classroom" by the Langwitches Blog. I really enjoyed this article because it organizes the information beautifully in many different diagrams that are well-organized and practical. 

The above chart, for example, is excellent in that it shows how students can get more and more involved in classroom tweeting with a spectrum that ranges from receptive to productive skills. Furthermore, this article presents the value of twitter in its ability to help establish routine in the classroom and I think that routine is one of the most essential parts of a smoothly-running classroom. This article aligns twitter use with Bloom's Taxonomy, cites an example of a classroom routine with twitter, and gives many examples of practical applications. In other words, it's gold. 

My readings for tonight have helped me to realize that the applications of twitter in the language classroom are limitless. There are many ways that I can use microblogging to connect with my students and parents and to help my students connect with each other and the world and because connectivity is such an important part of learning, knowing how to make it happen is essential!

Twitter chatting with #edtechchat

For the twitter assignment this week, I decided to join tonight's #edtechchat on twitter and I interacted with fellow students, teachers, professionals, and administrators. Although I am a semi-frequent twitterer, I have never before participated in a twitter chat, nor have I used it for educational means so this was an experience. 

What I like about the #edtechchat:

• Anybody who wants to get involved in the conversation can. There were pre-service teachers along with long-term professionals all involved in answering questions and discussing with each other.
• Twitter chat is a very interactive feature. You can favorite other peoples' tweets, re-tweet, and respond, creating a very communicative base for sharing responses and opinions.
• Twitter chat is instant. In the twitter chat, responses appear the moment they are posted so it is easy to keep track of and follow the conversations occuring.
• The chat was clearly labeled! The organization system established with a moderator and labeled Qs and As made it easy to see what everybody was responding to and what the focus of the chat was. 
• Cooperation is rampant. All users responded to one another and there was a lot of respect shown for the many individual opinions presented.
• Twitter represents modern technology. What better way for teachers to discuss educational technology than by using it?

What I do not like about the #edtechchat:

• The chat moves extremely quickly. This means that a lot of the responses disappear before I have the time to read all of them and I felt pressured to respond quickly without thinking my responses through as much as I would have liked to.
• Twitter has a character limit! I struggled with posting what I wanted without cutting out a bunch of characters and I had to delete a bit to fit the hashtag. I almost think a chat with a shorter hashtag would be better because it would buy me a few more letters for my response!

Even though I had a few frustrations, the twitter chat that I participated in featured questions such as "why does our students' future really compel the transformation of today's schools? Or does it not?", "What should digital learning look like in the classroom?" and "How should a school district support professional learning to promote the conversion to a digital classroom?". Teachers participating in this chat shared resources that I was able to favorite for later reference and I was able to express my own opinion and see how what I have to say lines up with what my colleagues believe. This chat was a bit confusing for a first time user and I think that some of my responses were not as good as they could have been because I posted before thinking out how to best say what I wanted to in 160 characters or less, but it was a really cool thing to be a part of and I can see myself using twitter in the classroom in the future.