Mining English Online!!

Just a heads up post really, as most of my time is spent on the server, but I'd like to inform you all of my latest project:

Mining English Online!

Me and the founder of Red Ranger Hosting: Steve Brewer have been working hard on setting up a server designed with intercultural computer-mediated communication (what I'm calling IC2MC) in mind. It is still fairly beta and we are learning as we go along, but the community is slowly coming together.

The Plan

At the moment, the plan for me is to give my students a communication activity to do in their classes each week and an additional activity to complete in their free time as homework.

How you can help

We (obviously) want as many people as possible to play, and hopefully with a mix of native and non-native players.

How to join

Go to the link above and register your interest in the "introductions" forum (link), log into the server (address: miningenglish.org) and get promoted to EngSpeaker or Student straight away!

Questions

Reply here, the forums, get me on Facebook or Twitter!!

Mining English: Student Journal Example (Verbatim)

July 9th

-----Minecraft World-----

We were in the small island.

Today, We were going to built our house in here.

Before we started, I had explored around the island to find a nice place for our house.

Finally, I found a really nice plain, it's next to a mountain, many animals live in there.

It would be an useful farm.

We suggested each ideas to design our house.

Finally, we decided as follows.

*The house is a two story house. The range of each floor is 16*16*8(actually, I don't remember each numbers clearly...).

*Use wooden planks to construct the standard of our house.

*Make a double door.

*Set windows on each walls.

*Place torches on each floor.

We started building our house.

I put wooden planks on the plain to make the floorboard.

It was hard work to correct stuffs.

Finally, We finished building the first floor.

Next week, We will built the second floor and fight monsters.

I'm looking forward to do it.

July 16th

We continued building our house.

We didn't have much time, so we had to do it as soon as possible.

click... click... click......

We had spend a lot of wooden planks quickly.

Finally, We had done it!

As I wrote, the range of our house is 16*16*(8+8). Our house looks like a big square.

However, it may save us from monster's attack.

Then, monsters had appeared.

Zombies... Skeletons... Creepers...

I know how to beat animals, but I didn't know how to kill monsters.

We swung swords to kill monsters.

Some players was died, and revived.

Suddenly a creeper exploded, Sadly our house was broken.

After we repaired our house, we explored the cave.

I paired with York to find the diamond.

Everyone were digging the cave.

We found a lot of golds, however we couldn't find a diamond...

It was a grateful challenge.

July 30th 

We were going to play HungerGame.

We learned what it is.

We made each idea, how to alive from HungerGame.

I choosed 3 stuffs to alive.

*Shovel

*Flask

*Lighter

I may use the shovel to dig and hide something, and fight and protect myself.

To fill water, I'll use the flask.

Lighter can burn foods and make me keep warm.

Unfortunately, we couldn't play HungerGame on Minecraft.

So we enjoyed Nether world.

We fought with pig zombies first.

Suddenly, Ghast appeared and attacked us, it caused us confuse!

I shot Ghast an allow, and Ghast died.

Nether is mysterious and horrible...

After we enjoyed Nether, we walled around the minecraft world...

We had enjoyed Minecraft a lot.

Extra

What is FPS?

What is virtual world?

What is Minecraft?

In Minecraft,

we can do any choice just we want,

we can choose our way by myself.

The WORLD has been created by amazing originality.

Dream inside the virtual world, This is what I see on the Minecraft world.

Video Game Lesson: Scribblenauts

I have been reading a lot of literature on educational games, and games in education recently (as they are not necessarily the same thing!). My particular interest in this subject is the reason why they often fail. One of the main reasons for the lack of engagement is that educational games are a culmination of disparate, often diametrically opposed elements. On one hand they are designed to teach a certain subject matter, but the way they go about it is through an unconnected game mechanic. In other words, the gaming context and the learning content do not match up. A good(?) example of this mismatch of game and learning subject can be seen in Financial Soccer, a promotional game by Visa to raise awareness of … Players engage in a football match controlling their team, but just as you are about to shoot… BAM! The game stops and there is a multiple choice question related to finance to answer before the game continues. This is what a lot of "education" games feel like: "OK, OK, that's enough fun, now you have to do some learning if you want to continue." I just downloaded an app on my iPhone to learn French which is essentially the same. A thin, sugar-sweet veneer of a game hiding a darker ulterior motive. Of course, the game doesn't mean to be malicious, but the fact that the game mechanics and learning contents do not match up, any student is going to figure out pretty quickly that we are trying to make them learn something they are probably not really interested in with something like: "You can't trick me with flashing lights and bonus points. This is just a rote memorization of math formulas exercise!"

The literature on this subject of mismatching game mechanics and learning goals talks about integration. The integration of game mechanics and learning goals. But not just that, it goes on to mention a concept known as intrinsic integration, essentially: The learning goal should be the main game mechanic. Quite a revelation for me just recently as I have been scratching my head something frantic thinking of reasons why my students are not speaking more English when playing Minecraft in my digital game based learning (DGBL) class. The reason is that English is not required for students to clear the levels that I have set up for them. This post is not about my Minecraft class though, so I will leave that for another time.

What I have been looking for recently are games that have the use of English as their main game mechanic. I didn't have to look far. The Nintendo DS (and now iOS) game Scribblenauts fits the description perfectly. Rather than having English tacked on as a supplement to game play, levels cannot be cleared without the use of English. The game concept is amazingly simple with clear goals to complete each level. However, how players achieve these goals is completely open to their interpretations and imagination. Take the first level of the iOS version (Scribblenauts Remix) as an example:

The goal is to cut down the tree in order to get the "starite" in the upper branches. 

Now, to cut down a tree, what do you use? A saw? A chainsaw? An axe? Or, what about a sword, or even more specific: a katana?! All of these options will work. But how do you get one of these items? Using the notepad in the top right corner of the screen, we can write a word and just like that, we have it! Once we have possession of the item, the goal of the task is easily achieved:

Open dictionary.

Maxwell with his chainsaw.

Maxwell with the starite.

Playing the game "as is" is a great tool for vocabulary review and even learning, but so much more can be done in a classroom setting.

A simple way I improved the learning potential for my communication class was to make students write down their solutions to levels and compare and contrast these solutions with other groups. In this way, the students are learning how to use the words in context, learn collocations, and expand their vocabulary and interlanguage by trying to out do the other groups with more and more outlandish and unique ways to clear each level.

Additionally, I had students write down any new words they either found in the game hints or from words that they used themselves and told them to write example sentences with them for their "class review" homework.

Treasure Hunt

I recently had to teach a lesson on directions as part of my first year English class. Last year I had the idea of giving the students a treasure hunt to complete which was moderately successful. It entailed me hiding four clues around the school campus with directions to the next clue. Once students found a clue, their was a simple riddle on the back which, when solved, would give them a number. Once all the four clues where found then, they would have a four letter number referring to a room where I was waiting for them.

A typical clue looked like the following (where the circle marks where they need to write the number):

Three people are on a bus. At the first stop, two people get on and one person gets off. 

at the next stop three people get off and one person gets on. 

How many people are on the bus?

○ _ _ _

Now, the reason I say that this activity was only moderately successful was because my class is a communication class, but they were only really passive in completing the task.

So this year, I endeavored to get my students to make their own treasure hunts and the results were better than I expected. Read on to find out how I did it.

Necessary items

1. Coins / treasure for students to hide

1. A map of the campus for each group
2. A sound cloud account to store groups directions to their treasure (not 110% necessary, but recommended).
3. An iPod or smart phone for each group (not 100% necessary, but recommended).

Overview of the project

First class 

- refresh students memory on how to give directions.

Second class 

- as a group decide where they want to hide the treasure.

- write directions to the location. 

- go to the location and hide their treasure. 

- record the directions to the locations onto an iPod and upload to a shared sound cloud account.

Third class

- go and find other groups treasure.

- dictate the directions they heard.

- add corrections to the other groups dictation.

- review the grammar used for homework.

Detailed descriptions follow below:

Lesson 1: Directions review

During the first lesson, I went over a basic review of directions: 

1. Brainstorm ways of giving directions and write them on the board (for reference).
2. Put up a map on the board and direct each other to various buildings located on the map (controlled practice).
3. Complete an information gap activity guiding other students to various unknown locations.
4. Ask students to describe how to get to various rooms in the university (close to the classroom).
5. Actually leave the classroom and attempt to lead your partner to the location you thought of.

The important thing that students learn from point 5 above is that they can't use words like "stop" when they write their treasure hunt, so they have to use expressions such as "when you can see ____ turn left."

Lesson 2: Set up the treasure hunt

This class is used for students to devise their directions to a specific place where they have hidden treasure. They can come in and out of the class and test their directions as many times as they want. Once they have written out their directions, they use soundcloud on the iPods to upload their directions to a shared location that is accessible from any smart phone.

 

Goals:

• To lead students to a particular place on campus. 
• At that point will be a piece of treasure.
• Once there, they take a piece of the treasure and bring it back to class to prove that they found it.

Goals (Linguistic):

• For groups to devise a precise set of directions that other groups can follow to get to the treasure.
• Groups will be judged on how many groups managed to complete their route, so accuracy is essential.

Steps:

1. Students write their directions out on paper.
2. Once they have the general directions written out, they go to the actual location, hide the treasure and write the final detailed instructions (such as "The treasure is under two stones").
3. Students record their directions onto the shared sound cloud account via an iPod: http://soundcloud.com/tduenglish

Nothing much more to say about this class other than, some classes finished early if groups had a clear idea of where they wanted to hide their treasure.

Lesson 3: Play the other groups' treasure hunts!

Take a map for each group to class. Students draw on the map where they found the other groups treasure.

Finding stage

1. Hand out the iPods and show them how to access other groups directions. I actually found that most groups had at least one smart phone user, so they decided to use their own phones for the most part.
2. Students listen to the directions on the iPods, go and find the treasure, then come back to class.
3. Once back, they write down the directions they heard on the left hand of a piece of A4 paper, and make any improvements that they can think of on the right hand side.
4. For homework (or if you have time in class) get students to complete a grammar/vocabulary focus activity. I used the grammar focus page from their textbooks.

To speed up the treasure hunt process: Give the first team to find all the treasures and mark it on their map bonus credits. If not, they will take ALL lesson to go and find the treasures!! (I learnt the hard way!)

Focus on Form

Do the grammar-focus page in their textbooks.

All in all, this was a very successful project for me. I think my students enjoyed it a lot too. Teaching directions is a great topic to get students out of the class and really using the English they are learning, which is rare in a monolingual EFL context in my opinion.

Let me know if you used it or have any advice!

Treasure Hunt!!

I recently had to teach a lesson on directions as part of my first year English class. Last year I had the idea of giving the students a treasure hunt to complete which was moderately successful. It entailed me hiding four clues around the school campus with directions to the next clue. Once students found a clue, their was a simple riddle on the back which, when solved, would give them a number. Once all the four clues where found then, they would have a four letter number referring to a room where I was waiting for them.

A typical clue looked like the following (where the circle marks where they need to write the number):

 

Three people are on a bus. At the first stop, two people get on and one person gets off. 

at the next stop three people get off and one person gets on. 

How many people are on the bus?

○ _ _ _

Now, the reason I say that this activity was only moderately successful was because my class is a communication class, but they were only really passive in completing the task.

So this year, I endeavored to get my students to make their own treasure hunts and the results were better than I expected. Read on to find out how I did it.

 

Necessary items

 

1. Coins / treasure for students to hide

 

 

 

 

1. A map of the campus for each group
2. A sound cloud account to store groups directions to their treasure (not 110% necessary, but recommended).
3. An iPod or smart phone for each group (not 100% necessary, but recommended).

Overview of the project

First class 

- refresh students memory on how to give directions.

Second class 

- as a group decide where they want to hide the treasure.

- write directions to the location. 

- go to the location and hide their treasure. 

- record the directions to the locations onto an iPod and upload to a shared sound cloud account.

Third class

- go and find other groups treasure.

- dictate the directions they heard.

- add corrections to the other groups dictation.

- review the grammar used for homework.

Detailed descriptions follow below:

Lesson 1: Directions review

During the first lesson, I went over a basic review of directions: 

1. Brainstorm ways of giving directions and write them on the board (for reference).
2. Put up a map on the board and direct each other to various buildings located on the map (controlled practice).
3. Complete an information gap activity guiding other students to various unknown locations.
4. Ask students to describe how to get to various rooms in the university (close to the classroom).
5. Actually leave the classroom and attempt to lead your partner to the location you thought of.

The important thing that students learn from point 5 above is that they can't use words like "stop" when they write their treasure hunt, so they have to use expressions such as "when you can see ____ turn left."

Lesson 2: Set up the treasure hunt

This class is used for students to devise their directions to a specific place where they have hidden treasure. They can come in and out of the class and test their directions as many times as they want. Once they have written out their directions, they use soundcloud on the iPods to upload their directions to a shared location that is accessible from any smart phone.

 

Goals:

• To lead students to a particular place on campus. 
• At that point will be a piece of treasure.
• Once there, they take a piece of the treasure and bring it back to class to prove that they found it.

Goals (Linguistic):

• For groups to devise a precise set of directions that other groups can follow to get to the treasure.
• Groups will be judged on how many groups managed to complete their route, so accuracy is essential.

Steps:

1. Students write their directions out on paper.
2. Once they have the general directions written out, they go to the actual location, hide the treasure and write the final detailed instructions (such as "The treasure is under two stones").
3. Students record their directions onto the shared sound cloud account via an iPod: http://soundcloud.com/tduenglish

Nothing much more to say about this class other than, some classes finished early if groups had a clear idea of where they wanted to hide their treasure.

Lesson 3: Play the other groups' treasure hunts!

Take a map for each group to class. Students draw on the map where they found the other groups treasure.

Finding stage

1. Hand out the iPods and show them how to access other groups directions. I actually found that most groups had at least one smart phone user, so they decided to use their own phones for the most part.
2. Students listen to the directions on the iPods, go and find the treasure, then come back to class.
3. Once back, they write down the directions they heard on the left hand of a piece of A4 paper, and make any improvements that they can think of on the right hand side.
4. For homework (or if you have time in class) get students to complete a grammar/vocabulary focus activity. I used the grammar focus page from their textbooks.

To speed up the treasure hunt process: Give the first team to find all the treasures and mark it on their map bonus credits. If not, they will take ALL lesson to go and find the treasures!! (I learnt the hard way!)

Focus on Form

Do the grammar-focus page in their textbooks.

All in all, this was a very successful project for me. I think my students enjoyed it a lot too. Teaching directions is a great topic to get students out of the class and really using the English they are learning, which is rare in a monolingual EFL context in my opinion.

Let me know if you used it or have any advice!

 

Treasure Hunt!!

I recently had to teach a lesson on directions as part of my first year English class. Last year I had the idea of giving the students a treasure hunt to complete which was moderately successful. It entailed me hiding four clues around the school campus with directions to the next clue. Once students found a clue, their was a simple riddle on the back which, when solved, would give them a number. Once all the four clues where found then, they would have a four letter number referring to a room where I was waiting for them.

A typical clue looked like the following (where the circle marks where they need to write the number):

 

Three people are on a bus. At the first stop, two people get on and one person gets off. 

at the next stop three people get off and one person gets on. 

How many people are on the bus?

○ _ _ _

Now, the reason I say that this activity was only moderately successful was because my class is a communication class, but they were only really passive in completing the task.

So this year, I endeavored to get my students to make their own treasure hunts and the results were better than I expected. Read on to find out how I did it.

 

Necessary items

 

1. Coins / treasure for students to hide

 

 

 

 

1. A map of the campus for each group
2. A sound cloud account to store groups directions to their treasure (not 110% necessary, but recommended).
3. An iPod or smart phone for each group (not 100% necessary, but recommended).

Overview of the project

First class 

- refresh students memory on how to give directions.

Second class 

- as a group decide where they want to hide the treasure.

- write directions to the location. 

- go to the location and hide their treasure. 

- record the directions to the locations onto an iPod and upload to a shared sound cloud account.

Third class

- go and find other groups treasure.

- dictate the directions they heard.

- add corrections to the other groups dictation.

- review the grammar used for homework.

Detailed descriptions follow below:

Lesson 1: Directions review

During the first lesson, I went over a basic review of directions: 

1. Brainstorm ways of giving directions and write them on the board (for reference).
2. Put up a map on the board and direct each other to various buildings located on the map (controlled practice).
3. Complete an information gap activity guiding other students to various unknown locations.
4. Ask students to describe how to get to various rooms in the university (close to the classroom).
5. Actually leave the classroom and attempt to lead your partner to the location you thought of.

The important thing that students learn from point 5 above is that they can't use words like "stop" when they write their treasure hunt, so they have to use expressions such as "when you can see ____ turn left."

Lesson 2: Set up the treasure hunt

This class is used for students to devise their directions to a specific place where they have hidden treasure. They can come in and out of the class and test their directions as many times as they want. Once they have written out their directions, they use soundcloud on the iPods to upload their directions to a shared location that is accessible from any smart phone.

 

Goals:

• To lead students to a particular place on campus. 
• At that point will be a piece of treasure.
• Once there, they take a piece of the treasure and bring it back to class to prove that they found it.

Goals (Linguistic):

• For groups to devise a precise set of directions that other groups can follow to get to the treasure.
• Groups will be judged on how many groups managed to complete their route, so accuracy is essential.

Steps:

1. Students write their directions out on paper.
2. Once they have the general directions written out, they go to the actual location, hide the treasure and write the final detailed instructions (such as "The treasure is under two stones").
3. Students record their directions onto the shared sound cloud account via an iPod: http://soundcloud.com/tduenglish

Nothing much more to say about this class other than, some classes finished early if groups had a clear idea of where they wanted to hide their treasure.

Lesson 3: Play the other groups' treasure hunts!

Take a map for each group to class. Students draw on the map where they found the other groups treasure.

Finding stage

1. Hand out the iPods and show them how to access other groups directions. I actually found that most groups had at least one smart phone user, so they decided to use their own phones for the most part.
2. Students listen to the directions on the iPods, go and find the treasure, then come back to class.
3. Once back, they write down the directions they heard on the left hand of a piece of A4 paper, and make any improvements that they can think of on the right hand side.
4. For homework (or if you have time in class) get students to complete a grammar/vocabulary focus activity. I used the grammar focus page from their textbooks.

To speed up the treasure hunt process: Give the first team to find all the treasures and mark it on their map bonus credits. If not, they will take ALL lesson to go and find the treasures!! (I learnt the hard way!)

Focus on Form

Do the grammar-focus page in their textbooks.

All in all, this was a very successful project for me. I think my students enjoyed it a lot too. Teaching directions is a great topic to get students out of the class and really using the English they are learning, which is rare in a monolingual EFL context in my opinion.

Let me know if you used it or have any advice!

 

video game lesson: Dooors

A bit of a break from minecraft posts as I am working on improving the syllabus for that particular project. So this week I am writing about the use of a videogame to teach prepositions and instructional English.

This lesson was inspired by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer's book: Digital Play and uses an "escape the room" game called Dooors. A free app on the iPhone and iPod.

The game is comprised of 35 levels—or rooms—that must be ecaped from by doing cetain things to the phone, finding items etc. 

The lesson plan is as follows:

I separated the class into groups and gave them an iPod each to play the game on. They must play as a group and write their solution to each door before going to the next level. The exact rules which I gave the class are as follows:

1. Each time they clear a level, all group members MUST write the solution.
2. They MUST show me their solution. If I don't understand it, they have to rewrite it before going to the next level.
3. They have to update the whiteboard showing which level they are working on.

Additionally:

1. They can ask other groups for hints
2. They can ask me for hints (but only 3 times)

Once the rules had been established, I showed them how to clear the first 5 levels and gave them a worksheet to write their solutions on (Available here). The worksheet features the solution to the first five levels for reference as the same words crop up again and again as they go through the levels.

Encouraging cooperation and communication on a class level was fostered with the following insentives:

• If all groups managed to get to level 20, the whole class would recieve 20XP
• If all groups made it to level 25, the whole class would receive 40XP
• The first group to get to level 30 would receive 20XP.

The difficulty of the game and the cooperation nature of the class meant that no individual group got to level 30. However, the cooperation and cohesive nature of the class was one that I won't foget for a while. In one class, a few groups didn't quite make it to level 20, so I erased the rule from the board, changing it to level 15. This class cheered when they heard the news. 

All in all, a really fun lesson! If you have enough students with smart phones or access to a number of iPods like I did, give it a try!