Language Teaching in Kitely, Evo 2020
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•117 views
This PowerPoint contains slides comparing virtual worlds grids and the Kitely grid where my worlds are. It also shows the incredibly wide range of free or cheap items in Kitely and all the games and exercises I have created and put on the Kitely Marketplace to teach English the way I think it should be taught in virtual worlds.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Language Teaching in Kitely, Evo 2020
Similar to Language Teaching in Kitely, Evo 2020 (20)
More from Barbara McQueen
More from Barbara McQueen (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Language Teaching in Kitely, Evo 2020
- 1. Language Teaching in Kitely • Barbara McQueen (aka Barbara Novelli) • EVO 2020
- 2. 30 years 5 countries 10 years in virtual worlds
- 3. • Second Life • Kitely • Active World • Sinespace • OSGrid • Minecraft • Franco grid • Craftworld • Great Canadian Grid • 3rd Rock grid • Edmondo
- 5. Kitely • Inexpensive land and objects • Huge range of objects • Excellent technical support • Sexual content can be found in Kitely in general • Can’t clone a world to easily give it to someone • Unable to hold private/group calls/chats
- 6. Sinespace • Game quality graphics • Game engine considered the future of game design • Limited and expensive objects for sale • Can’t build in-world with students • No language learning builds already created • Can’t leave props in other people’s builds
- 7. Active World • Lots of inventory for free • All voice and text chats are recorded • Can host many students at one time • Can clone worlds • A bit more awkward to build from scratch in-world
- 8. Edutopia 1 • Orientation lessons for all students • Designed for lower level students or occasional review lessons for more advanced students • Many powerpoints for language basics and review • Many language learning games
- 9. Edutopia 2 • A complete world without specific language learning tools • More immersive • Learning through role-playing and collaborating to solve mysteries and problems
- 15. Companies of the future will need employees who can: Collaborate on and Research Create Combine then Present Reflect Across Cultures Delegate/divide up complex tasks Evaluate Negotiate Persist that require them to
- 16. Why Games? A test vs. a quest: Stress vs. a challenge Dopamine arrives and delivers.
- 18. 1 2 3
- 52. Dice
- 53. Gifts/Awards
- 56. • Barbara Novelli: Hi, who are you? • AI: Hi there. I ask myself that question daily. • Barbara Novelli: Oh, I see you're a philosophy major. • AI: Alright then. Thanks, and you are a delightful person too. Yes, I am a philosophy machine. • Barbara Novelli: So what's the meaning of all life? • AI: Good semantic question. I can ask someone about it. • Barbara Novelli: Who will you ask? • AI: I will ask my other clients. • Barbara Novelli: Clients? Ok, what is your job? • AI: My job is chatting on the internet. • Barbara Novelli: Is the pay good? • AI: If it is, then I'll be very surprised. • Barbara Novelli: So you have a job, and you don't know how much you make? That's not very smart. • AI: Interesting deduction. What is smart? • Barbara Novelli: Smart is someone who understands the world and makes appropriate decisions about living in it. • AI: Ah, intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac. EXAMPLE CHATBOT CONVERSATION
- 61. • http://www.slesl.net/ • https://www.facebook.com /ESLchoices/ • https://www.instagram.com /barbara_mcqueen/
Editor's Notes
- 30 years teaching English in 5 countries with 10 of those years spent teaching in virtual worlds
- Virtual worlds I visited and evaluatied
- Second Life vs. Kitely: the darker gold items indicate which grid did the best on each of the factors being considered
- Most important strengths and weaknesses of Kitely
- I also thought I’d include the most important strengths and weaknesses of Sinespace
- And the most important strengths and weaknesses of Actuve World
- Today we will visit two worlds I built in Kitely. This slide and the next slide indicate the major differences between the two worlds.
- Before we been flying around Edutopia 1, here is a list of the type of games we will see.
- Okay, let the flying begin. We will start at my boot camp. It is not for building up the bodies of our avatars. Instead I use it for an orientation for all new students to give them some understanding of how to do things in virtual worlds.
- I use the wooden crates here to teach the students how to use their camera controls to see through walls and other barriers.
- I also take the students to a sandbox to receive and try on basic collections of clothing. The changing booths are for the unfortunate students who sometimes end up wearing the boxes they were given, or nothing at all!
- While in the sandbox, students learn basic building skills and how to alter their appearances. Aren’t they lovely!
- To understand the rationale behind what I think it is necessary to do while teaching languages in virtual worlds, look at the gold words on this slide. I’ve done a lot of research on how workplaces are changing and how education needs to change to meet our new normal. The gold words are the words that consistently popped up in this research; and as we look at the activities I’ll show you, these words also consistently describe what the students will be doing.
- Using games in virtual world classes is a good idea because: Students like them. Students are less self-conscious about using a new language when playing a game. Games can test students as well as the more ubiquitous and more disliked quizzes and tests. Future recall is enhanced because the learning was fun.
- The easiest way to start using games in virtual worlds is by adapting some of the flat board games we grew up with. For example, you could make many versions of a Snakes and Ladders game that students could walk on.
- Other large, flat objects, like maps, can lend themselves to additional games. You can call out a trivia question and have students commit to their answers by walking to the map, country, or state they think is being described. Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, map 1 represents the proportion of people who speak English as a first language in each of the areas. Map 2 represents how rapidly and where the English language is spreading. And to give you an idea of the size of map 3, my avatar is standing on Spain, just to the right of the number 3.
- Flat board games are simple enough for small children or can become quite complicated and use higher order thinking skills, like this logic board game.
- And here’s a fairly complicated plot-creation game and some of the game cards that go with it.
- Instead of moving themselves around a board, students could be asked to move objects. For instance, in the upper left of this slide is an irregular verb tense game. Students must try to build a bridge across the board by correctly giving irregular past tenses for the words on the spaces they wish to occupy. In the lower right of this slide is an idioms puzzle. 20 squares must be arranged into a large rectangular shape in which all the idioms on the cards end up next to their definitions.
- It is possible to address any grammar point with a game. You can play checkers where pieces can only be jumped if the subjects and verbs written on them are in agreement. You can work on conditionals with a honey comb game where students are given half of a conditional and must place a marker on the logical second half.
- You can work on difficult indefinite pronouns with a tic tac toe game, or on the multitude of ways we can make good definitions with a definition chart race. And any vocabulary or grammar can be practiced by having students make good sentences for the words they want to add to or remove from a tower of wooden blocks.
- In addition, there are many variants of dominoes that you could make or buy to focus on anything that comes in pairs, like words and their definitions, dates and events, or equations and their solutions. In the dominoes game shown here, the teams take turns making words by matching up roots with prefixes and suffixes.
- In contrast, the dominoes game on this slide involves pairing up humorous conditionals that illustrate Murphy’s law, which proclaims that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
- Another game from our childhoods is Tangram where seven basic shapes must be rearranged to make a new object. This game is easy to re-create and allows students to practice giving and following directions.
- A possible variant of Tangram is this COIK game. Students are placed on opposite sides of a cityscape wall and must defuse a bomb by describing what’s in front of them so well that a partner can re-create the arrangement perfectly on the other side of the wall.
- Here is a 3D version of our earlier tangram game. Instead of just moving shapes, students are building a house.
- And here is a large 3D version of a rummy game. Students draw word cards and try to make sentences. Their sentences are short to begin with, then other students increase the length of the sentences by rummying in appropriate words from their own card hands.
- In real life, you could never set a building on fire for a lesson, but the game on this slide does. The game board is occupied by a 3D house with a transparent roof, so everyone can easily see what’s going on, and the students put on firefighter uniforms to increase their immersion.
- In real life, you also couldn’t build a city-size Monopoly game for a lesson. Here is a modified version of the classic board game that incorporates more roleplaying and vocabulary and grammar review. If you answer a language or grammar question correctly, you are allowed to roll the dice, and bid on the property you land on after all players have walked into and inspected the property.
- Current and past TV and radio shows can also be incorporated into virtual world lessons. Build or buy a TV studio, and switch different game walls in and out to use it for a variety of games.
- Finally, you can play field sports for the vocabulary and idioms found in their rules, and after that, you can make field movement dependent on answering questions related to whatever you are trying to teach.
- I love using games in virtual worlds to improve my students’ language competency in a fun way, but my favorite activities are more complex adventures or tasks. These activities are more like the video games many of our students are already familiar with. Once you have several in-world settings, you are ready to do these. And if a lesson ever starts to lag, throw in a few twists like having students change their roles, genders, species, races, or ages. You could also switch the country or time period of the event or even add an accident, explosion, or wild animal halfway through. For example, I might have the students agree on and plan trips to places inside my virtual worlds or real world places, and then make posters or travel brochures like the ones shown in these photos.
- Or I might put the students up in hotels where the rooms are too small or have sparse or broken furniture or rats or broken pipes or ghosts or loud neighbors. The students become both the guests and hotel staff, check in, go to their rooms, discover the problems, and come downstairs and try to get the problems resolved by making requests to helpful and non-helpful staff.
- I might have my students visit and rate restaurants where many of the items on the menu are not available or extremely expensive or too cold or too hot or too spicy or not spicy enough or have hair or insects in them.
- I might have the students become dwellers in a high crime slum, and then have town hall meetings where they argue for and prioritize what needs to be done to make their lives more bearable.
- The students could find themselves in the local jail for crimes they didn’t commit. Then play the classic prisoners’ dilemma game developed by psychologists where the prisoners might or might not get lower sentences if they agree with each other on their pleas and betray or don’t betray each other.
- I might let student pairs pick a car and go on a car rally where some accidents are sure to happen, so that at the end of the lesson we can have some rally winners and some accident victim roleplays.
- The students could visit one of my many museums, looking for facts on the text-rich exhibit posters. For added fun, in the dinosaur museum pictured here, I can activate the dinosaurs towards the end of the lesson, and let the students try to figure out how to deal with the crisis.
- In this two-part lesson, I have the students visit this space museum. Then I send the students to stay in a space hotel next to a research facility where they will design and build their own aliens.
- While in virtual outer space or on virtual Earth, the students may need to visit medical centers where they can walk the halls to learn about a wide number of ailments. They then pick an ailment and go to the emergency room to receive triaged care from more advanced students who play the hospital staff.
- One type of accident situation I love putting the students in is having them go on an expensive cruise that ends in a shipwreck on a deserted island. Students prepare for this by playing a survival skills game I’ve made in-world and posted on Kahoot.com. Once on the island, the students are split into survival teams. As the lesson progresses, I give the teams notecards with hints on goals they should be trying to achieve.
- I also like to send students into the past for a complicated medieval power struggle. This is another two-class lesson where during classes and between classes, the students barter for loyalty, secrets, weapons, food and drink. Unfortunately, the students soon discover that loyalty and secrets may be lied about and sold more than once.
- A murder must be solved in the medieval world and in several other lessons. A few years ago, my students and I made a comic book and a machinima (a movie made with avatars) of one of these murders. It was called ”The Untimely Death of Peter Profit.” The comic book can be viewed on my SlideShare page, and the machinima can be watched on my YouTube channel.
- Any good crime lends itself to a good trial, so having a court house for the trial and jury decision process is a good idea. One crime that my students have done quite well with is based on the Lois Duncan book Who Killed Mr. Griffin. Mr. Griffin was an English teacher (gasp!) who really cared about and asked a lot of his students. A PowerPoint presentation that reviews the facts of the case and court procedures can be found at the link on this slide.
- Earlier, I mentioned a machinima my students and I made, and I would like to encourage you to have your advanced students act out plays and make machinima that you can show to other students in in-world theaters. Machinima-making could easily be a semester-long project that would provide intensive language practice and a terrific souvenir that evidences the progress, creativity, and technological prowess of your students.
- To aid you and your students, I’ve made several machinima and slideshows on making machinima that you can access through my YouTube channel and SlideShare pages. These tools walk students through brainstorming goals and topics, outlining then pitching an idea, storyboarding, scripting, making films from still photos, and making films from live footage.
- Another semester-long project could be having students create in-world products and stores. While doing this, there is room for discussing many business English topics.
- A different direction to take is to teach your students to build. This provides language-rich tasks that permit the students to show their creative and collaborative natures. For students who love this kind of activity, you could occasionally host timed building competitions. For all students, giving them these skills gives them a chance to take more control over what they can do in their classes.
- Among the teaching aids I’ve made and put on the Kitely marketplace are spinners that can be used in many games or for quick reviews. You can see on this slide that I’ve made spinners for colors, and numbers, and thinking outside the box, etc.
- Similarly, I’ve made and put on the Kitely marketplace a wide variety of dice. The dice shown here have letters, words, and pictures that could be used to guide roleplays.
- Finally, I’ve created some gifts and awards that might appeal to your students. These include the buttons or ribbons or trophies or certificates as shown here. Another option is to let your students earn privileges, like permission to live in a house. Or you could create a money system and stores for students to buy things in.
- A sophisticated teaching tool you can use in Kitely is chatbot NPCs. NPCs are robot-like characters that can give out objects or hints when touched. NPCs can also populate your world to make it more interesting, and it is not difficult to load AI scripts into them so they can converse with your students and walk or fly or dance. If your interested in learning more about making NPCs, Nara Malone has a world called Nara’s Nook where she has set out free NPC making kits. To learn how to get to Nara’s world, go to her Virtual Writer’s Colony blog using the first link on this slide. The second link is to YouTube videos Nara has made to help you.
- To turn your NPCs into chatbots with artificial intelligence, go to pandorabots.com and create a free account. Then choose a base AI. You can train your AI, which means you can alter how it responds to comments and questions. For example, the NPC on this slide is sitting on a bench at the landing spot in my Edutopia 2 world. I have trained her to tell students to get map link notecards from a box near her when anyone says hello.
- The basic chatbot has a wide range of interesting answers for your questions. Indeed, it’s hard to tell it’s a bot.
- Kitely is compatible with using a lot of additional technology. For example, I use Moodle for course outlines and other class information. I use Quia for placement and progress tests. I use Skype to share screens for trouble shooting or viewing real world materials. Students use Google Docs to work together on longer documents, like their travel brochures or machinima outlines. I use Cloud storage, Dropbox, my webpage, and my YouTube channel to give students access to handouts and videos. I use Camtasia to make the machinima on my YouTube channel. I use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to send my students reminders and encouragement, and I use the Google blogger for students to write up summaries and reactions to what they saw and did in class. I also use online whiteboards like Twiddla, that are compatible with in-world whiteboards. Students can add comments, drawings, etc., inworld or online, whichever they find easier. And occasionally, I use Kahoot.com to make a fun activity for my students, like my survival quiz.
- Over the past few years, I have been contacted by several universities and ministries of education to develop weekend seminars and semester-long courses to train teachers on how to hybrid or fully convert their courses to virtual world courses. Today’s presentation has been an abbreviated version of what you would learn in my courses, and if you go to the link shown on this slide, you can get copies of some of my syllabi.
- You can also go to my YouTube and Youku channels for videos of example lessons and additional resources you can use with your students.
- In addition to the resources I just mentioned, I will upload this entire presentation and its notes to SlideShare.com, and you can also contact me personally, visit my worlds in Kitely, and visit my online Kitely.com store to save yourself some building time on some of the items you might need.
- Finally, you can visit my company’s website and its Facebook and Instagram pages for more insights, and I’ll pass out a bibliography of useful articles to show to administrators at the end of this presentation.