e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Update 1: Learing through playing strategy

I used to think it is hard to incorporate educational games in classes, it was unit I use it in classes with young learners. It is a magic tool that can bring, not only fun and positive competition to your class, but also good class managements as kids will be attentive to teacher's directions on how to play a game so that they can guarantee their win. It can be time consuming at first, but once the learners grasp how to do the task and get used to each game, time consumption would not be an issue. Here is an example of how powerful incorporation games can be. Teaching alphabets to young learners ( second grade ) was a challenge and some students show weakness in their learning; some were not able to differentiate between the letter and its sound and others would simply forget whenever they make a progress so they have to start over. This was an issue for a whole semester. For the second semester, I used interactive spelling games where students have to fill the missing initial of each word. The aim was to get the students not only know the letters but also recognize their sounds. It took about two weeks and the results were beyond expected. Only 2-3 students are still showing weakness in the learning area, while the other 30 students are now able to recognize the letter, tell and utter its sound correctly. Moreover, dictation used to be boring for them as they felt challenged, now they look forward for dictation exercises. I still use different website to incorporate games in lessons as I saw how effective it was in encouraging the students to master the area of learning. So, I am always in a hunt for new, safe, appropriate and effective sites that offer designing or using already designed learning games.

  • مفرح عسيري