Social gaming, new or old, doubles as an excellent learning experience | TEFL Jobs World. By Monika Salita@monikasalita or About Monika Classic word games are given a digital renaissance. What’s old is new again, essentially. For many smartphone and tablet users, digital word games have become all the rage lately. Players of younger and older generations alike are whipping out their gleaming phones to play games such as Words with Friends or Wordfeud, the new spin on Scrabble; Draw Something, the digital version of Pictionary, and Hangman, a pocket-sized favorite game of our youth. These digital reincarnations of the classic board and pen-and-paper games prove to be quite useful in education and learning.
Words with Friends Many games, such as Words with Friends, have a chat feature which allows for players to start conversation around the game, or anything else they’d like to discuss, which can lead to new learning experiences such as word discovery (Example: Person A: “I’d love to play ‘sommelier’ off of your ‘som’!” Draw Something Hangman No smartphone or iPad? The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games. Here’s yet one more “The Best…” list — this time focusing on web tools that let teachers and students create their own online learning games. If you find this list helpful, you might want to also review The Best Online Learning Games — 2007 (a couple of the sites on that list are repeated here), The Best Online Video Games For Learning Language & Content Knowledge, and The Best “Fun” Sites You Can Use For Learning, Too.
You might also be interested in: The Best Ways To Create Online Tests The Best Tools To Make Online Flashcards When I talk about “learning games,” I also mean sites where students can easily create online video games that might not have an overt learning purpose. However, they can be excellent opportunities for English Language Learners to develop their English — by following the instructions on the screen, by writing directions for their game, and by writing and talking about their reactions to playing games made by their peers. … accessible to English Language Learners. Create Your Own “Escape The Room” Game With “Room Escape Maker. As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of having my English Language Learner students play online video games as a language development activity (see POINTING AND CLICKING FOR ESL: Using Video Games To Promote English Language Development).
Escape The Room games are one of my favorite game “genres,” where players have to…escape from a room by clicking on objects and using them in a certain way and/or order. Most of these games also have a text component. Now, a new free tool has come online, the Room Escape Maker, that lets anybody create their own….escape the room games. It requires a little more of a learning curve than I would like, but I think it has some potential. I’m adding it to The Best Websites For Creating Online Learning Games. Create Your Own “Escape The Room” Game With “Room Escape Maker. Great games for the language classroom: Blockbusters. I‘m a gamer: I love using games in the language classroom. I find them such a great and versatile tool and, if used well, something that always goes down well with learners. I’ve discussed the role of games before on this blog and have probably summed up everything I want to say about the use of games in an article I wrote for Humanising Language Teaching back in April, 2011 (by which I mean I’m not going to go into great detail about the how and the why of using games in this post; please click on the HLT link for my huge article on this subject, OK!).
So, why am I returning to this subject? Well, last night saw the triumphant return of EAP Chat, our bi-weekly discussion on Twitter relating to a subject of interest to EAP practitioners. Our first discussion of 2013 focused on the appropriacy of games in Academic English classes. As you can imagine, I came down heavily on the ‘for’ side! The classic, easy-to-use Blockbusters grid Blockbusters! OK, then, first things first. How to play. 6 online activities for developing knowledge of subject-verb agreement. As you can probably guess from some of the ideas I’ve been sharing in recent posts, I’m gearing up to teach a beginner level class! Monday is the big start day and I’m going to do a few activities to see where they are in terms of their language: their understanding of subject-verb agreement is one thing I’ll be looking at.
If learners are well versed in this area, or even if they aren’t but have nevertheless studied it a lot, finding activities that are entertaining and interactive is invaluable in helping learners master this fundamental grammar point. Here a six such activities… 1. Song Lyrics The Music Lyrics Database has almost a quarter of a million songs in its bank. 2. Choose a current event from a news website and discuss it, either in class or assign it as a homework task. 3.
Discovery Education’s Puzzlemaker website gives you a nice variety of word searches, crosswords and other variations on word puzzles and is extremely easy to use. 4. 5. 6. Any more? 3 fun online activities for practicing verb tenses. We started a new coursebook in class today. As any teacher ever in the history of language teaching knows, a new book means starting with a revision of every verb tense that the poor buggers have been exposed to up to that point in whichever coursebook series you happen to be using. And so it unfolded… the simple present, present continuous, simple past, past continuous, present perfect, past perfect and present perfect continuous… have I missed any out? I thought that, despite my impending nausea at the sheer volume of grammar I’d have to go through during today’s four hours of class, it would be useful to have an idea of how comfortable they are with verb grammar. The question was how to make all of this kind of fun at the same time. 1. Based on the classic ‘Jeopardy’ format, you can use this game to practice different verb tenses (present simple tense, present progressive, past simple, past progressive, present perfect, future tenses and more). 2. 3.