The Horizon Report 2011

The 2011 edition of the Horizon Report, a joint publication by Educause and The New Media Consortium,  has just become available.

It examines emerging technologies in relation to their potetial impact on teching and learning and categorizesthem according to the predicted time of adoption.

The following summary taken directly from the report is a good overview of you can expect to find.
"The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment."

The 2011 Horizon report includes such technologies as Electronic Books, Mobiles, Game-Based Learning and others.

Click on the image to get the PDF version of the report

Digital Game Based Learning: an introduction through videos

Darren Elliott from The lives of Teachers and Karenne Sylvester from Kalinago English have come up with the nice idea of a sharing a blog post that has been overlooked for some reason.

So I have decided to share a blog post from Digital Play, a great blog on Digital Game Based Learning by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer. I somehow missed it when it came out and, given my interest in using games to promote language learning, I decided to bring it back to light as I think it is a great collection of videos to introduce teachers to DGBL.

So here it goes... read on

10 Online videos to watch

10 Free Digital Game-Based Learning Resources for English Classrooms

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) can be a good way to get students of any age excited about learning. The right games can serve as effective teaching tools that not only speed up the learning process, but also improve comprehension. There are many different learning-based games that can be played online. Here are a few to try with your English classroom:



Free Rice - FreeRice is an online trivia game created by the United Nations World Food Program to provide free education and end world hunger. When visitors answer game questions correctly, rice is donated to hungry people around the world. Trivia categories include English vocabulary, English grammar, geography, math, chemistry, language learning, and art.



Free Poverty - Free Poverty is similar to FreeRice in the fact that it donates to needy people whenever visitors answer questions correctly. The difference is that Free Poverty donates cups of clean drinking water rather than rice and focuses solely on geography trivia.



ProProfs Brain Games - This site offers free puzzle and brain games, such as word searches, hangman, memory games, and word jumbles. Visitors can play existing games or create their own online learning games and puzzles.



Fit Brains - Fit Brains is an online brain fitness platform that provides fun games to educate and exercise the brain. The site's word fragment games have been proven to improve English language vocabulary, comprehension and fluency.



Learning Today - Learning Today, a provider of Internet-based education, offers several free reading games that can be played online. All of the games are research-based and designed to improve phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.



Spell It! - This game, from TheProblemSite.com, displays a picture of a common object and then asks players to spell out the name of the object. Most of the words in this game are spelled the way they sound, making it a good game for beginning English students with limited vocabulary.



Tutpup Spelling - Tutpup is a new digital game-based learning site that offers fun and competitive English and math games. The site's spelling game, which requires players to listen to a word and then spell it out, is ideal for English classrooms.



iKnowThat.com - This education site provides a wide range of online language arts games that would work well in the English classroom. Each game includes a teacher's guide to help educators choose the proper level of play for their students.



Sesame Street Games - Sesame Street's online learning games are perfect for younger children who are learning the alphabet and older children who are just learning to read.



Big Universe - Big Universe isn't technically a DGBL site but it could easily be used as one. The site allows visitors to create and publish their own books online--an excellent activity for any English class.



Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degrees for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

Using Digital Games: Grow Cube

I have been reading about Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) for a while and besides having read Marc Prensky's book, I came across Kyle Mawer's wiki and then was directed to Digital Play, a great blog about DGBL authored by Graham Stanley and Kyle Mawer.

Based on a great idea by Kyle Mawer taken from Digital Play, a couple of weeks ago I used Grow Cube with my intermediate students and it worked wonderfully!



I used the computer lab where we can sit 2 or 3 students per computer.

First, I let students play around to familiarize with the game idea.

Then, I asked them to reset it and to listen to me carefully as I gave them the right order one by one.

After each one, they had to observe what happened and narrate it in written form. At the beginning they thought it was really easy, but then realized it got more complicated each time!

As they watched, they started thinking and asking about the right words to describe what they saw.

The result was really fascinating as each student produced a text according to their own linguistic ability. And they loved using a game!

As a follow up, I pointed to the other Grow games available (on the left hand column of the game) and told them that if they felt like playing them and found the solution, we would play in class but they would have to give the instructions orally for the rest of the class to be able to win the game!