Introduction of Some Classroom Games in ICT to Motivate Students

When I look back on my English class in Chinese middle school, feeling bored in the classroom is quite normal. Without interesting teaching methods, young students' attention could not be paid very easily. 

Nowadays, equipped with advanced classroom technology, some schools should make full use of it. It is of great responsibility for Chinese English teachers to design activities that allow students to be individual, creative and autonomous. According to Digital games and ELT: Bridging the authenticity gap, written by Henry, A. (2013), English teachers need to create learning opportunities whereby students can experience the types of creative and self-relevant interaction commonplace in digital gaming. 

In today's blog, I will introduce you three my favourite classroom games that can be associated with English teaching, and give you some links of other interesting classroom games which you can explore on your own.

1. Voki

Voki is a very interesting website for teachers. People can create their own characters, with various accessories, background and colors. What's more, the character also can 'speak' with different accents, like male British accents or female American accents, even with people's own voices. I think if this Voki can be used in Chinese classrooms, young students should be interested. I made a GIF to show the lovely character that I made before. Teachers can create different characters in order to become virtual friends of students. These friends can be designed to learn with students together or guide them to study in the process of language studying. For example, the Voki character gives students tasks to do or ask vocabularies questions.

screenshot of Voki website

2. Triptico

Triptico can be seen as a great teaching 'assistant'. There are many activities and classroom games resources in the website. Teachers can find useful games in the Resources section and then save favorite ones in My Saves. I will give you some recommended resources below.

Quizzes have many great resources to add some enjoyment in quizzes process. I like What's the Question? in which teams are shown a selection of answers and they must try to provide the correct questions. Answers are color-coded to reflect their difficulty, with red answers worth the maximum 30 points.

screenshot of Triptico website

Selectors cover many interesting spinners or selectors for students to choose in the tasks. I recommend Task Spinner. As each letter of a question is revealed by it, the selector moves around to highlight the next student. What's more, teachers can create sets of questions in any language and on any topic and run saved activities with different class lists.

3. Kahoot

Kahoot needs students in the class to use phones or pads because the quizzes designed by it are tested online. Students can choose classic mode or team mode to play. It is really easy for teachers to edit the option content, set the time limit and change the rewards of answering correctly.

screenshot of Kahoot website

There are some other interesting and useful classroom games websites below. I really hope they can have some help to you!

4. Socrative – https://www.socrative.com

5. Quizlet Live – https://quizlet.com/live

6. Dvolver – http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html