Sim 3 : A perfect game to learn America

  Sim 3 is really a fantastic strategy game for players to learn American culture and everyday English vocabulary. In this game, players can create their own virtual sims making livings, developing skills and explore endless possibilities of life. I installed it in my laptop and have played it more than a hundred times, it's a life-time game and really never lost its attraction.

  The learning objectives of this game can be numerous, here I list the two main objectives:

  First, students are able to learn American cultures through the game. For example, the most interesting and challenging part of this game is socializing. Players can learn how to socialize in America. Players have to control their sims socialize with other sims in the game to expend their circles and make relationships with others in order to meet the needs for socializing and explore new opportunities. By choosing the different options in the conversation, such like chat, get to know, joke about work, apologize (there're just so many options), their sims or players will find traits of others and gradually grasp certain social rules to make friends and better relationship faster and efficiently.

  Second, students are able to expand their vocabulary through the game. Sim 3 provides a building mode for players to build their house and decorate their rooms of their own (in fact, I found many American families like to build and fix house by themselves). In the building mode, there are just so many stuffs categorized by plumbing, appliance, surface, etc. In this mode, players can find almost everything they could think in the real world, and use them to make an ideal house. The game also require them to buy certain items in this mode in order to meet the needs of their sims. In the world map, players can find more places like market and theater, their sims could buy groceries and get recreation according to different situation. Through this building or purchasing process, students are able to learn a lot of words of everyday life.
  The game is so easy to handle because it's just to make the sim live and learn while the player also learn how to live a life and learn new thing. For the assessment, I think group discussion would be fit for the culture aspect. Students could share what they learned through the game and techniques in social communication while they could also put them into use in the discussion. And for vocabulary, a small quiz on certain category  of vocabulary or a vocabulary competition in groups would be the choice.
  Students would love this game! If you want to know more about Sim. Check here.

Let's play games!

 

Do your find language learning boring? Do you feel it's a daunting process to learn grammar and memorize vocabularies? If yes, then you should ask yourself another question -- Do you love GAMEs?

  I believe you must like games, there's ought to be one game you love to play. But what if I told you the essence of game is just like opening a million of boxes to find 15 pie? You should take a little time to watch the lecture given by Chatfield T, "7 ways game reward the brain". In his lecture, he explained that "this sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling." A game is able to make boring stuff interesting! How?

  Chatfield T provided us the functions of how games can do that. First, games are never made too difficult nor too easy for you to play, they keep you confident to play while make you feel achievement bit by bit. Players also enjoy the experience bars measuring progress, they could see

they are making progress. Second, games provide you multiple long and short tasks,people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged. Third, reward, games reward you for your achievement but don't punish failure. Fourth, feed back, through the game we could teach lesson of things that hard to touch and understand. And the last one, the element of uncertainty, games always have uncertainty to make you curious and keep on exploring.

  Isn't it amazing? What if we combine games with language learning? Can we also make language learning interesting and engaging? Sure, that's what we called gamification, "applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging."

   Let's take a look at the game pacman, one of my favorite which I played thousands of times in my life. It's a very simple games, you only need four keys to control the pacman to eat all the beans while avoid the

monsters. It's a very good way to teach kids simple expression of directions through this game. I once used this game in my teaching. An objective for me to use this game is to teach my students the basic direction words, and other basic vocabularies such as different fruits (I believe there's another version of pacman that will reward player different fruits at the end of each level). Besides, the game is a good ice-breaker for shy students to get familiar with everybody (I have to say silent kids have talent in playing games), while they can shout out and help one who was playing the game, they also improve their communication skills. Students engaged in the game very much through competing with each other, I group them into groups and set the time limitation, the group using the less time and scoring more would win. They took turns to play and the atmosphere was really exciting while I heard them shouting out in English. I think a walkthrough at the beginning of this game activity is necessary, through instructing students how to play this game and how should they effectively help each other through speaking  in the competition. As teacher, I only monitored the competition and made a free chat with them after the game as a motivator, I asked them how many monster they skilled and who scored the most and how many kinds of fruits they collected. These questions motivated their will to speak; I always found topics to connect my teaching with these game.  There're many ways to assess students' knowledge. The discussion is one of them, through the free discussion of anything happened in the game, teachers are able to know each student's level and how they find the game and how much they engaged in it. I would also use other games to assess them; let students write certain category vocabulary in groups or instruct them directions and let them raise hands and point out directions to response. The images of this game is not that clear but I think I can make use of the cartoon figure of pacman and monsters in other lessons, for example, make up story using them, which would make the story more attractive to students since they are so familiar with them.

  

  "Microblogging enables a real-time interaction between users, using different devices, technologies and applications." (Holotescu C & Grosseck G) Twitter, one of the best known microblog platform has more than 600 million users among which one of five are college students. The great potential of education Holotescu and Grosseck's study, they presented a course using a specially designed microblogging platform called Cirip.ro. they suggested that differing from Twitter which open to all the public user, specially designed microblogging, Cirip.ro, comes with the following features:

use in microblogging had already stimulate educators to develop new methodology and explore educational features in micro blogging. In

•   Users have the possibility to specify the domain about which they will write the notes; this makes finding microblogs from a specific domain easier, particularly the educational ones;
•   Creating user groups; pupils, students, teachers can create public or private groups(in the private ones the notes are visible only for members);
•   The possibility to embed images, audio and (live) video files, presentations, documents in notes;
•   The possibility to subscribe to search feeds or to feeds offered by sites / blogs / social networks –the same as users and groups, the feeds can be monitored, online, by IM, or by SMS.

  They suggested that using such a educational microblogging, students gained interest in life-long learning, motivations and flexibility in developing their own educational and vocational route. The advantage of flexibility was also mentioned in Tweeting for learning: A critical analysis of research on microblogging in education (Gao F. 2012). "learning can happen beyond pre-scheduled class times, and learners' time on task may be significantly expanded by opportunities of spontaneous and sustained learning."

  But microblogging in education also face challenges. One of the most inmportant ones is participants' unfamiliarity with microblogging. The technology developed so fast that the Twitter now isn't the same as is was half year ago. A starter may face great challenges to use microblogging and this may lead to their uncomfortable feeling in the learning process. So it's teachers' responsibility to help learners to learn how to use microblogging and help them find the great advantages in this form of learning; show them the joy of express and share ideas in the unlimited network. Though it is a long way to go, we already have a good start.

#Find Your Interest#

  I joined #edutechchat this Thursday. I am not a new microblog user, but really a novice of Twitter. So before I joined the Twitterchat, I took a little time to research what a Twitterchat is. I am very familiar with Weibo, a mainstream Chinese microblog, and I dig it from my memory that there's something with # as well. So, I made a comparison between Weibo and Twitter to make a better understanding about Twitterchat.


  The word "chat" was a little confusing for me. In Weibo, when you post your piece of microblog with #hashtag#， then your blog will be categorized into what we called 话题(topic). So, anyone who want to share his/her mind or looking for others ideas about this topic can search those microblogs and also post theirs with #hashtag#. It's a really fun to search topic like #what will you do or #super recipes in Weibo. But usually what we do is sharing or reposting with short comment such as "perfect!" or just a . There's really few communication between users that could make me connect it with "chat". This function is really as same as Twitterchat, the only difference is two # vs. one. The picture on the right is what I searched for #EnglishEdu in Weibo.  One more thing I found is that the Twitterchat isn't limited in certain time, whenever I come up with an idea or problem, I can Tweet it with #hashtag and wait for someone discovering it.

  Consider my teaching career, I regard Twitterchat as a very eye-opening way to explore useful resources and an approach to get help from other teachers, even those famous, influential ones. I found many who in the same chat sharing  teaching methods and new invents within the field. These tweets can be retweet a million times and spread to world in a few minutes. This means twitter is one of the fast way to acquire the latest information and learn the newest creative thinking. And talking about getting help from others, it is amazing because I will never know who will help me solve my problem, it might be dean from Oxford who I've never met. Through the chat, I might know more people in my field as well. So Twitterchat really gathers people from the same field and provide a space for them to exchange ideas, for my professional development it is really a contributing tool. But I must say, the twitter needs  long-term keeping and active participating; it's just like the human resource network. The more influential, the more chances your tweets would be focused  in millions of tweets.

Classroom 2.0

   Talking about Classroom 2.0, "This website is really doing it seriously.", that's what came into my mind
when I was filling in my applying information. The website requires me to give the reason why I want to join this network. "Wow, that's something I never expect." Then the administrator will decide whether you can join this network. What does this mean? This means this website is really specifically  professional; the members on this network are all real professional in this field. Because they are qualified for such a standard.
    And it really is professional. You can explore various educational resources on the site; it provides literature, videos for new teachers which are really helpful to widen their horizon. Within this site, it also forms a network among teachers from all over the world. From the view of connectivism, this is definitely a huge resource to learn from if you fully enrolled in it.
   I

What’s mine is yours!

    This is an era of information explosion. Siemens G. mentioned the extent that the knowledge expanding in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. “One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago.” In other way to think about this, what you have learned now will not satisfy you in 10 years. We need to absorb knowledge and refresh our minds as quickly as we can to keep pace with the changing world. The traditional way of learning won’t fit; you may never think about this, we learned a lot through on-line network through the last decades. We are a new type of learners, the connectivism learners. What is connectivism? "The relationship between work experience, learning, and knowledge, as expressed in the concept of ‘connectivity, is central to connectivism, motivating the theory's name.” The central aspect of connectivism is the metaphor of a network with nodes and connections.  In this metaphor, a node is anything that can be connected to another node such as an organization, information, data, feelings, and images.

So, learners are like sponges in a big vessel full of knowledge of water. Every sponge will absorb certain part or amount of knowledge at first as we start to learn knowledge. Then we squeeze the water out as we share knowledge with others. In this process, the knowledge will mix and maybe create more chemistry as motivate new ideas and then be absorbed by others again. This ‘absorb-squeeze-absorb’ process happens among every sponge thus creates a multi-linked network. Through the network exchanging knowledge, we share information and learn new stuffs from others. Back to reality, this network exists in our internet technology. Today our connections base on social networks such as Facebook and twitter connect us more efficiently. The network is learning, isn't it? Being educators, we should make advantages of all these technology to instruct our next generation learn in a fast-pace world.

    And one more things to mention, when you read this, you’ve already become a connectivism learner!