 All right, so thank you for coming out to my talk today My name is Mike Barcomb, and I'm going to be presenting about gamifying Moodle for extracurricular speaking opportunities So I'm a PhD student and also a business owner. I teach students in Japan And so this is kind of my two passions coming together at once. So the objectives for the talk So I'm going to review relevant literature about interaction with a foreign or second language extracurricular learning and video games and pedagogical settings So what we're going to look at is the first plug-ins poodle, and so this is a language recorder that can be Embedded throughout Moodle So I'm going to look at the different uses of that to create the speaking opportunities And then we're going to look at how we can gamify these opportunities to motivate students to engage in the speaking Opportunities so I think a lot of people may be familiar with both of these plugins We're going to look at kind of how they can complement each other so Creating interaction with a second language is really important And it's up to the teacher to provide these opportunities, especially in the foreign language setting where they might not have opportunities to speak outside of class So how can you The the main goal is to challenge learners in a way that they're not going to be bored It's not too easy or it's not so difficult that they feel overwhelmed and they're going to give up so we have to hit at that right level and It's important to extend these opportunities outside of class and most teachers try to do this through the use of a book which offers limited interaction and so another problem with wanting to extend the classroom for speaking opportunities is that Pronunciation anxiety is a major factor and this prevents people from speaking in class because they don't want to lose face in front of Other peers, so this is another reason that we want to get students in a comfortable setting and Computers can specifically help in this so we're going to look at how they can enhance Interactions specifically speaking and some focus on listening So games and learning so a lot of people might be familiar with video games and learning So there's been a lot of news recently about Students who may learn a foreign language by playing a world of Warcraft or a game like this And so that's a commercial game, but it's not specifically designed for learning So well students can learn during that We might want to make the game so it has a specific pedagogical purpose And so that's where serious games and serious simulations come in we still maintain the game element But now it's it's been designed specifically for for a pedagogical purpose So we're going to be looking at speaking and listening in a second language Specifically today, so that's still including the game element though And it may be beyond many of our resources to develop a game So we're going to look at gamification which is removing the actual game And we're going to look specifically at the normal pedagogical activity but including some of the elements like leaderboards and badges and So I'd mentioned that some students learn on their own So this is extramural learning where they may go out on their own completely independent of a pedagogical Context and learn something, but it's very uncommon. So we can't expect this of our students So instead of focusing on extramural language, Sylvan and Sunquist 2017 Also talk about extracurricular language, which is the extension of a classroom. So it's not just You're on your own to learn you actually have some guidance by a teacher and by the course materials So when you leave class you can continue the language learning and possibly with other students in the class and kind of that game-like way that you would hope for and So this opens up opportunity to opportunities to gamify out-of-class materials And the flipped classroom setting so students can practice out and come into class. So why Moodle? Why why would we want to use Moodle to do this so Moodle's particularly effective fused to encourage interaction among connected knowers? Particularly in forms and that's what we're going to talk about quite a bit is how can we get that interaction? between the learners in the forms and It's critical to show and model Target activities and behaviors in the classroom. And so again, this is another reason why we want to extend Into the into the out-of-class setting So Moodle enables teachers to create through customization And this is a really important point because at non Moodle conferences when I when I present my research I always get the same question How long have you been programming and I always have to explain well I'm not a programmer and I think that that's a major draw to Moodle is that we can we can create these highly effective Materials without actually having to program. And so if we look at how Moodle can be gamified There's progressive learning through maps and levels which can be done through themes labels and conditions to access We have socialization through chats and forms which we'll be focusing on Instant feedback and the thing the the fact that things can unlock and happen instantly is highly persuasive and then reward systems through Gamified plug-ins so specifically we're going to look at forms the gamified plug-ins and in the role of instant feedback So the guiding questions are how can Moodle be equipped with level up to motivate students to engage in speaking opportunities? And how can it afford how can poodle afford users opportunities to speak with other students out of class so poodle So we're going to look at the use of poodle of the audio and the video recording There are other things it does, but we'll be focusing on those two So this is a typical form where maybe we would have students go and ask and answer questions Basic just text ask and answer, but we can add poodle to that so instead of sending a text message We send we send a video message and this can enable students to interact with each other within a video form Where they can have a conversation out of class and then when they come into class We can scaffold them up because they've already had that practice with each other before and it's asynchronous So if they make a mistake they can delete and start over again And this is very important for beginning learners because again, they don't want to be losing face in front of their peers so Adding poodle to pages so it's not just forms you can add it to pages where this is a brief grammar lesson And instead of just reading you can have the audio equipped with it And then maybe the students would participate in a form and ask and answer the questions that they had just practiced in the grammar lesson Another way to add it is for books So maybe we might want to have students do a reading course So this is with younger children in this image And so it's myself reading the book and then the students practice Reading along with the book and then in the form they have they read the books to each other And then in the lessons finally in the synchronous live setting after they've rehearsed several times They have the opportunity to to read the book to each other And so another way maybe we don't want student-to-student interaction Maybe as a teacher I want to provide some more Specific feedback and just maybe a more comfortable setting for the student where they're not exposing their their second language speech To all the other users in the course So with the speaking quizzes I could either record myself asking a question and the students record their answer Or I could type it and they could read and then they can speak to answer it And so this is a brief example of a poodle quiz and so poodles quite dynamic and what we can do with it there are a lot of different opportunities that students can have to practice speaking and So now comes the part where we need to motivate students to try that How do we motivate them to engage in these activities that we've built? So level up is a plug-in It's in the form of a block and then it gives you a lot of options to to focus student attention towards specific Resources in the course so the course rules it allows you to set Seemingly an endless list of actions that you can award points for and so it's this is the really important point because you decide What's worth the most in this course? And it's really important to do that because the students are going to pay the most attention to what's worth the most points And so you determine the interval how much what gets the most points speaking grammar vocabulary Whatever it may be and then how many points before you get to the next level Is it weeks where you know you have to study for a long time before you get to that next level? Or is it maybe a couple days and depending on the population these are instructional design options you're going to have to make for some learners it might be fine for some you may discourage them and you don't want to Have them feel defeated at the beginning of a learning experience So maybe a more quicker reward systems really important So plan carefully and please refer to research before setting those rules and so when you actually set the rules they're added one at a time and In this example the points are allocated there are three points for the grammar activities and ten points for speaking So I want to guide the students towards speaking so they're going to get ten points For sending video messages in the forums versus three points for the grammar vocabulary activities And so that's a that's kind of how you set that up. So it's really important to have that There has to be intent behind those rules. You can't just arbitrarily make those it'll cause major problems Okay, so visuals so it comes stock with stars and if maybe you're working with younger children You might want to change these maybe you're doing an aquatic theme and you may do different types of fish or marine creatures There are different ways to do this depending on your audience But the visuals that come with it as you level up from star one to star two. They're quite appealing. So We've actually kept those in our courses Importantly there's a cheat guard so you may get students who just want to be at the top of the leaderboard So they just click things over and over again And so you can set the cheat guard maybe the activities some like the vocab cards are brief, so they only need to spend a few minutes on them and You you just want to prevent people from constantly clicking. That's the the main goal with the cheat guard So you'll have to experiment again depending on your population And you can kind of look at the logs and get a feel for what's going on And this takes some time to develop, but it's really important to be aware of all of these features All right, and so once you're done you have this is the fruits of your labor is your ladder So you have the student rank what level they're at their image And then the progress to the next level and this is available. You can make this private This one's public so the students can see each other and so some building tips So be sure the students know how much the activities are worth if you look in this example You can see that the points are at the end of each activity how much they're worth and this will help them to develop strategies to use the course not just It doesn't mean as much if they don't know what's worth the point So they can't develop the specific strategies to engage in the competition Which is one of the key points of gamification is to encourage that friendly competition and It's to reset that another important point is to reset the leaderboard So if you just let it keep going you'll find that you'll have students either Perpetually at the bottom or the top and that's not really a good space for learning If you reset it I find that once a month is a good amount of time and again It encourages that time that type of competition we want and it's important to remember that these points don't represent grades These are merely effort points So if we're doing our job as teachers and instructional designers and getting that material correct from the from the start Then if they practice it and do their part then the learning should happen from there So another point to consider is what do these points mean after the fact say I delete them at once a month Well, what does that mean? I just had these points and now they're gone And so something we started working with our avatars in the form of the profile picture So students can exchange points smaller Accessories so 50 points for the eyes and related accessories and 75 points for clothes and boots The background images students are really interested in these and so they can exchange points for the basic background for a hundred points or a hundred and fifty for the more fancy backgrounds and It seems simple, but these kind of serve as a rich metacognitive activity Not just oh I had these points and now they're gone But as they look at the robot there's some connection to the amount of work They've done to get to that point And I think that anything like that is really encouraging and language learning where you can often feel like God, I'm just still not good at this, but actually you've developed quite a bit So objectives revisited so we want to create that interaction outside of class inside of class too But I find that outside of class is a great way to start and that that'll help pick up Whether it's a webcam lesson or an in-person lesson when you're at that live synchronous communication that that'll be really helpful at that point And so now we know the different ways that you can use poodle and how you can leverage gamification to motivate people So in conclusion, we want to focus on helping learners to interact with the target language out of class Either with other students or individually and we want to gamify to motivate students to do the activities We deem to me be most important and ensure that the points are meaningful to the students Beyond the immediate activities that they're doing so what what's the long term? What do these points mean to them in the long term? So thank you very much Sorry, I can't go back Questions Sure, so the the question is what did we use for the avatar customization? So yeah, we're just doing it off off of Moodle just some basic Adobe type stuff. So Yes, yep, so the students send in the points and then we will go and manually put them together and put their Put their profile pictures together Sorry, yeah me too No, so in terms of privacy and the rankings You can set it so either students can see kind of all the information or only their own Yeah, it's not possible to keep the points but remove the names, but I'm always in touch with the Designer of this plug-in and he's always updating stuff. So I'm sure if you email him. He'll appreciate it. All right. Thank you so much