Random Thoughts

roommate prewrite1
Originally uploaded by namckeand.

We would regularly do TOEFL writing practice. I wanted students to put more thought into their essays than they usually did, so I started doing whole class prewrites. Often we used a HipBone board. The main reason I did tht was to force them to think of more than 3 possible ideas to discuss in their essays.

Another time I used a more complex board with 12 places, I believe. We talked about ideas related to the topic: Why movies are popular. After we filled the board, we looked at it for some possible ways to structure the essay. This extended the value of the game.

Day of the Dead HipBone Game
Originally uploaded by namckeand.

This is a game that was just to provide structure to a discussion of the Day of the Dead. All the words were in some way connected to the topic. The discussion was wonderful.

sentence combining
Originally uploaded by namckeand.

This is one game board I did that first year with my students. Without giving them any clue as to what we were doing, I had students give me simple sentences. I wrote them on the board in the order they were given to me. They could combine any two sentences that were connected to each other on the board. We ended up with some crazy sentences, but they had a lot of fun.

This isn’t really much different from any other sentence combining activity. Students got good practice with combining sentences. But it seemed much less like work and more like fun. These were adult students I was working with, but the game approach really appealed to them.

Bee also asked about my use of HipBone games with my classes. I first heard about HipBone games in 2001. I was teaching in Mexico at the time. A colleague told me about them. I couldn’t quite see what I could do with them, but I loved them!

The next year I went to Louisiana to start a new ESL program at a small college. I had the same 5 students in the same small room for 25 hours a week. We needed stuff to break up the monotony, and I decided HipBone games were going to be part of how I did that.

I started with simple vocabulary games, where students posted words we had been studying and made sentences with them. Of course, they had to incorporate other people’s words into their sentences as the board filled up. I was surprised how well students were able to do this.

We played many other kinds of games, too. We did grammar-based games where students combined sentences or practiced a particular verb tense. I used the games as discussion starters and as prewrite activities and as a story-mapping activity. Students always enjoyed the games, no matter what we did.

I used a game as a vocabulary review activity at a Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project workshop. This activity, which was just supposed to be a demonstration of the potential of the games, ended up being a defining moment in the summer workshop.

I have played a couple games with my adult immigrant students recently. The first one was a vocabulary game that I have written about previously. The last one, though, was more like what I used to consider a “real” HipBone game. I explained that we were going to be talking about our memories, and that one person would have to keep talking about his or her memory until it made someone else go “That reminds me…” I wanted to introduce the past progressive tense to my students, so I started by telling them about what happened to me when I was learning to ride a bike. I told the story in some detail, but I wrote it on the game board as a one sentence entry:

When I was learning to ride I bike, I fell down a lot and cut my knees.

That prompted another bike-riding memory and another. We branched out from bike riding to other memories, but each time I wrote it as a sentence on the game board using past continuous and simple past. At the end of the game, we talked about the grammar of it. The students were intermediate level, and almost all of them had naturally used the past continuous. This was more of a question of drawing their attention to it. And it worked.

I have uploaded a few game boards to flickr, and I will post some of them here.

Well, I haven’t been here much lately, have I? We are entering Week 6 of Social Media in English Language Teaching. It has been interesting for me to participate as a co-moderator, to see it from the inside. Right now we are playing a HipBone game. I have been playing HipBone games with my students for years, and this is the first time I have seen one played online. The board we are playing on at the moment looks like this:

It is really interesting to see how this plays out online. It is a lot like the way it plays out in person except there is a lot more time between moves. And, since I volunteered to update the board after each move, I have learned more about actually doing something in Drupal.

And then, of course, there is the fact that I really like wordpress better than Blogger. Even though I am not posting there much more than I am here, I find that it just works better for me. I year or so ago, I copied everything here over into Moving Along, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to close this blog. Somebody asked me not too ling ago why I was reluctant to give up this blog, and I didn’t have a real good answer. I guess it is force of habit more than anything else.

Once the SMiELT session is over, I hope to be back here full-time again. Let’s see how good I am at actually doing that!

I finally got around to playing a HipBone game with my adult ed students. It was wonderful — as I knew it would be. I have used the games with my students for years but I had not used them with my adult immigrant students until this evening.

For those of you not familiar with HipBone games, they based on Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. They are games of connections. Beyond that, they are totally flexible. With students tonight and usually with any group of students, I begin with a very simple vocabulary game. Tonight we formed three teams of 4. Each team got to draw 7 slips of paper into which I had written the vocabulary words from the story we just finished reading. Because I have a very low-tech classroom, I had drawn a Psyche Board on the whiteboard. (I have been trying to upload a picture here, but for some reason I can’t.) Each team played a word and then made a sentence with it. As the board filled up, they made sentences with their word and the other words connected to it. We kept score. Students loved it.

I copied the board onto paper when we were done. I don’t have access to a scanner right now to upload a copy of it. When I can, though, I will do that.

I said a while back that I wanted to focus on adult education in this blog, and I have attempted to do so — without a lot of success. But I started reading adult ed blogs at least. A post on Technology for the Adult Education Instructor today caught my attention today. What it says is applicable to all levels of education, I think, but it is definitely true of adult ed.

Of course, schools have evolved. But has staff evolved as well? To some extent, yes, but is it enough? From the iPhone to Wi-fi to the Wii, technology is part of daily life for students. Yes, there are pockets of educators creating innovative 2.0 interactive Websites and Podcasts, but it is hardly a universal phenomena. The average instructor is satisfied with accessing 20th century technology. Many have changed (usually reluctantly) to LCD projectors and PowerPoint presentations but I am sure that in most every school there are still those using the overheads with abandon….

A lot of people have been saying this: that the problem is the current staff/ employees, not the difficulty in transitioning to whatever the new thing is. And I agree. It is the reluctance of teachers to change and our inability to envision a new way of teaching that slows us down. The technology is out there waiting for us.

And yet, I think about my own situation at the moment. I would willingly teach with all kinds of technology if my students had access to it. I would happily use the most modern and up-to-date gadgets if I had access to them during class. But I don’t. So what do I do? How can I exploit technology if I have only a chalkboard?

There are still ways to include technology in my teaching. My students, unfortunately, do not get to participate in it, but they can benefit from it anyway. At the very least, I can avail myself of the wealth of information that is out there and inform my teaching accordingly. I can provide my students who have Internet access with web addresses of sites that might help them with their study of English.

Something else that I can do, and something that intrigues me more than these other options, is to try find low-tech ways to enhance my students’ learning. What I am looking for are ways to encourage student investment in learning, connection both with the topic and with each other, and deep thinking. One tool that immediately comes to mind are HipBone games. There are others.

I think, then, that it all comes back to the teachers. Are we willing to change? I don’t think that technology will save us if we are unwilling to examine our own classroom practice and its suitability for our situation and our students. I think that there are times and places where overhead projectors are just fine — better than LCD projectors even. And I can use PowerPoint all day long, but it won’t help if the lesson I am teaching with it isn’t relevant to my students and their lives. It isn’t the tool as much as what we do with it that matters.

I believe that we, as teachers, are at the heart of education. We shape what happens in our classrooms by our action or inaction, by our creativity or lack of it. And that is where I see technology as critical. We can get our encouragement and our ideas from what others are doing. Technology gives us access to classroom practice in hundreds, if not thousands, of classrooms around the world. It gives us access to teachers who may be more creative than we are or who, at least, are ahead of us in learning about some of the options that exist. No other form of professional development is as personal and as universal at the same time.

The tools are out there. The knowledge exists. What remains to be seen is what we do with them.

Once I discovered Clippings in Bloglines, I started clipping posts that were of interest. But, of course, I never looked at them again. So I decided to remedy that situation today. One post that I had clipped was from Graham back in February, The Viral Glass Bead Gameboard. This was of particular interest to me because I have been a fan of HipBone games for 7 or 8 years now.

HipBone games were developed by Charles Cameron and are based on Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. The boards look similar to the one Graham used that was developed by Chris and used with his classes.

These games, whichever version you use, are wonderful tools to use in the classroom. I have used them to practice vocabulary and grammar, to stimulate discussion, and to work through a difficult reading. Whenever and however I have used them, students have always loved them.

The games fit well with how we all seem to live and work today. It is all about connections. We follow bread crumbs online and off. Give the games a try and see what you think!