Seasons and tides

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in my classroom - the pupils have 'fads' or 'seasons' for certain programs.

As an example: dragonbox: try as I might, when I first brought this game into my room, there was resistance. It was 'boring'. Yet, this week, several pupils have been voluntarily logging in to play it during their 'free time', when they can choose any game they like.

The perennial favourite remains the 'Money Tales' series.

The bulk of the work we do still revovoled around Mr Anker's tests, interspresed with swf games.

One game that I have been insisting the boys play this week, is "Grammar Ninja". This is an swf game with three levels, and within the levels, pupils can be 'students', 'ninjas' or 'warriors'. I managed to download it and install it for offline use.

It isn't an easy game at the upper levels - even I was having trouble with some of the questions - and my grammar is quite good! I set the pupils the challenge of getting better results than I could.

The boys enjoyed the challenge of this game - before playing it, most had only a vague idea of what a noun, verb, adjective or adverb was, despite having been taught these things in traditional classrooms ad nauseam.

Influent Vocab Game

I discovered this game today,and will be trialling it this week:
http://playinfluent.com/

Here is the info from the developer:

My name is Rob and for the past year I've been developing a language learning game in Japan at the University of Tsukuba's Entertainment Computing Laboratory.

The game focuses primarily on vocabulary and pronunciation and allows players to select objects and add them to their vocabulary list. Players can then challenge themselves in Time Attack mode and set high scores.

Check out the game here:

http://sanjigenjiten.com/

Review:

Influent has proved popular with a section of my students - I have been using the game over the past week - those who are drawn to use it, are actually the ones who need it, so once again, self selection of tasks by students appears to  work - students don't like using games or software that does not challenge them in some way.

Although the vocabulary is all English,many of my students did not know the correct names for common objects around the home, and this have proved a useful tool for building vocabulary in an enjoyable manner.