Gamification in education: trying to solve the puzzle

I must confess I've been trying to understand what gamification is for a while now. After reading several tweets and posts from my PLN, I still was not able to figure out what it was! I did know something about game-based learning, but this seemed somehow different.

Sooo I registered for a gamification MOOC at Coursera, dictated by Prof. Kevin Werbach from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, determined to take every advantage of it.

The course is half way through now and I must say I find it incredibly informative and motivating (although-not surprisingly- it turned out to be highly business-oriented and not related to education). In spite of this, I've already learned quite a few interesting concepts and I'm gradually coming to terms with the underpinning principles of gamification.

So, one thing is clear for me now. Gamification and game-based learning (GBL) are not exactly the same. They are somehow connected, sure, but they are not the same thing. Some differences:

Created in minutes with easel.ly

Now only one question remains: what are the implications of these differences in the classroom?

GBL seeks student engagement by proposing students activities that are naturally fun and motivating for them (i.e. games). For instance, students can learn history by playing Pirates, or they can research on capitalism by playing Animal Crossing (examples taken from Knewton).

Gamification proposes the use of game-like rule systems in the classroom or school. It involves game-like experiences such as repeated experimentation and failure, adoption of a variety of cultural roles and other challenges that might eventually result in learning and changing behaviour. Some examples provided by Lee & Hammer (2011) include giving students "reading points", "perfect attendance rewards", and assigning roles, such as a "lead detective role" in the Science class, among others.

Feel like going on reading?

Why use games in the classroom?
The gamification of education and cognitive social and emotional learning benefits
Lee & Hammer (2011) Gamification in education: what, how, why bother?
Knewton - The Gamification (or GBL???) of Education Infographic
Video: using game desing to improve my classroom
The 50 best videos for teachers interested in Gamification (and GBL???)

Developing skills with web-based tools in ELT

Last Saturday a group of teachers and myself held a very refreshing PD session, where we worked on web-based tools and their applications to help students develop both language and digital skills. The participants contributed to an informal, relaxed atmosphere, making the workshop a great learning opportunity. Thanks a lot to all the wonderful teachers that joined me!

You are welcome to have a look at my slides!

The loss of #ELT chat - Plan B! REPOST

For the last – well, almost two years now, since September 15 2010,#ELTchat has kept us on our toes and forged hundreds of professional and personal relationships amongst its followers who turn up on Twitter every Wednesday to talk about topics they have suggested and voted on – a community of peers which was created by a small group of colleagues – which grew and grew some more and became something that counts as an important part of our continuous professional development.

Like many great ideas, it didn’t hit just one person but several.

And that is how #ELTchat was created.    

The website to keep up the communication of its members, a base and repository of our ideas was one of the first things we all thought of creating – the wiki came later.

Andy Chaplin was keen to join the moderation team and help with podcasts and technical stuff; he was quick to buy eltchat.com and announced the good news to us after the fact.

A few months later, right after TESOL France 2011,  he suddenly disappeared – some say for reasons of health.

We never found out for sure.

We never received a single word of response to our emails.

eltchat.com was and still is registered in his name.

And yesterday we lost it.

On August 8 the domain expired and we have no way of taking over unless it goes up for sale again; it was very sad that Andy Chaplin did not find it appropriate to renew.

The news is really upsetting.

The work we have put in on this website cannot be told in a few simple words – but it has been a labour of love and we have got so much out of it that we have never regretted one single moment

We are pretty upset at the behaviour of this individual – disappointment is one big understatement.

But we trust that our community of #ELTchatters, our PLN for short, will again gather round the new domain which we have purchased – eltchat.org

It will take us a few days to put the website back on its feet.

And all will be as it was before – all the posts in place all your thoughts and comments, all the polls and great summaries which got us on the shortlist of the ELTon Awards nominations.

We will be back with a vengeance.

We are not just a website – we did not get on the ELTon awards shortlist as just another website!!!

We are a great community of teachers and we have a Plan B!

See you all in September!!!

Marisa Constantinides – Shaun Wilden

Vicky Loras

Barbara Paola Garcia

P.S. We would greatly appreciate it if any of you belonging to this great community of teachers,  teacher educators, bloggers, #ELTchat followers,  reposted this on your blog.

If you decide to do this, please add your name to the post under ours.

Put it on a timeline!

Timelines are a visual, easy way to display information that could otherwise look thorny or complicated. This is a timeline with a brief history of the role of the first language on second language acquisition research, which I made for my Contrastive Linguistics class.

Timetoast

What I like about this timeline is that I can have a quick overview and text view as well, where my explanations and comments are neatly organized.

Other timeline generators:

Xtimeline
This is probably the best known online timeline generator. It's good when you add specific events but it's not that simple when it comes to seeing the attached comments.

Dipity
It helps you create visually appealing timelines, with pictures and videos, etc. The problem is you can't edit your timeline once you finish it, so you have only one shot (unless you subscribe to the full version).

Capzles
Capzles is nice to create personal timelines, useful to work on projects about holidays, personal stories, etc.

Timeline Maker for Schools
This is a more basic, easier tool to use with kids.

Do you know any others? Let's add them here!

Adults also want to have fun!

Hi there! Long time no see! (has it really been two months since my last post???).

A couple of weeks ago I came across a brillant, thought-provoking video by Angela Maiers about the importance of playing in the learning process. In the video she shares what she learnt herself by observing children, the way they play and the way they learn in the sandbox. The video is called The Sandbox Manifesto and I seriously think all of those who work with children should watch it. It's gripping and inspiring! You can enjoy Angela's video here:

After watching it I kept thinking about how important (and difficult!) it is to keep the ability to look at things through fresh eyes when we grow up. Being open and ready to feel curious, to be amazed by the world, to be dazzled by those sorrounding us. Isn't this an essential ingredient for a successful learning recipe?


In the last couple of years I've worked mainly with adults and I noticed -many times- that even the most serious businessmen are ready to leave the "formal" part of the class behind and have fun when the activity proposed is relevant to their interests and they can see the point of it. If you think about it, playing is natural for all of us, even for grownups (you can meet quite a few interesting blokes on Second Life or The Sims!).


Here are some games (both on and offline) that have worked for me and my students. Have a look!

All of us, some of us, none of us
This is a variation of one of the best known activites in ELT: Find someone who... You give your students a list of prompts to discuss and write three columns on the board: all of us, some of us, none of us. They have to walk around the classroom and talk to their classmates to find out information about the prompts. They end up with sentences such as "all of us were born in Buenos Aires" or "some of us can play golf" or "all of us read at least one of Peter Druckers' books", depending on what you are working on.


Call my bluff
Students talk about themselves and include one piece of information that is not true. The others guess which part is a lie and try to discover the truth behind it. In a nice variation of this activity, you read out a word and all students have to write a definition on a slip of paper. You hold a bowl with all the definitions inside (including the real one), read all definitions out loud and students take a vote. I tried this after working on dictionary skills and it was fun!

Rumour has it...
In this game one person of the group leaves the room and the rest tell him/her that someone told them a secret and that s/he has to guess the secret by asking yes/no questions. The trick is the following: whenever a question ends in a vowel the answer is yes, whenever it ends in a consonant the answer is no. Things can get pretty confusing! One note of caution here: make sure everybody understands this is a game (once one of my students said "oh I have it, is it that I'm cheating on my wife?" Plop! End of game!).

Guessing the question
This is another activity that works very well to work on question formation. Students A says something about him/herself (it should look like an answer, eg. "40 years old") and student B has to guess the question. 

Taboo
Divide the class in two groups. One player from group A takes a card with a rord on it and has to give hints to his/her classmates for them to guess it. The catch is that the card also contains several words s/he can't use. For example, if the word is marketing, your taboo words could be market, commercial, campaign.




You know I'm a big fan of technology integration for all levels and ages. So I tried some pretty interesting activities online and I must say my students loved them!

Comics
The idea of this activity is to create a comic about a character or event previously discussed or that is part of a book or article already read in class. What they find motivating about this activity is that they need to change genres and turn a narrative into a dialogue (which is quite limited BTW, because they have to organize the information in four or five comic frames). Here are some nice web-based tools to explore:


Aniboom
Inkcinct
Stag'd project

You can also check out a blogpost I wrote on the use of comics a while ago.

Creating a brochure or newsletter
I like to take a project-based approach to Business English from time to time. I think this kind of work helps students practice everyday business skills apart from teaching them the relevant language. The challenge to come up with an end product such as a brochure or a newsletter turned up to be quite motivating. A very cool tool we've tried is Letterpop.

Creating a presentation
Presentation skills are vital for most adult learners. They just can't have enough training on this. Some times they choose to wrap up a project by creating a presentation to sell a product, show results to a fake board, etc. I've put together a whole binder on presentation tools, because this tends to be a key topic in my classes. You can have a look at it here: Presentation Tools ELT by Bárbara García.

So... let's play! What about you? 

Any winner games you'd like to share? 

Please do!