How can I get my students to review vocabulary or grammar for hours? How can I get them to encounter the words hundreds of time? By making it fun! I have talked about taking advantage of students’ free time and using online games is yet another way to engage students during their free time.

Now, you could try to use normal games and make them educational. There are lots of ideas about how to make games educational by creating fill-in-the-blank tests from normal games for example. Read this excerpt from Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s article titled Adapting Online Computer Games for the Classroom:

Example: (from the MOTAS walkthrough game):
Level 1:
Look under the pillow to find the _1._ and take the _2._ from the wall Use the _1._ to open the _3._ . You will find a _4._ in the _5._
Missing words: locker, screwdriver, key, box, poster

That seems educational to me. And it also seems like a homework packet students wouldn’t mind doing in their free time. Here are some gaming sites recommended by Larry Ferlazzo for use in the ESL or EFL classroom.

Besides those games, I got really excited about quia.com yesterday. And I think I am going to stay excited, too. On Quia, teachers can create their own games. Then, the games can match your lessons perfectly! You can make battle ship games that require students to answer a grammar question before they can sink a ship. Like this one that tests your knowledge of the possessive.

But battle ship is just the beginning, there are 16 different types of games! Now, there is one catch: it costs $50 a year to create games. But you can use other teachers’ games for free and once you create a game it is online forever! So I think, it might be worth the money. Especially if you could get one of your computer addicted students to play for hours.

I hope, I can convince my department to finance the fun on quia.com. I really think that the more students encounter English outside of class the more they will learn. So why not help them by providing fun online games!

Last 5 posts by katiemitchell

• A Small Part of a Book... By Me! - May 14th, 2009
• Teacher on the Move: What Would You Bring Abroad? - April 26th, 2009
• TESOL Convention Tidbits-- Free Writing - March 28th, 2009
• TESOL Convention Tidbits-- Writing the Main Idea - March 26th, 2009
• TESOL Convention Tidbits-- Creating a Book Club - March 26th, 2009

Tags: battleship to learn english, english class, english education, learning english in your free time, online game to learn english

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.