Games to play in your forum or blog

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

• What kinds of games do you play with adult classes?
• Which games make them actually apply their language skills?

There are lots of low-tech, easy to set up games you can play using your blog/ comments or your forum.

Text-based games

Any kind of collaborative or prompted writing can be a game as soon as you set rules limiting what students can do, getting their creative juices flowing. They are developing something together, yet watching the others, which all by itself introduced a competitive element. You can set time constraints to raise adrenaline levels and create parallel tasks to increase the sense of competition.

1. Write a story simply by extending a sentence by a word. Rule: you're not allowed to delete what someone else has written! Here's a sample: Expanding Alice. Each person updating the story copies and pastes the last update into the comments and adds words.
2. Change a story by changing individual words (sample: Altering Alice).
   

This posting must happen assynchronously - students may get in each other's way if they work all at once! In Ning students can update their comments for 15 minutes, so they can correct any mixups. BUT you can turn this into a synchronous game by having everyone start their own story as a separate discussion and then having them go around adding to the others'.

You might want to link to Oxford collocations in your Ning or blog and have students refer to them when playing text-based games to keep the language juices flowing.

Picture-based games

Post a puzzling picture as a discussion and have everyone guess what it is. I really like the picture puzzles on Pixelio.de. Register and then just type in "Bildrätsel" into the search box there for free downloadable pictures. The photographers generally include a picture "solution" that you can share when comments start to run dry. Pairs include these:

Interactive games for adults: Fun, but not collaborative!

You can create your own games, and the range is virtually endless. But where is the line between a game and an exercise? Many ready games are Flash-based, which has to be installed on the computers you are using. You'll find interactive language games at Spotlight, designed by Macmillan.

Hat tip to Markus Brendel of Der Englisch Blog: Markus embeds in his blog is Sheepman, a German-English idiom translation game that has sheep biting the dust. The activities on Nik (Peachey)'s Daily English Activities feel like games. It's a big world of games out there (let's talk about it another day).

BUT all of these games can also be played alone. You can beam them up on a whiteboard, or use a projector and have someone type what everyone says.

But in a forum, you're playing together. Collaborating. Even if you're not in the same room.

Task:

• Think of a forum game to play with a class of yours.
• Write the introductory text.
• Post as a Ning discussion.
• Invite others to join.

GoogleDocs in Ning to collect vocabulary

This is another ELTAS Tech Tools Day task.

Pre-task thinking:

• Does it make sense to keep a vocabulary list for the entire class?
• Or does each individual have his/her own list that can not be generalized?
• How do you collect vocabulary in your classes?
• Have you tried other systems?
• What are the pros and cons of each?
• How does collecting vocabulary in digital form differ from having it in a notebook?
  

What I'm doing:
One of my company courses now has a Ning. We use this collaborative learning environment primarily to get organized, as the participants have rather demanding jobs that make them have to miss quite a few lessons. The Ning lets them check things neatly in our course log. I can embed any media we used, so that means fewer copies of handouts to pass on to those who didn't show up. We also organize our extra-curricular events there.

One thing they've asked me for over the years is a vocabulary list that they could fill in. We've used handwritten sheets and copied them, but that doesn't work well, especially when they are coming irregularly. So what I've done is to make a Google Docs Form using the questions:

• English word
• sample phrase/ sentence
• sample phrase/ sentence
• Definiton
• German equivalent

Any user with the link to the live form can enter information into that form. They don't need a Google acount.
And any user can read (but not edit!) a Google Spreadsheet that has been published as a web page. When new content is added through the form, this web page is updated automatically. On the spreadsheet select the settings: Publish + Automatically republish when changes are made.

So all I had to do is get my students to sign up for Ning. Then I created a text box in Ning and added two links:

• to the live form to enter new words
• to the output spreadsheet to view our list.

The text box also contains some reference links:

Macmillan dictionary
Oxford collocations
Corpus Concordance English
American Corpus
Linguee
Leo


Now they'll just have to start filling it up!

The limits of Google Docs in Ning:
Unfortunately, you can't embed a Google Form or Spreadsheet in Ning the way you can in a blog or in Moodle. This is connected to internal formatting in Ning. Pity! It would be nice to have everything under our Ning URL. Adding a link is only second-best.

Task:
Create a vocabulary list template using Google Doc Form.
Create categories like:

• word
• sample phrase
• explanation
  
• translation

Give it a focus that other EFL teachers can relate to (e.g. words in the local dialect)
Link to it so we can add vocabulary.