Archive for the ‘Learning Through Fun and Games’ Category
Hangman:Get Hung Up on Learning English
I guess most of you will agree when I say learning English should be made as much fun as possible. After all we are most likely to remember all those learning experiences which were informative as well as enjoyable. If you are asked to sit down with a dictionary and learn up a few words everyday, the groan inside will be audible enough to me but if we talk about some fun games which have the potential to make you think about words and remember them in the process, I am sure of hearing some enthusiastic cheer.
Some of you might be familiar with the game “Hangman”. For those of you who are not, the game can be a lot of fun and also serve the purpose of enhancing your vocabulary. While playing the game, you are asked to guess a word based on a given clue. You are given an idea about the number of letters the word contains. So you start guessing one letter at a time and for every wrong guess, the sketch of a person hanging from the gallows nears completion. You need to guess the word before the figure is complete or you lose. From experience, I can tell you that it’s great fun to rack your brains and guess different words. What’s more, the words remain in your mind since you tried so hard to get them.
So if learning English through games sound exciting to you, go for glory with “Hangman”. Follow this link and get started on having fun.
Training Through Social Networking
Social networking is becoming more and more popular. Almost everyone we know can be reached on orkut, facebook, myspace and other well known social networks. The idea of social networking is to enable people to keep in touch and share information, pictures, videos and so on even when they are scattered all over the globe. Logging into a social network brings all your friends together at one place and lets you interact with them freely. An extremely effective tool to reach out to a lot of people at one time.
Now think about this from the perspective of a company which wants to train a group of new recruits. How about creating an unique social network for trainees and interacting with them through it. Not only will it solve a lot of problems pertaining to finding training rooms, equipments, trainers etc, but by virtue of being an unique network within the company, no outsider can get access to it. Training involves extensive information sharing, brainstorming by the recruits, feedback and group discussions. All these can be done with the help of a social network. If you have a new idea, put up a post for all to see and comment. If you want a discussion with your trainer or colleagues, initiate a chat session. All you need is a desk and a PC of your own.
Apart from sharing information and discussing, online web tools offer provisions for virtual meeting places/spaces as well. More on this exciting technology later.
Make Learning Fun
As English is being looked at as a language of opportunity, more and more people are flocking to various training centres and colleges to hone their English skills. As someone proficient in English, this opens up new opportunities for you as a language trainer. The demand for English language trainers is high not only in India but across various countries where English is not the first language. Needless to say that to make the most of this lucrative opportunity, you need to have a good command over English. However, we have seen several times that learned men do not always make good teachers. So before considering a career in language training you need to work on your teaching abilities as well.
In a training institute or college, you will come across students who can speak English but suffer from lack of fluency, confidence and so on as well as students who have to be taught from scratch. It is important to identify the various levels and assign different time slots so that you can give every level the necessary attention. However what is most important according to me is that you need to ensure that your students are having fun while learning. Abstain from making your sessions resemble grammar schools or dull English classrooms. Think out of the box and come up with word games, contests and creative activities (such as composing slogans, poems etc) which will make your students look forward to attending your session.
There is nothing like learning through fun. Picking up a language, or any skill for that matter, becomes something to enjoy and makes the teacher immensely popular and successful in the process.
Outside the Classroom:A Different Take on Creative Learning.
In the academic fields of literature and language, a creative writer is highly appreciated. Several universities and colleges both in India and abroad offer courses on creative writing. If you are an acclaimed creative writer, your proficiency in the language can hardly be called into question. It is taken for granted that you have mastered the language and are able to play with it as per your wishes. You can compose poetry, write stories, argue convincingly and so on. Armed with such abilities, you may think that a job in the industry that involves writing will be a piece of cake for you. Pause here and think again.
Lucrative opportunities like technical writing and blogging require extensive writing from you but not the kind that you have been producing so far in your classrooms. I once attended an interview for the post of technical writer in a reputed company where I was asked why I want this job. I confidently replied that creative writing is one of my skills and I would love to apply that skill in my job. My interviewer smiled and told me “creative” writing is not what is expected out of me. The focus should be to keep the language as simple as possible and be straightforward. The writing thus has to stem from an entirely different attitude and perspective.
You need to keep in mind that a company is hiring you to write about itself, its objectives, its products etc. Through your writing, existing and prospective clients will form an idea about your company and what it is all about. It is up to you to make this idea as clear to them as possible. So you need to free your writing from veiled references and images to make it clear and comprehensible. When you are writing about a product, you have to make all specifications easy to understand and when you are blogging about the company and its services, your style needs to be simple so that your writing is understood by everybody. A poet or novelist can get away by saying he/she writes for a specific target audience, but you won’t usually have that excuse. So does that mean there is absolutely no creativity? Not at all; you need to be creative to make your writing simple, comprehensible, yet eye-catching.
Be Different, Get Creative in Learning
In an earlier post i had emphasized upon the importance of originality in writing. We all have different approaches and ideas about various things and ideally, your writing should reflect your own ideas and not those of other people. In order to bring creativity and lend your writings a distinct touch, consider visualizing the incident you are writing about. If you are writing a travelogue, describe things as they appeared to you and not how they are commonly perceived. Describing the Taj Mahal as a magnificent piece of architecture puts nothing new on the plate. But maybe when you looked at it, you saw something unusual. A crack, a fissure, an oddity that struck you. Write about that. It’s your own work and you have the right to describe things as you see them.
If you have taken up the task of writing about something you haven’t seen then try to imagine yourself in that situation. Like our takes on things, our thoughts also run in different directions. Given the same scenario, your friends might imagine completely different things which may not even occur to you. These varied flights of fantasy will make your imaginative work stand out with fresh, new perspectives. Make sure you avoid the cliched descriptions of things and observe carefully to bring something different to the limelight. Look beyond the obvious and creativity is yours.