Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to a group of teachers that Shelly Terrell was training in Brazil. I answered questions about using computer games in the classroom and introduced them to the Digital Play blog and book.

Hope you enjoy the video!

The workshop, facilitated by Paul Braddock and Graham Stanley is one of a number of similar workshops that have been organised for the annual TESOL Electronic Village Online (EVO).

Over the next 5 weeks, participants will be working together and sharing ideas about using games in language teaching. The workshop, run on Moodle, and which will be archived on the TLLG wiki, also features a series of live sessions with special guest speakers talking about different aspects of games and gamification in language teaching and learning:

• Joe Pereira
• Ozge Karaoglü
• Kyle Mawer
• Rob Lewis

In addition, participants will:-

• be given two special booklets with ideas, tips and lesson plans on how to use online games in class
• have the opportunity to take part in a special Teacher Development online game

This is the second free online games workshop that Digital Play has been involved in. The first, run in December 2011 for SEETA (South East Europe Teachers Association) is still available for visits and tasks (see below).

Published by Delta Publishing, Digital Play – Computer games and language aims is part of the wonderful DeltaTeacher Development series, which includes other original resource books such as Teaching Unplugged by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury, and Teaching Online by Nicky Hockly and Lindsay Clandfield.

The book is so much more than a simple collection of the best ideas from our blog. It includes insight into how learners engage with gaming outside the classroom and advice and guidance for teachers who are interested in joining the digital revolution to their classroom. There are also lots of original step-by-step activities to help teachers bring the world of gaming into the classroom.

Like the other books in the series, Digital Play has been divided into three Parts.

Part A is an extended essay examining how computer games fit into 21st century society, how they are currently being used in education, and what potential they have to be used in language education. In particular, we wanted to dismiss the stereotypes and suggest ways that teachers can implement games in practice.

Part B is the most practical section of the book, consisting of a bank of activities that can be used by teachers. It is divided into activities designed to be used by teachers who have access to one computer in the classroom (i.e. a connected classroom), others that utilise multiple computers (a computer room or class set of laptops/netbooks/tablets) and those that require no computers at all.

Part C takes it further, looking at the bigger picture, with suggestions on how to integrate digital play activities into the syllabus, and tips on how teachers can develop and get to know more about using computer games.

We have been busy promoting the book this week, with a number of events. Through Delta publishing, Kyle and I organised a ‘Digital Playtime in ELT’ webinar (you can watch the recording here – press the play button in the bottom right corner when the file has loaded) to a limited audience, where we held a competition to win a copy of our book. Stephen Greene, a teacher in Brasil answered the question correctly.

Stephen is actually the second teacher to have won a copy of Digital Play. The first copy was won by Vicky Saumell from Argentina during the IATEFL conference in Brighton, UK earlier this year .

I held another webinar on ‘Educational Gaming’ yesterday. During the week, the British Council organised a number of live and online events (full programme here) to coincide with Social Media week in Moscow. My presentation was the last one, coinciding with the focus of the day (computer games). The recording of this webinar is also available, and my slides are online and can be downloaded if you are interested.

Along with co-founders Allan Stitt and Frank Handy, he runs the online game company Zap dramatic.  The games at Zap Dramatics site consist of interactive simulated adventure games that focus on the art and science of negotiation.  They tend to be text heavy and aim to educate as well as entertain.   The Canadian New Media Award for Excellence in Learning (Professionalism and Ethics simulation) was awarded to Zap dramatic in 2005.  In the same year it received the Vortex prize at the McLuhan International Festival of the Future for the adventure game ‘Move or Die‘.  Four years later the company became an official honoree at the 2009 Webby Awards for the game ‘Sir Basel Pike Public School’ which deals with the issue of bullying.  You can see the promotional video for this game here:

Recently Zap dramatic has released the engaging real life drama game ‘Inside the Haiti Disaster’, which places the gamer at the scene of the Haitian earthquake.  At the beginning of this simulation you choose a character and play as either an aid worker, a journalist or local victim of the disaster.  The game is particularly hard hitting in it’s use of film, photos and audio recordings of the actual event and people concerned.  You can read an interview with one of the team members that worked on this game here.

I think the games we’ve mentioned here are best for high level language learners and they are particularly attractive not only because of their high language content but also because they aim to educate the gamer in real life skills as well as raising awareness in some important issues.  They are definitely worth a look into even if it’s to have fun and educate yourself.

“We’re bringing gameplay into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours — and real money — exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? As Tom Chatfield shows, games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.”

An Interview With Hayo Reinders from darren elliott on Vimeo.

One thing that comes out of the interview, that Hayo also mentioned in his keynote, is that existing games should be adapted, which is exactly what we are doing on Digital Play. There’s no need to try to get involved in game design – it’s too expensive and Reinders suggests adjusting existing games.

Reinders also mentions being disappointed with existing language learning games that have been produced for platforms such as the Nintendo DS. Most are not interesting or interactive and would not be motivating for students. In the abstract to his keynote, he states that “the pedagogical approach underlying such games is often not clear…the games were intended to develop fluency but in fact offer only simple spelling exercises with right-wrong answers.”

Reinders has a website, http://innovationinteaching.org/ , which has some details about the research related to gaming and language learning that Reinders is involved in:

“One of my PhD students (Sorada Wattana) and I are looking into the effects of game play on students’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and their actual in-game interaction. We are also looking at the effects of different types of instructions (in the form of in-game quests) on the quantity and quality of target language use“

Also on the website is an article that Reinders wrote for English Teaching Professional called ‘Using computer Games to Teach Writing‘, which is full of useful ideas for teachers. One of these, which is new to us is ‘Gamics’. This is a contraction of games and comics, and would involve students using images from their favourite games to create their own comic.

Finally, Reinders has also been involved in making games for the ipod – he calls them podquests (a combination of ipod and webquest) and wrote a chapter of a book about this, which is available here: Podquests: Language Games on the Go

photo by Preoccupations

Event: More Details are here
Date: Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 1am GMT (next day) (check your time here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In the Elluminate Virtual Classroom. Log in at. The room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event for those who want to come in early. If you have never used Elluminate, go to http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page (here).

James Paul Gee is perhaps at the forefront of those academics calling for others to take the use of video games in education seriously.

He states in his book Situated Language and Learning that he is a linguist ‘whose interests have changed over the years.’ This is probably the understatement of the decade – he has moved from being a theoretical linguist to being the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which “argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences“.

He is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, and is an engaging speaker who always has something thought-provoking to say.

The book’s preface makes the point that games education can be surprisingly complex and that “extensive prior videogame experience often interferes with students’ abilities to reason critically and analytically about games”.

Zagal suggests that anyone serious about games and education should make use of an online learning environment when analysing games. He examines two in the book:

1) Gamelog (http://www.gamelog.cl/) is a site where gamers “keep track of the games that they are currently playing. …basically a record of a game you started playing”
2) Game Ontology Wiki (http://www.gameontology.org/index.php/Main_Page), which provides “a framework for describing, analyzing and studying games”

His research has shown that “participating in these online learning environments was a positive learning experience.” and that “In addition to improving their relationships to videogames as a medium, it also helped students broaden and deepen their understanding of videogames.” He said the most important aspect of blogging about games meant that students “stepped back from their traditional role of “gamers” or “fans” and engaged in reasoning critically and analytically about the games they were studying.” and he highlights that it is the reflective nature of blogging that makes it a very “useful activity for supporting learning and understanding about games.”

Early on, Zagal provides a number of different contexts for understanding games: 1) understanding the relationship and the role a game plays within culture in general 2) understanding what the game’s relationship is to other games 3) understanding the game in the context of the technology/platform it is designed for… and finally 4) understanding the structure and components of the game.

He then writes at length about Games Literacy and Learning Theory, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Building, Methods and Data Analysis. The report on his research that led him to the conclusions mentioned above follows. All-in-all it makes for an interesting read for anyone interested in designing games for education or teaching game design.

Her ARG The Lost Ring, which ran at the same time as the last Olympics, was a great example of how these sorts of games can engage huge audiences and be be both collaborative and creative without losing elements of competition. The idea revolved around devising the rules of play to a lost sport. Now the game is over, but you can get an idea of the kind of creative content that was produced by people while the ARG was running by browsing the archives.

EFL CLASSROOM IDEA – SUPERSTRUCT

Another game that Jane was involved in is Superstruct, which can be used with students in the English language classroom. The premise is for players to imagine what their lives will be like in the year 2019. Although the description on the site tells us the game is now finished (it ran for 6 weeks from October 2008), students can still register and interact with the content. You could also use the game in the classroom for discussion and as an impulse for writing.

If you want to get students to use the site, they can register in a matter of seconds (if they have an email address) and the next step if to create a profile by answering the following questions about their life and world in 2019 (which could also be done in the classroom instead):

• Where do you live?
• Who do you live with?
• What do you do? Where do you work?
• What matters to you most?

After comparing answers, the next step is to watch one or two of the Superstruct videos with students and ask them to react to them to come up with possible solutions to the problems.

OR/AND

Students could prepare video diaries such as the one Laura (one of the participants in the ARG) prepared:

If the students react well to this, there are other missions for them to follow on the site.

Find out more about how to play the game by watching Jane’s introductory video:

HOW GAMES CAN CHANGE EDUCATION

Jane is particularly interested in looking at how games can change the way that we learn and work in the future, something which she explains in more depth in the short video interview below.

She also explains the potential that collaborative gaming such as that promoted through XBox Live can contribute to the development of collective intelligence and other skills.

Jane talks about the future challenge for education and the world of work to take advantage of the potential of such gaming systems. Surely there are possibilities for language learning and teaching here. What do you think?

More about Jane McGonigal (follow her on Twitter here) and her work here:

• Articles and Papers by Jane McGonigal
• Boing! Boing! Video: Emotion, Gaming and Dance
• Video – Explosion of Opportunities offered by Games