How has social media changed you?

Day 8 Blogtember topic: Discuss ways that blogging or social media has changed you.

This one is difficult for me because blogging and social media has changed my life so much that I hardly know where to begin. For the sake of this exercise, I just went back to the very first post on my very first blog - if you’re wondering, it was on July 6th, 2008. It’s interesting, because I found that my writing voice and style has actually not changed much at all since then. But boy, so many other things sure have.

Blogging and social media have had many both positive and negative effects on my life. For one thing, they’ve caused this addiction in me to share my experiences with others. I used to live my life in a solitary fashion - you know, like most people do - but now, if I can’t photograph it, instagram it, tweet it, blog it, share it with the world, it almost feels like it wasn’t even worth doing. It’s such a strange thing, and when I put it that way, it sounds sort of negative (not to mention pathetic). But I find that in my life, this is a good thing. I am naturally disinclined to change, grow, experience new things, and get out of my comfort zone. Blogging and social media have helped me be less that way. Because, you know, my blog would be boring as hell if I remained a sad stagnant hermit covered in dog hair who mostly never leaves the house.

A second way that blogging, in particular, has changed me, is that it’s given me confidence I never, ever had before. I specifically remember being at the grocery store one day, a few months after I started Story of My Life and after I had picked up a few dozen or maybe a couple hundred readers by then. I remember noticing I had this extra spring in my step, and a stronger sense of self than I had ever had before. I remember noticing that and then immediately attributing it to my blog. People cared what I had to say, my great passion for writing was being affirmed, and I was connecting with people in a way I was missing in my “real” life! It just generally felt really nice. To have found a niche, a hobby, and something I knew I could excel at.

Social media has also caused me to be really freaking ADD/all-over-the-place, which I discussed in this post (the response to it was pretty incredible… so many of us suffer with this!). Since I already talked about it, I won’t go into anymore detail on that one. I’m getting a LITTLE better about this though. Re-training myself to focus when I really need to. It’s not easy.

And finally, this conversation would be so incomplete if I didn’t mention the way that blogging and social media have had an incredibly globalizing effect on my life - meaning, it’s brought the entire world right here into MY world. The things I have learned have been countless. The relationships I’ve made have been priceless. The art and talent I’ve been exposed to have been inspiring and invaluable. Basically, it's all made a giant world feel so much smaller and less intimidating. Maybe that’s the optimist in me talking. But I think it mainly just comes from a place of genuine passion for social media and other humans and their endless abilities to share and create.

What about you? How has blogging and social media changed you? Speak up in a comment or in the linkup below!

Favorite online places (to drop some dough)

For Day 7 of Blogtember we're sharing links to favorite online shops. I have so many and there are seemingly endless fantastic handmade shops in places like Etsy... it is a veritable black hole of awesomeness over there. But here are just a few of my favorites! Cannot wait to browse everyone else's picks, too. Happy Hump Day!


BLOOM THEORY // The loveliest camera straps I've ever seen. I don't own one, but it's on my bucket list.

DIMDIMINI // When we have a baby someday I will be decorating with these little critters. There are so many adorably whimsical watercolor animal prints in this shop!

PETITOR // This is one of my favorite shops for beautiful and inexpensive gifts for friends (and myself).

IVIEBABY // One of the major reasons I'd like a baby is so I can decorate its nursery with some Iviebaby.

RUCHE // Ruche is so timeless and classy, and new arrivals are added almost every day. I love this adorable shop!

Share your favorite shops in the linkup below! Have fun browsing. :)

Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker

As the traditional lecture has come increasingly under fire for being completely out of touch with modern teaching and learning methods, there has been a move by many teachers, conference presenters and lecturers to make their teaching techniques more modern and interactive. One of the key technologies for enabling this has been a range of audience response systems that provide real time responses to polls, questions and surveys while the speakers is actually presenting.

It’s great that many teachers are taking this step, but some of these response systems like mQlicker can deliver much more than a simple audience response, in fact you can use them to initiate debates, brainstorm ideas or even develop complete units of elearning which can help you to ‘flip’ your classroom and create motivating blended learning materials which encourage and keep track of student engagement.

mQlicker has a number of ways of encouraging interaction and displaying results. To see a live demo of how mQlicker look at: http://www.mqlicker.com/demo.html

Be sure to tab through the different questions types, enter data and use the settings tab to change the way the data displays. I particularly like the word cloud type data display for text and numerical entries.

To set up your mQlicker interactions you need to register and log in on the mQlicker site. This is free to do.

Once you have done this you see the admin user interface. This is much simpler to use than it looks at first glance and the initial field shows you the 6 step instructions for how to create your poll or questionnaire.

Once you have created your questionnaire and launched it, participants just need to go to: https://respond.cc/ enter a numerical code and then input their response.

Here are 3 short video tutorial which show you how to do that.

How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 1



How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 2

How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 3



Why I like mQlicker

• For a start mQlicker is cross platform compatible so as well as working an app on all the major mobile platforms it will also run in the browser on both mobile and desktop.
• It has a range of ways of displaying participants responses which you can choose from. I particularly like the one which shows responses to text input as a word cloud.
• I really like that you only need to set up one fixed URL https://respond.cc/ for responses and that respondents just enter a short digital code. This makes it pretty simple to get people to the right place at an event and they don’t have complex URLs to copy down or registration codes to handle.
• mQlicker is pretty simple and straight forward just to get started with, but it also comes with a complete manual http://resources.mqlicker.com/doc/manual.pdf that you can download to start digging into the more complex capabilities.
• You can embed mQlicker chart results into a presentation (PPT) and make it dynamic so that your presentation slide updates automatically when people vote.
• It’s easy to reuse questions or questionnaires with multiple classes as it collects questions together in a question bank.
• There are premium services if you want something that looks customized for your company or event.

Some tips for getting the best from audience response

• Don’t limit participation to the room. Why not send out surveys and polls for response through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or through a back channel chatroom, then you can get a much wider variety of opinion and get the people in the room to respond to that.
• You can use the tool to brainstorm, especially with the word cloud data display. This would be great for brainstorming vocabulary based around topics, or words which collocate with ... etc.
• You can set up before and after votes for in class discussions, to see how many people can be persuaded to change their minds.
• You can create complete flipped interactive learning, by creating questionnaires with a video embedded into a slide at the beginning and then a variety of questions to get students exploring the video content. Then when you come to class students are prepared and you have some response data to get them working with and thinking and talking about in class. Using videos for flipped learning in this way when you are tracking the responses,  puts more pressure on students to actually do the work and watch the video as they know their responses are being tracked by the teacher.
• You can create questions based around images, so be sure to take advantage of this feature to help stimulate response from the students.
• You can allow students / participants to be anonymous, so this is a great tool for doing action research and to collect genuinely honest feedback on your teaching methods or content.
• You can use it to make your classroom more democratic, by setting up votes to find out which parts of the book or course students most want to study or what kinds of activities they want to do next.
• It’s great that mQlicker can enable open text input, so make the most of this feature. Participants are often frustrated wit questionnaires or polls that don’t really provide the answers that they want to give. Creating open text questions gives the respondent much more ability to express what they feel. This can though be more difficult for you to analyze statistically
• And last but not least you can use it for assessment and set micro tests as you class progresses. This can assure you that participants are following and understanding your message.

mQlicker is a great free tool for making your classroom, lecture or conference presentation more interactive. It would be great to see more tools like this being used at conferences and in classrooms, but of course you do need to make sure that your venue or classroom has good connectivity and get people into the habit of coming along ready with devices to participate, but as mobile and tablet penetration grows in the education sector and educational authorities realize that we have to stop banning these devices from classrooms and start exploiting them more fully.

I hope you find mQlicker useful

Related links:

• 3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations 
• Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments
• The Web 2.0 School of the Present
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

Video communication apps and mobile learning

One of the great things about mobile devices such as tablets, iPads and phones is that most modern devices have good quality cameras and microphones built in. This opens up a really wide range of potential for communication and speaking practice that used to be such a struggle to organise on older laptops and desktop computers.

App developers have also been quick to exploit the potential of this powerful tool and in this post I'd like to look at some of the tools that have been created and how they can be used for language development.

Mailvu for asynchronous messages

Mailvu has been a long time favourite of mine, mainly because the web based version is so easy to use and doesn't require any downloads. You just point your browser at: http://mailvu.com/ and as long as you have the Flash plugin installed on your computer you can start recording immediately. Mailvu also provides mobile apps for iOS, Android an Blackberry. These are easy to use and it allows you to send short spoken messages which don't require the viewer to have any specific software or to download large video files. They just click a link and watch your message. This kind of cross platform compatibility is really important if you are working in a BYOD environment where students could be coming to class with a wide range of devices.

EyeReport for picture in picture

EyeReport  puts an interesting twist on the video communication genre by adding the ability to record video on video. By this I mean that students can upload or record a video on their mobile device and then add a video commentary over the top explaining or commenting on what they see in the original video. This opens up a whole range of potential activities that we can get students doing. They could add commentary to sporting clips, give guided tours of places they have visited, explain processes or even make their own documentaries. Once students have completed their recording these can be shared to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or emailed directly from within the app.

CoachesEye for video annotation

CoachesEye is a similar app to EyeReport (though this one is no longer free) but is much more feature rich. Like EyeReport you can record video commentary over video, but with CoachesEye you can also add annotations and you can stop and control where you insert your comments into the video. This app was designed for coaches to give detailed feedback to athletes on their physical movements, but it's a great app to get students creating and talking about their own videos, and also a useful tool to use when observing teachers for training purposes.

Storytime for bedtime stories 

Storytime is another app which puts a new Twist on the video communication genre. It combines video conferencing with reading stories out loud. The app was designed to enable parents to read to their children from a distance and it contains a number of books you can choose to read and while you read you can discuss the books, ask questions and point to things on the page whilst chatting with the video window at the top. This is great for doing online tutoring with younger learners. There is quite a range of books from very basic and up and they are nicely illustrated.

Teleprompter for controlled speaking practice 

Teleprompter is an app that I wrote about a while back when it was still free (iPhone for Speaking Homework ). The app is what it says, it allows you to import text and then it scrolls through the text while creating a video of you reading it. This is great to get students doing controlled speaking practice and then watching and improving their speaking. You can set texts which include a range of sounds which they find difficult and then watch them together and help them to understand what elements of their pronunciation are causing problems.

Keek for video journals

Keek mixes web with mobile in the form of video journals. Users can post short messages of up to 35 seconds from their mobile or computer and these are published to the web or can be browsed through the app. This would be a great tool to use as a daily learning journal, but it's probably best used by adults or more responsible teens. It seems to be a very popular tool with teens in the USA and there is a wide range of content that students can browse through, some of which is not best suited to educational purposes, but as a concept this is quite a good app. If you prefer your students to be sheltered from this kind of popular culture app, then you can still take up the idea of the video learning journal and just get them to use their built in video camera app and post the messages to a Dropbox site.

Six3 for video messaging

Six3 is similar to MailVu and also compatible with most platforms, but it gives you the choice of recording private or public message and has an additional filter feature which can help to improve your appearance on the video. It's called Six3 because you have 63 seconds of recording time in each message. Like Mailvu, the messages are also sent via links through your email, but they can also be posted directly to Twitter or Facebook from within the app.

Skype for synchronous online tutoring

Skype has been around for a good while and was one of the first video based communication tools to break into the mainstream. It's being used by many online schools to deliver live online lesson from teachers to all parts of the globe. One of the great things about Skype, apart from the reliability, is that it keeps developing and adding new features. The recent addition of video messages that enable it to be used as an asynchronous tool will really help to widen its scope for use as a language development tool.


Built in camera app
With all these apps and the possibilities they offer, it can be easy to overlook the obvious. Most modern mobile device come with a built in video camera application and you can always use this to record and send video message. This has the advantage that messages are very safe from third party app providers and any possible security breaches, but sending the video clips to someone else often involves sending the whole clip via email which can be slow and require good connectivity.

For more ideas and activities for using video and webcams to develop languages see my posting 20 WebCam Activities for EFL ESL Students

Why use video communication?

• Well one of the best reasons to use these kinds of apps is to get students speaking. Speaking homework has always been particularly difficult for students, but now you can ask students to produce spoken homework which you can watch and assess.
• Video as a communication genre is likely to become increasingly important as a 21st century digital literacy, so it's important that our students have practice and are able to use this communication genre, just as they do with speaking on the telephone or writing emails.
• Video can draw students' attention to many of the paralinguistic features of communication that are hard to highlight in a crowded classroom.
• Enabling students to record themselves speaking and then to watch themselves can be very enlightening for students as they can then start to self assess their own performance and look for ways they can improve. It can also encourage some students to try harder, because they know that someone else might see the video.
• Video can be very engaging and can be played repeatedly so it gives students the chance to listen again and in more depth.
• Video communication can help teachers to build a stronger sense of connection with their students, especially with online course when you might never physically meet your students. Conveying some sense of your personality, sense of humour and character can be very difficult in written communications, so video has some really big advantages.
• Giving students 1 to 1 time and having the time to just sit down and spend a few moments listening to a single student without the noise of others around can be really difficult in the classroom, but having a short recorded video clip of our students can really enable us to focus on their specific strengths and weaknesses and enable us to give them some really personalised feedback.

Potential problems

• As with any kind of online communication, make sure your students know how to protect their privacy and also themselves from harassment. Be sure to have a transparent and open policy on any kind of harassment so students know what is likely to happen to anyone harassing and how to report harassment.
• If you are using video communications with younger students also make sure their parents know what you are doing and why you are doing it and get their approval (in writing if possible) and if possible get them involved too.
• Make students aware of the difference between poor quality speaking and poor quality audio. You don't want them to think they sound bad if the real problem is the recording quality and interference from background noise etc. Help your students to understand how to get he best quality results from whatever recording tools they have, by finding somewhere quiet to record and experimenting with the best distance from the microphone.
• Helping students to look their best on video will also help to boost their confidence. Getting the camera angle right and having the light coming from the right direction can also have a big impact on how students look, so helping with this can be part of the learning experience. There is a useful article here which may help: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/look-good-on-webcam/
• Always remember and remind students that anything they do or say on video can potentially be seen by other people for years and even centuries to come, so whenever one of these apps is used, encourage them to think about what they are doing and saying and keep in mind that it could be seen by people they know and people they might yet meet as well as strangers who they might never meet. It's important to remind students of how they want to be perceived.

I hope you enjoy these apps and that they help to get your students speaking. Please leave a comment if you have any favourite video communication apps that you use to get your students speaking.

Related links:

• Mix Images and Animation on Your Mobile 
• Peer editing in digital and mobile environments 
• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best

Nik Peachey

Peer editing in digital and mobile environments

For years now I have been happily using EtherPad based services like http://primarypad.com/ and http://sync.in/ to get participants on the training courses I deliver to work collaboratively to create and peer edit texts. Increasingly though I've been having problems with the reliability of the free services these companies provide and the lack of reliable compatibility with mobile devices.

At last it seems that now I have a very elegant solution in the form of https://quip.com/.
Quip looks a lot like Evernote and has a similar interface with documents contained in notebooks, but one of the big differences is that Quip was designed specifically to enable peer editing and collaboration on documents and has a very clear way of showing and tracking the changes.

Here's a short tutorial showing you how it works:


Why should we get our students peer editing?

• It improves their awareness of accuracy
• It can improve the quality of their writing
• Pushes students to accept that writing is a process that needs revisions and redrafting
• The ability to collaborate in digital environments is likely to be an important real world digital literacy

What kinds of peer editing activities can we do with students?

• We can give them texts with planted errors (10 - 20) in to work on a find and correct together. These could be the lyrics of songs they like or stories or articles they have read.
• We can get students to correct each others' compositions before we look at them.
• We can give them texts with specific features missed out and get them to work together to add them. These could be linking or referencing devices, punctuation, vocabulary words, grammatical features such as prepositions or articles etc.
• We can get them working together to rearrange parts of a text into a better order or structure.
• We can give them the bare structure of a story and ask them to embellish it and make it more descriptive and interesting.

What I like about Quip

• It's free
• Nicely designed interface
• Works and looks well in both tablet  app form and in the browser
• Clearly tracks and highlights changes to documents by different users
• It looks secure and enables you to limit who sees and works on the document while editing
• Has a kind of chat messaging feature which works along side the notes for changes
• We can use it to get students collaborating and working together outside the classroom

What I'm not so sure about

• It requires registration, which can slow things down in class, but it does also add a degree of security
• I haven't tried it with larger groups yet so I'm not sure how reliably it will function when scaled up to say having a whole class work synchronously on a single document
• Not sure how long it will stay free (There is a Quip Business already available)

I'm now looking forward to my next course so that I can try Quip out and get a bit more experience with it. I hope you also find it useful with your students. Do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

Related links:

• What do you feel are the key digital literacy skills that 21st century learners need? 
• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation 
• How I use social media for my professional development  
• Two Contrasting Views of Educational Technology 
• Online Teacher Development Works Best - 15 Reasons Why
• Developing your digital study skills
• Temporary Bookmarking
• Creating a personal homepage
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• A Tick List of 21st Century Digital Skills for Teachers 

Best

Nik Peachey

Why I don't want an IWB (Interactive Whiteboard)

Recently, I have been asked quite  few times about IWBs and which ones are best etc. My usual answer is 'none' and then I have to explain, so I thought, instead of explaining I would write this post so that I could point people towards each time they ask.

So this is my classroom set up of preference and these are the key components.

1. Data projector - I'm not really bothered which one as long as it produces a good screen resolution (There's a reasonable article here on how to choose one:
How to Buy a Projector)

2. A Laptop - My preference here is for a MacBook, but I can understand why some people find that extravagant and don't feel they are worth the extra financial outlay. Personally, I think they are worth the extra money, because they work faster and so save time (the most valuable commodity we have) and because they are pretty durable(The Apple products I've owned have lasted at least twice as long as their PC counterparts I've had and are still going strong.)


3. iPad - Again my preference here is for the iPad mini, because it is so light to hold in one hand and pass around, but still big enough and powerful enough to fulfil my storage needs and to operate without squinting (also quite a bit cheaper)

4. Reflector app - This is a key app that you download onto your laptop. It then enables you to project your iPad screen onto your computer (and so through the data projector) as it wirelessly receives signals from the iPad's Airplay function.

For those who aren't familiar with Airplay, it's an Apple function that allows you to use the wireless to project sound and vision from an iPhone, iPad, iTouch etc of to Apple TV. You can find more information here: Airplay

Why I like the Airplay enabled set up

• For me this allows the best of both worlds. I can use the laptop for any software that's native to computer world and very quickly and wirelessly switch to the mobile environment of the iPad.
• This set up is portable so you can use it in any room with a data projector and computer, as long as the Reflector app is installed.
• This also has the advantage of allowing your students access to the data projector if they also have iPads, in fact the Airplay function combined with Reflector can allow your students to project onto the screen from a number of iPads simultaneously, which is great to get students showing and comparing work for the whole class to see.
• Controlling the projection screen from the iPad means that you can move around the class and control it from wherever you are.
• To hand control over to students you just pass them the iPad
• You can store all your materials on your iPad and use it to do all your preparation / marking etc at home.
• You don't have to fiddle with replace or try to find those awful IWB pens.
• The iPad gives you access to the vast range and variety of apps that you just can't run on a computer or IWB environment. 
• An iPad and a $12.99 app are hugely cheaper than the cost of an IWB and far more flexible.
• You can also use the Reflector app to record screen activity so you can easily turn parts of your lessons into flipped learning or useful revision.
• The iPad and laptop set up provides an authentic digital learning environment so digital literacies can be developed, whereas IWB software is an artificial digital environment which students will only encounter within schools.

There are of course some downsides to this arrangement. 

• Hand writing on the iPad screen isn't so comfortable even with a stylus and a good whiteboard app (though if you want to try it I would recommend Bamboo Paper).
• The Reflector app isn't free, but it is very cheap ($12.99) so much cheaper than an IWB.
• This set up only works with Apple mobile products as the controller (Though you can use any laptop to install the app on), so if your students bring along Android or other devices they won't be able to access your projector (but they wouldn't on an IWB either).
• The Reflector app runs through the wireless to connect the laptop to the iPad, so you may need to have some specific ports open if your IT manager has them closed.

If you don't have the choice and you already have an IWB, then that's fine, you could still install the Reflector app and start using an iPad too, but given the choice it's pretty clear. So, now hopefully I'll be getting asked this question a lot less often.

Do post comments and let me know what you think. I'd also appreciate hearing about any alternative apps you may have used to connect your iPad and especially your Android tablet to the projector

Related links:

• Learning Technology News 
• Tools for Learners
• Could Doceri be the IWB killer?
• Can you replace your IWB with a $10 dollar app?
• Questioning the role of technology in education 
• iPad apps for English language teachers
• Some Pros and Cons of iPads for ELT 

Best
Nik Peachey

Gamification to encourage learner autonomy

This post tries to pull together a couple of things I have been thinking about recently. The first was a post I saw on the 21st Century Fluency Project blog a few weeks back. The title of the article 'How I Turned My Classroom into a ‘Living Video Game’ caught my eye and before I even had time to read it I started thinking about how the factors that create motivation in computer games could be applied to the classroom. The article is well worth reading, although this is only one element it touches on.

The other thing I have been thinking about recently is time management and distraction as it is one of the more significant objections which teachers often raise to having students using computers and mobile devices in the classroom, so when I saw 'HabitRPG' I thought it could be a useful tool to help deal with the problems and implement more of a gamified approach to the  classroom.

HabitRPG is a time and task management tool which overlays motivational elements of computer games onto managing time and tasks.

The two major motivational elements are health points, which can be used up and coins which can be earned by doing daily tasks, following good habits and doing jobs from your 'Todos' list. These coins can then used to buy rewards.

You can define the rewards for yourself. In my case I decided to define the rewards as the things that I usually do to procrastinate, such as check my email or look at facebook updates etc.

Then you can simply add your list of 'one off' jobs to the 'Todos' list. For me these are things like 'write an article', 'complete a job application', 'update my CV' etc. These become more valuable the longer they are left and so this increase motivation to do them and gain the coins so that you can pay for your rewards.

Then there are my daily chores which I can set up. These are things like 'update my blog' , 'add some links to Scoop.it' , 'search my RSS feeds for interesting articles' etc. If I do these they earn me coins, but if I don't do them by the end of the day I lose health points.

Lastly, there are the habits. These can be positive or negative depending on whether you do them or not, like 'take a walk' or 'have a snack'.

You can edit all of your lists quit simply by clicking on the pen icon, making the changes and then clicking on save and close.

The main thing you may need to edit is the price of rewards and the amount of coins you get for each task.

To change the price of the rewards, you just click the edit icon and then type in the price. The default amount for a reward is 20, but you can adjust the price depending on how much time your reward takes.

To change the amount of coins you are rewarded for doing each task, you need to go to edit and then go into the advanced options and choose, Easy, Medium or Hard. Doing a hard task will of course earn you more coins.

Once you have your lists set up it becomes quite easy just to click the + and - each time you do a task or have a reward.

Everyone starts off with 50 health points and if they have no coins to buy rewards or if they indulge in bad habits then they have to pay with health points. The challenge is to stay alive and build up enough coins to start buying rewards.

So how would this work with students?

• Well you could set the rewards as similar things to my own rewards, especially in a connected classroom. You could also add things like play a game or have a few minutes free browsing time online etc.
• Within the habits you could have things like 'speak L1', 'take notes' or 'copy an answer' etc.
• The daily things could be 'revise vocabulary', 'read a short article', communicate with someone in English', 'do an activity from the course book' etc.
• The 'Todos' could be a range of homework and autonomous learning assignments.

Here's what I imagine an ELT students profile would look like.

You'll need to guide students through the set up process and make sure they understand that for this to work they will need to be honest. You could actually have one page for the whole class, or set a page up for a group of students, but it will probably work better if they manage their own page.

They can also add a few elements of personalisation. If the click on the avatar (top left) there are a range of ways to change its appearance.

What I like about HabitRPG

• It's free and easy to use.
• It can help get students to take responsibility for their 'bad habits' and reduce the amount of 'policing' you have to do.
• It can encourage students to work on single tasks with concentration, rather than constantly multitasking.
• It's a great way to get students to take responsibility for their own time and learning and have some fun at the same time.
• It could increase motivation and help your students to be better organised.
• Students have their own account so they can log in on any computer.

Things I'm not so sure about

• Each student would need to have a computer or mobile device for this to work effectively.
• It would be great to see this on mobile, but I think that is being planned and it does run in the safari browser on iPad.
• There is some down time sometimes.
• Grouping students would also be great, but again I think this is coming.

If you want to know more about HabitRPG, there is quite a long tutorial below which shows a number of other features that you can unlock by playing the game.


I hope you enjoy HabitRPG and that it helps your students to be more organised and disciplined about they way they use their computer or mobile device for learning.

Related links:

• 3D Computer Games with Young Learners
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game

Best

Nik Peachey