Monday, October 7, 2013

serious games

    I played the Budget Hero, which cost me around 1 hours. Through the game, I realize the importance of serious games for my future students. I will apply serious games into my future teaching. My language learning objectives are that students can solve the real problems in the real world and they can find effective and various ways to solve common problems in the real world through playing serious games. After playing serious games, I will let students solve similar problems in classroom. For example, after students playing Budget Hero, I will let them do some accounting and to see if they know how to balance and control their budget.

Escap games


    Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is used in applications and processes to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning.
     Nowadays, many researchers have found that game player's regularly exhibit persistence, risk-taking, attention to detail and problem solving skills, all behaviors that ideally would be regularly demonstrated in school. They also believed that game environments enable players to build understanding actively and at paces. Moreover, well-designed games let players to advance on various ways at various rates in response to each player's interests and abilities and foster collaboration and just-in-time learning. 
     I played Polleke's Blue Room, which cost me 45 minutes to escape the room. After playing the game, I found that game can rise great interest in learning. I think I will apply the gamification into my future teaching. The language learning objectives would be to  encourage my students to exercise more effectively and improve their overall health and to make education more engaging. I think students will be actively involved because the attractive video scene and students are awarded varying numbers of points for activities they perform in their workouts and gain levels based on points collected. Moreover, students will love getting ahead of others and then stop to help their classmates to show off their learning competence. I think the role of the teacher would be designing proper games according to their students' language level and make proper instructions to attract students' attention. Moreover, teachers need to do assessment through games. I will use a walk through for the game. I will write several steps and hints which are relative to how to escape the room. Through the walk trough, students will notice some important vocabularies they need to learn and those vocabularies will be showed by playing the game. I will use images from the game. I will choose some attractive and funny images to put to the game. Moreover, I may print these images and put them in the classroom with vocabularies, then students can learn everywhere. After the game, I will let students do vocabulary dictation to see how many words they can remember, and then I will adjust the difficulty of the game according to their performance.

social working stie

I think Teacher 2.0 will be useful to my future teaching. Because Teacher 2.0 is an independent community for educators to explore their interests and passions, and to build a network of support for educators at all levels. Through this community, with online events, interviews, and workshops, I can help my students re-energized in their study and in their contributions to the world. Moreover, through the community, I can let my career become easier and more convenient. I can save a lot of time to manage technology problem and spend more time to pay more attention to my students. Furthermore, through the community, I can keep contact in my students study and give my feedback to them in time.






Wednesday, October 2, 2013

using Twitter for my teaching

     I will use Twitter for my future teaching. After reading the articles free technology for teachers and What you wanted to know about student blogging, I get some ideas about how to apply the Twitter to my future teaching.
     Firstly, the Twitter  could become a central location for all of the online materials I use in my classes.I can use Twitter not only to keep a record of my lessons, students ideas, I can also use Twitter to share my lesson resources and give my feedback to students.Through the Twitter, I can share my ideas with my students, and I can get feedback from my students in time.
     Secondly, I will make a detailed rubric for the score standard for using Twitter. I will let students get some grades by using Twitter, which can motivate them studying together by using Twitter. For example, I will let them respond at least one article I post, and they should reply one of their classmates' ideas, just like what we do through discussion board. Then students can share their opinions and I can notice whether students understand what I teach.



The Twitterchat that I followed

     I followed the Twitterchat of #edchat. I think the #edchat  can be a good form of professional development for me in the future teaching. Through the #edchat, I can be informed of many useful resources about teaching, such as the useful websites for the teaching, some useful strategies teachers shared, some interesting class demonstration videos and so on. Thus, I can learn a lot from those teaching resources. I can apply those useful teaching strategies to my future teaching, and I can make some improvements through learning from others.