Gamification - Video Games

There are many misconceptions about video games such as children becoming more violent because of all the violence related concepts that they have. Even though it has been proven that it does make people more prone to violence, it is only a really small percentage. Despite this negative influence, it has been evident that video games do indeed have benefits as well such as coordination skills and decision making.

Gamification can also be used in classrooms to keep the students engaged and enthusiastic to participate in the learning activies. It is clear to say that millenials carry a cavalier attitude and that they look down upon learning resources. At least through the use of games, they will be more eager about their own learning process. Gamification is an integration of game mechanics and training content striving for learning outcomes. For instance, it is also used in the medical field for prospective surgeons. Thus, game-based learning activates cognitive learning by the students actively processing and producing their learning.

Comments

Duolingo

Duolingo is another popular language learning app and it is the most downloaded one in the world so far. It offers 85 different courses in 24 languages. Gamification is poured into each lesson; your hearts keep your lesson alive and when you answer incorrectly, you lose a heart. If you run out of hearts, you simply just start over again. There's a streak count to motivate you to stay on track by displaying the number of days you spent learning a language in a row. It has in-lesson grading so you can immediately see if your answers are correct or not. Each lesson includes a variety of skills such as speaking, listening and translation etc. with multiple choice challenges. Additionally, it can be easily used in schools as thousands of teachers are already using it for their students' development.

Canva

I used canva to create a poster for students at lower levels of proficiency to display past-perfect tense, as it is quite difficult for some students to understand this grammar tense and it would be of great assistance for them to see the timeline of the tense in a visual manner. Basically, this poster can be printed out and hung in the class for this purpose. You can use canva to create the other needs of your students as posters too to use as visual aids in the class.

Mondly

Mondly is a language learning app that enables users to learn 33 languages for free and it is used by 40 million people in over 190 countries. The 33 languages are British English, American English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Romanian, Afrikaans, Croatian, Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Hindi, Indonesian. There is the free content and the premium content of Mondly. The free content is obviously much more limited compared to the premium one as you don't have to pay money; however, there is still enough content for you to be able to the basic vocabulary of any of the listed languages. Personally, I would only recommend Mondly for vocabulary learning unless you decide to get the premium version of the app, which also includes the grammatical aspect of language.

The art of ELT

Search This Blog