Using ICT to Entertain

Chapter Outline

·         Word games

·         Quiz time

·         Being sociable

·         Give them their head

Every teacher hopes that children will enjoy English lessons and each of us realizes that we need at times to take on take on the role of entertainer. For many students the varied activities of English enjoyable, with discussions and debates, stories, language games and plenty of social interaction. There are, however, times when we must admit we’re all in need of entertainment, whether so sweeten some repetitive task or brighten the end of the day. If even Plato said, ‘ Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play, we can feel justified in using ICT along with other methods to make learning more fun. The accounts of activities in earlier chapter have, we hope, demonstrated a variety of ways in which ICT can engage students, often for periods of intense concentration, in ways that will be enjoyable as well as educational. In this chapter we shall look at a number of applications we can use where entertainment is more explicit. The terrible word ‘edutainment’ was coined in the 1980s for products ‘intended to be educational as well as enjoyable’, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.

We shall not be using it again, partly because it implies that education and enjoyment are normally in opposition to each other.

The value of ICT can be particularly seen in:

·         Activities that make repetitive tasks more interesting and motivating.

·         Games and other software with a scoring and competitive element.

·         Applications with a social element, allowing group work and communication inside and outside the classroom.

·         The creation of films, audio programmers and web pages in a magazine style.

Some very simple applications can make lessons easier for everyone as well as more engaging. A computer clock, with countdown and alarm sounds, is more fun than a traditional wall clock, and doesn’t rely on you, as a teacher, watching the time as you attempt to keep your well-regulated lesson on schedule. There are plenty available, including those supplied with interactive whiteboards and a countdown timer that allows you use music (classics or TV theme tunes) on the Class Tools site that features later in this chapter.

Well recommend you start by trying the Teachit Timer, illustrated here. This looks good on an interactive whiteboard or just projected on the wall and provides a visual reminder of the remaining time for an activity, complete with a range of fun alarm sounds in additional to a simple gong or bell. Ask students to select the final sound and observe how, when the hand creeps towards the final seconds, group discussion falls quiet as they listen for the bleat of the sheep or the dog’s bark. In addition, this timer allows you to set up a sequence of events in advance, so that (if you wish) the whole lesson could be displayed, with visual and audible reminders. The Teachit Timer is free and can be used online or downloaded to your own computer so you can use it anywhere, whether or not you have an internet connection; it’s one of the Whizzy Things from Teachit: www.teachit.co.uk

While you’re on the Teachit site, take a look at the many other activities in the Whizzy Things section if you haven’t already been tempted to do so by Chapter 8. Most the interactive resources require you or your institution to take out a subscription but the descriptions and sample activities will give you an indication of what is available and there’s even a free version of the Shakespearean Insult Whiz for the iPhone. Designed to work in full screen mode on an interactive whiteboard or classroom screen Whizzy Things can also be used by students on their own or in group. Anagram and Scramble (making the longest word possible from the given letters, as in the classic television game Countdown) will need no introduction and provide fast moving activities, with built-in timers, for the beginning or end of a lesson, for example. Magnet is a drag-and-drop equivalent of fridge magnet word games, with considerably more power (including the ability to enter any text, which allows students to add extra ‘magnet’ and provide multiple words on one ‘tile’). You should all be entertained by Weird Whiz, a version of Word Whiz which generates silly sentences    to help students to understand sentences and word order. Although the word appear by the random whizzing of the computer, the underlying structure is controlled by dragging the word classes into the screen, so that ‘determiner + adjective + noun + verb + simile’ becomes’ the huge gnus boom like bishops at a Beer fest’. We strongly recommend a visit to Teachit to explore for yourself, as the creative minds behind this site (including, we should say, one of the students oof this book) keep adding new activities.

                                                                                       

Word games

Word games of various sorts are of course old classroom favorites in one form or another. It is relatively easy to createyour own activities such as cloze exercises (where selected words are omitted from the text) using a word processor though these have limited functionality. An interactive whiteboard offers attractive – and interactive – tools that make it possible to create more tactile games with text, though these take time. Fortunately, there are a number of options for the busy teacher which provide short-cuts to creating your own puzzles or even ready-made activities. Developing Tray, mentioned as a tool for exploring text in Chapter 1, performs this through a deceptively simple activity that can have small groups of students engrossed in discovering a text. This is a commercial program from 2Simple Software (www.2Simple.com). Talking its name from the way that, in the days of old-style wet chemistry photography, an image would gradually emerge in the tray of developing liquid. Developing Tray present student with a hidden texts you can use one of the passages provided to enter text yourself. You can also control how much is revealed to the students at the start. Students then attempt to work out the remaining text by typing letters. They can ‘buy’ letters – for example to show all shapes or instances of ‘e’ – but that will cost points and they soon learn the benefits of attempting to predict letters or even whole word and phrase. While attempting to gain a high score, students will also be interrogating in detail the way the text uses language.

A similar online activity called Revelation was created as part of the Word – Lab from English Online. You (and your students) can simple Revelation at http://bit.ly/te_5. There you will find free versions of some other WordLab games, including the StoryStarted Fruit Machine (described in Chapter 8), Snap, WordSpin and Fridge Magnets. You’ll also find Collapser in the Word-Lab, this isn’t a game but is worth mentioning here as an invaluable tool for producing collapsed text activities of various kinds: drop any text into the box and the application will turn it into a sorted list at the click of a button. Yu can then drop the list into a word processor or use them in your interactive whiteboard software. These lists are an excellent way of focusing students’ attention on the component words of a text, whether you want to concentrate on the special vocabulary of a poem or the grammatical features of a travel brochure. You could, for example, ask students to sort the text in different categories (they can suggest their own headings). Teachit’s Cruncher (available to subscribers) is a similar utility with even more facilities. 

Quiz Time

English teacher are often, and rightly, skeptical about the kind of software that reduce work to simple right/wrong answer. However student (especially when preparing examination) do need to acquire relevant detail and learn some fact, whether about set texts or spellings, and quick-fire quizzes can be part of the answer. As usual using the number of strategies gives variety and helps maintain interest. There are several website which provide tools for you to create your own interactive quizzes.

One in Class Tools (www.classtools.net), a free site which includes simple tools which allow you to rapidly create a variety of arcade-type games for student. The same set of question and answer can be used for several games such as Matching Pairs, Flashcard and Wood Shoot (a Space Invaders type of game). It’s recommended that question and answer are typed up as a word processor or text document, in the set format in which the answer are preceded by an asterisk (‘What present does SlimgiveLenni e ? *A puppy)- that way you have the answer to hand as well. Paste this into the online from and select thetypeofgame – it’s as simple as that.

 Furthermore, you can save games to use on your own computer or website if you wish because this system is so straight forward and is freely accessible, you can involve student in creating their own quizzes to test each other – always good way of motivating them.

There are other ways of creating interactive quizzes. One is the suit of programs called Hot Potatoes from the University of Victoria in Canada (http://hotpot.uvic.ca/). It enables you to create multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching, ordering, gap-fill (cloze) exercises for the internet.

Unlike ClassTools, which you use online, you need to install Hot Potatoes on computer (you can download and use it without charge). It’s more powerful than ClassTools – it allow you to include text passage and images, for example – an as a result will take a little more time to learn, though there are tutorials and sample activities on the website. In addition, many learning platform or VLEs such as Moodle have their own built-in quiz creation tools that will be worth exploring.

Like Hot Potatoes, these should allow you, if you wish to use images as well as text and move beyond simple right/wrong answer into more searching tasks (for example, by using multiple choiceanswers). They could be combined with wikis, online glossaries and questionnaires to introduce or revise aspect of you courses and have the advantage that student in other classes, or later years, can also benefit from these activities.

The ready availability of video and audio resources online provided another source of material. Sam Constance, teaching 15-year-olds about persuasive techniques in the media, used the archive of television advertisements on the tellyAdssite (www.tellyads.com). Her student had a simple persuasive techniques bingo card that she had download from Teachit, with boxes labelled‘emotive picture’, ‘rhetorical questions’ and so on. As they watched the clips, student complete their card to see if they could be first to spot all the devices in use. Sam also devised a game to help her student distinguish between fact and opinion and evaluate how information is presented, called ‘Who is the biggest slapper ?’ This require to plastic fly swats, alist of non-fiction and media terminology projected onto her interactive whiteboard and the class devide into two teams, lined up on each side of the board. As she held up different media texts in turn (magazine front covers, film poster, newspaper front pages, etc.) the student at the head of each line used the fly a swat to slap the feature they wanted to comment on.

The team whose word was hit first went first-if they’d slapped the word ‘picture was used. Each team had a scribe to jot their ideas down and another student kept the score. Once they had attemptedto slap a word with the fly swat and their use it correctly, they had to pass the fly swat onto the next member of their team. Sam comments : The use of ICT was simplistic – the projection of different set of word – but it enabled the student to develop their understanding.’ This was so successful that she developed the game to include phrases and language device for the different writing tasks her student faced in the examination and for revising literature texts.her account of ‘Active revision strategies using ICT’ is another case study from the NATE project ‘Making hard topics easier to teach with ICT’ (www.nate.org.uk/htt).

Being Sociable

The popularity of new working sites with young people demonstrates how ICT has provided an attractive form of social interaction. We have already learnt in previous chapters how student take to online discussion, sometimes demonstrating far more energy and creativity than they have shown in traditional ‘written’ work it’s possible to use this too add an extra dimension to classroom study – for example, a teacher asked her class to create Facebook pages for each of the character in PrideandPrejudice.

As this was a girls’ school, you won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Darcy soon collected a large number of friends. If student are enjoying this update on Austen (who has already had plenty of other exploiting her material) they are likely not only to pay closer attention to the text but should also be open to consider the differences between the early nineteenth century and twenty-first century content and reflect on their own roles as readers. The use of Facebook in school can be problematic (and it certainly important that student are made aware of safety and privacy issues online) – in which case in similar activity could be created using a wiki or other facility on the learning platform.

Give them their head

We have already mentioned podcasting in Chapter 3. Even when they were creating study resources many of the student were concerned to present their podcast in ways appropriate to a teenage radio show. This enthusiasm to communicate could be harnessed by encouraging student to create their own magazine programs or report on hobbies, interested and other topic of their choice. These could be presented as online publications, audio podcast or in video format. In the process, of course student can learn a great deal about media production, audience and effective communication. Technology allow the result to be shown to the world  - or, if preferred, restricted to those with access to the school network or learning platform. Alongside these or independently, they could run their own discussion forums. Previous chapters have demonstrated how student enjoy being able to debate online: you might like to consider allowing some discussion forum on topics of their own choosing. This will require student to consider who takes responsibility for moderating discussion and what guidelines they will use.

We have now moved away from direct curriculum concerns to wider aspect of communication and tests. Many of the activities describe in this book have appealed to teacher because they offered a fresh approach to teaching and learning but also because they are enjoyable. We know how effective it van be when student bring  their own knowledge and enthusiasm to bear on a classroom topic, as was shown in the example described in Chapter 3 of the creation of video game trailers based on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Chapter 7 show how reluctant writers were spurred into creativity when given the opportunity to writer about what really interested them – manga fiction and video games. Success in each case can be attribute to a combination of the access to suitable tools for the student to express them-selves and teacher’s skill in knowing how to encourage them to follow their interests. We hope your student will be similarly inspired.