Serious Play

Want to teach your students real life lessons and expand their awareness of global struggles? Try introducing them to  a serious game. This task can be assigned as homework or simply suggested to sprout a classroom dialogue. These games typically follow a story line and involve strategy and critical thinking, so they are best for students to do outside of the classroom. So many games are available online for free. Students can learn about refugees,environmental issues, budgets, etc... if you want to expose them to a serious concept in an engaging way; there is a game for it.
I played 3rd World Farmer six times and managed to starve my family each time. It reminded me of playing Oregon Trail; which i loved as a kid, but never was very good at. This game is not hard to play though, each time I got a little better and learned from my mistakes. However, theft,wars and general unexpected events are thrown in often and I'm never prepared. This game utilizes the same repetition and vocabulary expansion that you would find in a casual game, but with a deeper message. After a couple of plays, students would have solidified their farm animal, tools, and food vocabulary. Also encountered were some scenarios that involved tourists coming and weather events. I would ask students to write down unfamiliar concepts for a classroom discussion. This could also be a good way to assess the individual understanding of each student. The objective is frequent exposure to vocabulary with a conceptual framework for global issues, a pretty meaningful homework assignment that students will enjoy.

Playing is Learning

As teachers, we need to always be thinking up ways to make learning more fun. Especially with ELL teachers, who have the enormous task of teaching something that most people haven't had to (consciously) learn. Some students may also oppose learning a language forced upon them or find the task too overwhelming. One tool that will help is Gamification; simply put, using games to teach. the wonderful thing about games is that people want to play them. Imagine a classroom of self-motivated,eager learners. An easy to use computer game can solidify and teach vocabulary while giving individual encouragement and assessment. This video explains all the wonderful ways games can reward your brain.
I played Griswold the Goblin 2 three times and once I understood the role of the walkthrough, I began to get the hang of it, and started to make some progress. The images were really cool and the walkthrough and playing the game; with the teacher available to translate unfamiliar terms and help give walkthrough instruction. The game was fun and had simple point and click motions with an interesting plot and images to keep me engaged. I knew I was getting better by how far I had gotten by my third try. Language students would be focusing on a set of 10-15 frequent vocabulary words and by one turn on the game and one as walkthrough coach, they would have seen the words dozens of times and have a visual attached. 
use of repetitive vocabulary would be very useful in a language classroom. I could see two students working in a group together, taking turns reading the

Be excited, not afraid

Communal learning,staying connected, being in the know, keeping up with technology...etc., sounds exhausting. Here is another way to make it easier; Google + communities. I like how I don't have to set up yet another account that I have to manage and delete a daily barrage of email notifications.  (I know, change the settings...I'll get around to it.)  Some groups I found useful were Teachers for Interactive Language Learning and English Language Teaching. There are plenty more for every interest or field.

Chaos and Order; Connectivism

So now that the debate about technology in the modern classroom is obsolete, due to inevitability; the task now becomes instilling a system in the learner so they can make meaning from it all. Teachers are now preparing future generations with the skill set to learn continually. This idea is called Connectivism: teaching how to  recognize, organize and externalize information, explained in depth in this video lecture: What is connectivism?
A learner is like a song-writer. To effectively communicate they must have a foundation of knowledge, recognize symbols, organize and piece them together and finally externalize them to convey meaning.  "Chaos states that the meaning exists-the learners challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden" connectivism; a learning theory for the digital age. At the forefront of this theory is George Siemens; and he believes that "the ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today". I agree with him, in the communal learning environment; forming networks, processing and externalizing information have become more important than the actual information itself.