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Using Alternate Reality Games in language education

r.e. European Union funded education project

ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0  (ARGuing) is a European Union education project.

The project has created the first use of an Alternate Reality Game for motivating secondary school students to learn languages. The project has also learnt how an ARG can be adapted to almost any area of education.

The game that was created was called ' The Tower of Babel' and included a story designed to engage the target student group. The students had to save the planet by completing specific quests, collaboratively and internationally. The project has been a huge success with over 400 teachers and students from 17 countries playing the game ' The Tower of Babel'. In the final pilot over 9,000 quests were answered and 800 files uploaded.

The project has created a number of resources that are available online, these include:

1. A re-usable game platform (on a Moodle platform) that includes multiple languages http://ictthatworks.net:8080/moodle/ - you can view inside the platform by sending an email to me. Please place in the subject line of the email – TofB platform
2. A project website with additional information http://www.arg-education.eu . On the website are papers to download including:

1. A methodology to make and use Alternate Reality Games in education
2. A set of case studies of other ARGs and serious games with empirical evidence of results
3. A set of use case scenarios that show examples of how ARGs could be used for other subjects or cross-subjects
4. An online teacher training course to enable educators to use the ARG the project produced
5. Summaries of papers on the pedagogy, evaluation and the technology employed. (full papers are available in the conference proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning http://academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2009/ecgbl09-proceedings.htm )

The project team are also offering consultancy services to other educators interested in using ARGs in education.

ProVoc - Free Language Vocabulary Trainer for Mac OS X

Get active learning directions.

Continuing with my series "Get active in the classroom!", here is another activity by Marc Helgesen which worked very well to reinforce directions in another language. I did this with my grade 12 group (17 years old). Although they are grown up students, they do need a bit of action from time to time as they tend to be a bit lethargic! We learnt how to give and understand directions in town. Then, as a follow up activity, we did the Tour guide in Madrid. I created cards to put on the walls and tables in the classroom. They were showing La Plaza Mayor, El Parque del Retiro, El museo del Prado, Atocha on them and some shops in Spanish we had learnt previously. It was a double lesson and students had a 5 minutes break so I had time to fix the cards in the classroom without them watching. When students returned from their break, I asked them to stay in the corridor and I explained the following:

1.  Students worked in pairs. One was a tour guide. The other was a tourist. The tourist is blindfolded.

2.  The tour guide directed the tourist around the classroom, giving directions and pointing out things that are interesting. (The tour guide may not touch the tourist). Only spoken instructions are allowed. The tour guide encourages the tourist to touch and pick-up objects. Naturally, the tour guides need to be careful so the tourists don’t hurt themselves, bump into things or other people, etc.

3. When each pair of students had finished their tour, we had a discussion of what makes for good directions, things that were easy or difficult to explain. We also talked about the main sights in Madrid.

Students really enjoyed doing this, they thought it was a fun way of practicing the directions.

What about you? Which engaging activity do you do to practice directions?

    

It's a beautiful and geeky world we are creating

Scheinbar vergessene Fremdsprachen

http://sprachennetz.blogspot.com/2009/10/scheinbar-vergessene-fremdsprachen.html

European Day of Languages outcome.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we celebrated the European Day of Languages at my school with a little competition I found on the mflresources forum. The students really seemed to enjoy guessing the different languages spoken by the staff and all the staff contributed which made the day successful. You can view the competition sheets adapted from the ones on the mflresources forum below.

In the lower school, each class had planned a little activity based on languages and presented it during an assembly. One class sang "Frere Jacques" in French, another class read a poem in Japanese, another one sang a song in Zulu, another class said "my name is..." in different languages. It was great to see the whole school involved to celebrate languages.

What about you? Was your EDL a success?

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Virtual Keyboard 3.1.5: A small but powerful multilingual program for text typing on 53 languages. http://bit.ly/9BJ31

European Day of Languages.

As the European Day of Languages is fast approaching (it is celebrated on the 26th of September, but since it falls Saturday, we will celebrate it in school on Friday), I thought I would write a post about it.

As mentioned on the website :
"The general objectives of the European Day of Languages are:

1. Alerting the public to the importance of language learning and diversifying the range of languages learnt in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;

2. Promoting the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, which must be preserved and fostered;

3. Encouraging lifelong language learning in and out of school, whether for study purposes, for professional needs, for purposes of mobility or for pleasure and exchanges."

This year, I am planning to organise a little competition I found on the mflresources forum. During the day, pupils have to spot which language members of staff are using. This is agreed in advance, and staff members simply 'drop' some language other than English into the lesson or in the corridor. Pupils who can identify the languages win a prize and the teacher who made the best effort to speak a different language also wins a prize. Some teachers have already agreed to speak Chinese (Cantonese), Hindi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Irish! I will tell you how it went on Friday (hopefully, very well!).

Otherwise, you can join a Facebook group to share ideas and a great wiki created by @dominic_mcg to share experiences and good practice with even links to resources from the seven previous EDLs!

What are you planning to do on EDL?

Brilliant Spanish textbook: Gente Joven.

I am not a big fan of textbooks and was thinking of creating my own exercises this year since my new school has very few resources but I found a brillant textbook called Gente Joven in the school library.

Good points about this textbook:

• Everything is in Spanish, there is no English explanation or translation. For me, it is very important to immerse pupils in the target language. This is how toddlers learn how to speak.
  
• The exercises are fun, engaging and challenging. For example, we were describing how people look like and there was an exercise about a casting for a TV serie. Pupils had to say why they would choose this boy or this girl. So not only, they had to say basic sentences describing people, thay also had to give their opinions using "creo que el chico puede ser ... porque...".
  
• The teacher's book is full of great ideas to get students involved with group and independent work. The collaborative listening activity which I posted earlier on this week is based on the teacher's book.
  
• There are also tasks to assess students such as creating the school website in Spanish or recording a radio show for a speaking assignment, along with sheets to mark pupils and to let them reflect on how they performed (again all in Spanish).
  

So far, I have used most of the tasks in the book as I have found they really work. This is the first time I like a textbook so much!

I also went on the publishing website "Difusión" and found a list of useful resources for free. So only, you have to register to access them.

What about you? do you use a very good textbook or create your own resources?

Zweitsprache bleibt im Hintergrund präsent

http://sprachennetz.blogspot.com/2009/08/zweitsprache-bleibt-im-hintergrund.html