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.

Getting it up (1) – simple ways to start a web presence

We assume you need some sort of internet presence – to impress potential clients, to put on your business card, and so you and your students can communicate with each other. But you don't know how to build a website, and haven't time to learn. You want something you can have up and running in a few hours.

Your options are: blog, bulletin board (or forum) and a template-based website.

Blogs:
Originally just a way for people to write an online diary, blogs are now often used as substitutes for normal websites. This is because it's easy to add or change the contents: you don't need to buy or install any software. You use your web browser, and it's no more complicated (well, only slightly more complicated) than writing an e-mail.

To get a blog, there are two main sources: Blogger aka Blogspot, and Wordpress. Both of them offer free hosted services. ("Hosted" = the database containing the blog is on their servers. For a non-hosted blog, you have to have a web server, or rent space on somebody's server, and install the blog software on it. You probably don't want to do this: it only really makes sense if you want the blog to be part of an existing website.)

Blogger/Blogspot is part of the Google empire. For the hosted part, go to www.blogspot.com/ and set up your site. For instructions, try this video tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb4VPSmKuo.

If you don't want to live your entire online life as a citizen of one Google satrapy or another, try www.wordpress.com/. Wordpress has a more community, less big-businessy feel than Blogger. For a video tutorial (long, but very clear and helpful), see www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWYi4_COZMU. YouTube is, of course, also a subsidiary of Google.

Why a blog might not be a good idea:
Blogs make the most sense for publishing your latest comment. If you want a site that gives, say, a potential client a quick idea of who you are and what you can do, a blog won't work so well. Anything you wrote in the past will get lost in the links and archives in the sidebar: it's hard to get people to click there. And if you want to interact with your students, it's hard to organize a discussion into a coherent sequence on a blog: bulletin boards work much better for this. And there's an extra step (and some expense) involved if you want a nice personal url (e.g. your very own dot com address).

Here's a successful attempt to make a full website using blog software: www.badscience.net/, using WordPress. The blog format is suitable because the site is a succession of reports.
And here's an example (posted on the www.tefl-germany.de forum) where the attempt to use blog software to make a site didn't work: kid-learn-english.blogspot.com/.

Bulletin boards (forums):
Much better than a blog for running joined-up discussions on particular themes, so the best choice if your main idea is to interact with your students. Apart from anything else, a visitor to your forum can start a topic, which is not possible in a blog. But a forum is not as good as a conventional site for presenting yourself as a business to prospective clients.

If you go for a forum, you'd better be sure that enough people will contribute. The lists of topics ("threads") in forums usually include counts of the number of people who have viewed and replied to each topic. Too many zeros here can be deeply embarrassing. (The trick is to contribute yourself under lots of different names, at least at the start: if you find that you're still doing this after a couple of years, you'd have been better off with a blog, or perhaps a household pet to talk to.)

As with blogs, forums can be hosted by a provider or can run on your own server. Unless you're a business with an IT department that knows about databases, you want a hosted service. Typically, they are free if you don't mind the provider putting ads on your page. Otherwise, you can pay them a bit (maybe $5 a month) to keep the ads off.

The www.tefl-germany.de/ forum uses the provider Yuku: www.yuku.com/. It's worked well for us since 2001. ("Well" here meaning: the site is hardly ever unavailable, and the posts don't get lost in the cyberwilderness.)

Websites:
I mean, a conventional small-business website: a homepage to say who you are and why you're good. Another page or two with references, a c.v., something about the methods and the courses you offer. A page with some clever tips for your students, or links to other sites if you can't think of any clever tips. And your contact details.

Much better than a blog or forum if you don't desperately want input from your visitors. And after all, it's bad enough having to interact with language learners while you're getting paid for your time. The problem is: it's more complicated to set up a website than either of the other two options (which is why a lot of people go for blogs and forums).

What you need is:

• a server
• a url (www...............com or .de or .co. uk etc.)
• your content, formatted as html
• some software to upload your content to the server.

Fortunately, there are hosted services that meet (or get round) all four needs, cheaply or for free. They provide server space, let you register a www name, and provide a selection of page design templates for your content. You access these templates through a web browser, which removes the need for special uploading software.

The first place to look for such a service is probably your internet service provider. T-Online, for instance, at homepage.t-online.de, offers a free service to existing customers, with a "Design Assistent" to create your pages (up to three), one .de domain, a blog function, etc. For € 4.99 you can have a lot more pages, and more stuff to put on them. Otherwise, the biggest (and, it seems, most reliable) provider in Germany is www.1und1.de, which offers similar packages from € 3.99 up.

Incidentally, when Germans say "Homepage", they usually mean "website", not "home page". When they say "Website" (pronounced "vepzide") they usually mean "web page", because of a confusion with "Seite". This can cause endless amusement when you're teaching English to web developers.

So there's no excuse for not getting an online presence immediately(ish). To make anything posher and more creative, you'll really have to learn a bit about how html works. Nothing about html is intellectually demanding: there are no obscure concepts. But it's rather like the offside law in football, or the use of the present perfect continuous: there are a lot of exceptions and fiddly details. In my next post: the easiest way to learn all about html.

What is "Ask Auntie Web"?

At MELTA, the Munich English Language Teachers’ Association, there are many teachers who are quite frustrated with new media technology. There it is, you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you just can’t quite get your hands on it. There are techie blogs out there, sure, Nik Peachey (http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com) is one of the best, but they’re “so high-igh-igh above me”, and it makes a teacher feel awfully old, doesn’t it, to have to trawl through the language and only understand maybe half of it. Well, it's a shame when good teachers with deep knowledge feel like idiots. That is one of the things that we really need to change. Lucy Mellersh built this blog for MELTA about a year ago to go with the tech advice column, Ask Auntie Web, in the MELTA Newsletter. But then MELTA kept it under wraps because we wanted to promote the MELTA Forum (http://www.melta.de/meltaboard/index.php). That forum is a communication platform for MELTA members. Yet we're a big community of teachers out here on the web, with great big questions and a great big pool of knowledge. So here goes a relaunch:

Let’s build Ask Auntie Web into the blog it could be. Let's make it a place to share knowledge. As you know, the most productive part of learning is asking the right questions. What have you always wanted to be able to do in teaching? What applications would you need to make your classes simply brilliant? What tech tricks have you seen somewhere that you'd really like to be able do yourself? Ask Auntie Web, and we can start a discussion.


Photo: George Sled, Panoramio

How it works: You can post comments under each blogpost. Or you can become an author on this blog, and join the writing team. Just send an email to "info (at) melta (dot) de" (this strange spelling is to avoid spam, so translate it to a normal email address). You can also follow the Auntie Web conversation on twitter. You haven't discovered twitter yet? Then read the first blogpost, below.