Turning the class into an RPG (Part 1)

I had to teach a shopping lesson this week, and, not having a great time with it was last year, I decided to make things a little bit more interesting. My idea was to play a kind of tabletop RPG with the students, where they would kit out a character with armour, weapons, food and potions and then pit them against each other the following week.

Discucssing the idea with my colleague, he seemed really interested too, so we started sketching out simple rules such as how much damage each weapon would do, how much defense each piece of item would give etc. After rehearsing it a few times ourselves, we finally came up with a system that seemed fair and would allow students to customise their characters so that groups wouldn't all buy exactly the same stuff.

1. Watch the presentation

Here is the presentation that I showed the students at the start of the "shopping class".

Rpg shopping lesson

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Not all of the rules are included on purpose: so that the students have to ask. Another point is that in the above presentation my colleague (and my) face appear. In the actual presentation, these are videos explaining how to use the different weapons.

Another thing which is not explained is: "How do we win?"

Well, once a characters armour has been reduced to 0, that group have to answer a question. If they get it correct, they don't lose a life, but if they get it wrong, they lose one of their three lives: ♡♥♥. This continues until they lose all three of their lives. As for the questions they have to answer... they will be decided by each group individually and should have something to do with their classes major.

2. Decide as a group which weapon you want to buy

After watching the presentation I handed out a "shop" worksheet to each group in the class and told them to keep their items a secret (so that students would have to ask what each shop is selling and how much items cost). I also handed each group their character worksheet that appears in the above presentation.

At this point, I was asked a number of questions. Some of the most common ones are:

1. Can I use a potion and attack in one go? (NO!)
2. Do I have to buy armour for all body parts? (YES!)
3. If I don't have an anti-freeze potion, what happens? (You have to roll a six on the dice to become unfrozen)

3. Do the shopping activity

Students complete the shopping activity which has been explained to them through the presentation.

4. Introduce your character

Groups take it in turn to introduce their characters name and the weapon (s)he will use. Nothing else. The rest is a secret for next weeks BATTLE activity. 

って言う事で、I'll be back soon with a review of the battle lesson.

Stay tuned!

Creating Rage Comics with EFL Students

In reply to a number of requests, this post outlines our methodology behind getting our students to create and upload rage comics to reddit.

First Lesson

The first lesson is a general introduction to the vocabulary for emotions in English. At the end of the lesson, students are introduced to popular Internet memes known as rage faces and are asked to guess what emotion they are portraying.

Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson.

Emotions 1: Introduction to rage faces

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This is the accompanying worksheet: http://bit.ly/emotionsworksheet

 

Second Lesson

In this lesson we went over the phenomenon of "trolling" and helped the students register on reddit, create their comics with ragemaker.net and then upload their completed comics to reddit.

Below are the slides we used as part of the lesson:

 

Emotions 2: Creating comics

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Hints, Tips and Considerations

• Because students were all submitting their comics from the same room (hence the same IP address) I had an issue with submitting comics where reddit would say, "you are doing that too much, try again in 10 minutes." Which meant that students could only submit their comics once every 10 minutes. A massive delay! To remedy this problem, you should input all students usernames on your subreddit as approved submitters. The link is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/about/contributors/

• Students should be advised that the content on reddit (especially rage comics) often contain inappropriate material or themes for school settings. We therefore recommend carrying out such lessons with mature students. In our particular context, all students were 18+.

• Adding flair after students names helps the reddit community know who is or is not a student.

• Because anyone can post anything on reddit, we recommend monitoring the comments that students receive on their comics, looking out for anything inappropriate or insulting. (We found that the community reported such comments in a lot of cases, too.)

• As a follow up lesson, we recommend having students reply to any comments they received, comparing their upvote scores, commenting on new comics and participating in English with the community you have created (= interacting with other English speakers).

 

Best EFLcomics of the week

See the full gallery on Posterous

Because it was very interesting class, I enjoyed it in the house (sic).

Student Feedback 2

The next installment of feedback from students.

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]

During the lesson, I introduced students to a number of emotion-related words through the use of rage faces.

Emotions Class 1

See the full gallery on Posterous

Students loved drawing their favourite emoticons. It was great fun trying to decide what emotion each character was showing.

They loved the 'Crater Face' YouTube video too. I don't think they will forget the word bittersweet now!

Student Feedback

See the full gallery on Posterous

This term students were asked to do some 'quick writing' at home which are similar to Murphey's Action Logs.

Students basically have five minutes to write about (reflect on) what they did during the lesson. They are told to write any new words or grammar they encountered too.

The things that students write are also very helpful to me as it shows what worked/didn't work in the class.

Here are a few good examples from last week.

Using Reddit in a university EFL classroom

Hello all!

This is basically a guide for my students, but let me give you a brief introduction to what it is I am teaching here.

What is reddit?

Some of you may be familiar with the website: www.reddit.com and the plethora of comics that appear in the f7u12 or classicrage subreddits...? Maybe not. A lot of these comics are completely inane and pointless, but there is of course the odd gem that makes me laugh. The r/classicrage comics usually strike a chord with me somewhere in my own experiences making me chuckle.

Here is one particularly relevant to students:

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to get my students to create their own comics and share them on reddit. I even created my own subreddit for students to present their work(s of art)!

The good thing about presenting student work on a subreddit is due to the way that reddit as a site works. Posts are voted up or down by users. If you like a post you "upvote" it, if you dislike a post you "downvote" it. With this mechanic in place, students can effectively vote on the comics they think are the best. They also have the ability to post comments, which gives them the opportunity to interact socially with each other in English outside of the classroom (that's the theory at least!)

So, on with the main part of this post: explaining how to register on reddit.

Registering with reddit

Picture 1

The first thing you need to do is press the "register" (登録) button.

Picture 2

Insert a username. Make it your student number. Also, make your password something that you will remember. If you need to, have your password the same as your username.

You don't need to put your mail address in, but if you forget your password, you won't be able to use this website again :(

Picture 3

Search for tduenglish.

Picture 4

Press on the tduenglish link (or press this).

Picture 5

Click the +frontpage button to register to the tduenglish news feed.

 

You are now registered to use reddit.

Picture 6

If you want to leave a comment (for the caption competition), press the comment (コメント) button and then put in your comment.

That's it!

If you have any problems, email me.

My next post will look at how to make rage comics as well as introducing some of the famous(?) characters.