Amazon Trail is a simulation of a trip up the Amazon River (and through time). The goal is to search for a medicinal plant that can save the ancient Incas from malaria. As students travel up the Amazon River they explore the rain forest, visit historical people and landmarks, trade with the people of the region, navigate and fish for food. The program comes with teacher's manuals and student worksheets that facilitate cooperative learning-based lessons and communicative language development. CD-ROM version. The earlier version is on disk and is slightly less expensive. MECC titles are now sold by Learning Company School.
This interactive CD-ROM from Amnesty International presents information about the struggle for human rights throughout history. Information is organized by geographical location, time in history, and famous people. Both human rights abuses and human rights successes are shown. The material is sometimes presented relatively rapidly, requiring learners to listen or read a second time.
The strength of this program is in the way students must link their own game-playing strategies with the way that inventions and technology might have been discovered and developed: you can't have literature without writing, and you can't have writing without the alphabet; and this applies all the way up to building a space-station. Students obtain knowledge through reading about the developments on screen (the file that creates them can be edited easily if required). One thing that I and a colleague (who used the game in a larger context) agree on is that the most important factor is the recording of information by the students as they play. He also gets them to write a summary of the day's play. I asked mine to copy the screens as they appeared. Effective for group work or individual play. Before teachers use the program they should run it several times themselves but should be careful as it is addictive. I would also recommend a companion book (unavailable here): Wilson, Johnny L. and Alan Emrich. Sid Meier's Civilization: or Rome on 640k a day. Prima Publishing: California, 1992.
Learners interact with people in different settings in the virtual community of Cornerstone. They can take trips to the airport, supermarket, library, museum, bank, bus station, and other common locations around town. They will need tasks set by a teacher, however, for language learning benefit.
Using a realistic, yet fun visual format this geography simulation lets students take on the role of a long distance truck driver. Students make decisions about finding and delivering in a timely fashion up to 52 different commodities to 180 cities. Students need to read maps, calculate distances, estimate expenses, and plan cost-effective routes from coast to coast. The program and accompanying teacherÕs manual offer many possibilities for ESL/EFL communicative language practice through cooperative learning tasks. Also available: Cross Country California and Cross Country Texas in Macintosh disk format. Mac/Windows CD-ROM. Demo version is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM and available on the publisher's website.
Using a realistic, yet fun visual format this geography simulation lets students take on the role of a long distance truck driver. Students make decisions about finding and delivering in a timely fashion up to 52 different commodities to 180 cities. Students need to read maps, calculate distances, estimate expenses, and plan cost-effective routes from coast to coast. The program and accompanying teacherÕs manual offer many possibilities for ESL/EFL communicative language practice through cooperative learning tasks. Also available: Cross Country California and Cross Country Texas in Macintosh disk format. Demo version is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM. CrossCountry USA is now downloadable from the company's website (requires credit card) or on CD-ROM.
Students work in groups to use the software and text materials to make decisions. Students check the printed materials for additional background information. As a group they prioritize their goals, receive multiple perspectives on the issues from their 'advisors' in the computer, discuss their options and input their course of action to the computer. The computer presents the consequences and the 'advisors' reappear to offer the students help in dealing with them prior to another round of decisions, actions and consequences. These programs work well in a one-computer classroom. The following are ones most likely to be of interest to ESL/EFL students. Immigration: Students are community decision makers. The computer presents a number of dilemmas related to immigration policy in the U.S. Prejudice: Students take the role of a mayor up for re-election in a town with a racism problem. Their 'advisors' in the computer are an historian, a campaign manager, a lawyer and an activist. The Environment: Students are community decision makers. The computer presents a number a dilemmas related to environmental damage in a small town. Urbanization: Students are community decision makers. The computer presents a number of dilemma related to the costs and benefits of urbanization for a small town. Violence in the Media: Students take the role of an advertising executive for a company sponsoring a controversial television program about life in a gang-infested urban neighborhood.
A space adventure activity; on disk or CD-ROM.
This is a version of the classic psychotherapy program. Tell Eliza your problems (by typing), and Eliza will respond with further questions. This works best with students in groups who have had an introduction to what to do by a teacher. The program works by scanning what students type for key words or by mechanical transformation of the student's input into further questions. Advanced students can try to cause Eliza to respond ungrammatically if they recognize how the program is creating its responses.
This CD-ROM uses QuickTime VR, digitized video clips, and animation to create a virtual reality setting. Learners take the role of an alien whose spaceship has crashed in the Arizona desert. They must converse with the people in a small town nearby in order to find the seven objects needed to repair the ship. The questions that learners ask are pre-scripted and chosen from a menu; language development comes from the responses of the townspeople. Since what the townspeople say is quite natural and colloquial, a transcript (with an optional translation into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, or Swedish) and an online glossary are provided. One of the strongest elements of the program is that learners have to do tasks with the information to get to the next step, which means that learners have to thoroughly comprehend what the townspeople have said. A demo can be downloaded at http://www.ef.com/mm/products/planet.html; reviews are available online at http://www.chorus.cycor.ca/Duber/escape.html and in print form in CAELL Journal 7:3 (1997).
This multimedia program teaches Canadian history, geography and culture at two levels of language difficulty (English and French). The geography section provides detailed information about regions, provinces and territories in Canada. The history unit is divided into the following six titles: Early History, Colonial Period, Canada Grows, Exploration, Confederation and Canada Today. Other features available on this program are a talking dictionary, an index for research assignments, scratch pad activities, Canadian Citizenship test, and other activities. Network of 5 - $150, network of 10 - $275, network of 20 - $500. CD-ROM.
Simulated machine assembly line. CD-ROM for Mac or Windows.
We use lessons prepared according to what we are teaching to our students. This can be used to identify food items and build up vocabulary on food and drinks, identify animals, practice clothing items, and do other beginning-level vocabulary tasks. (MP)
A creative writing CD-ROM, which lets you or your students write, direct, and play your own animated shows with talking characters. You select the scene, you direct the actors, you write the dialogue, you choose the music and special effects. You can screen it in the theater by clicking on the projector. There's even an Idea Machine which provides story starters, plot twists, and dialogue suggestions based on the scene you've chosen and the specific personalities of your characters. Uses computerized voices; sometimes you have to fiddle with spelling to get them to sound right. (SA) Formerly sold by Theatrix, it is good to see this title reappear.
Like its predecessor Hollywood, Hollywood High has students write and direct an animated show with talking characters. The settings and characters are high school-oriented, so this is more attractive to teens but less useful for adults than Hollywood. Students select the scene and characters, place and move the actors, write the dialogue, and choose the special effects. Because it uses synthesized rather than digitized voices, they can be odd. It's possible to tweak the spelling to improve the pronunciation, but the point of this is the dialogue among the learners creating the show, not the end result itself. This is not recommended as a listening skill builder, but it's a great tool for discussion at the computer. CD-ROM. Formerly sold by Theatrix, it is good to see this title reappear.
This offers historical footage from ABC News as well as still photos and text about the life of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Clips of young adults talking about the effect of the Movement on their lives today are also included. The program consists of a double-sided videodisc controlled by a HyperCard stack. There are extensive options for viewing, including with accompanying text, in Spanish or English, or in clips to copy to a videotape. Because the options are numerous, students will probably need an introduction to the program by a teacher. For best language learning results, the teacher should give students information gathering or information transfer tasks to perform. The strength of the program is in the large quantity of information provided in a hypertext format that allows movement among ideas.
A computerized version of one of Mario Rinvolucri's grammar games, combining language learning with strategy. It's a virtual boardgame based on the ancient Japanese game "Go" in which students must master an area of language in order to win. MindLines is the American English version while MindGame is the British English version. Students can play against each other or against the computer. Each of the five levels comes on a separate CD-ROM or as a compilation. It comes with an authoring component. A demo is available from the website.
Opinion Zone titles deal with the language of expressing opinions, built around a studio debate. The topics of these debates include Gun Law, European Union, and No More Roads. In addition to the studio material, Opinion Zone titles include a variety of interviews with people ranging from an Australian government minister to a street vendor. Opinion Zone titles are not intended to be self-contained courses; rather, they are classroom resources that teachers can call on to support an existing study programme. Each title is sold separately for approximately $90, with 5-user and network versions available. CD-ROM.
Students make decisions following a simulated trip along the Oregon Trail. They can choose the month and year to start, with different hazards accordingly. The program has excellent graphics and a lot of information is presented on screen in the course of the simulation. Includes digitized speech. This lends itself to use in cooperative learning plans where each student in a team has responsibility for monitoring different information. There are a lot of resources about this period such as pioneer journals that can be used effectively in conjunction with this program. Having the students keep a journal of their simulated trip also works well as an extension activity. On CD-ROM. The earlier version, Oregon Trail, is still available in disk or CD-ROM version and is slightly less expensive.
In this city simulation, learners plan and manage a city through periods of growth, recession, and various natural disasters. Getting started takes a fair bit of time and teacher work to prepare students, even at advanced levels. Once learners know the basics, however, the activity is very engaging. This works best as a group activity since many different areas need simultaneous attention to avoid the city's financial collapse and/or physical destruction. Other variations include SimEarth, SimAnt, SimCity 2000, SimTown, and SimTower. SimTown is described below. A demo version is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM.
A CD-ROM based simulation where students build and manage a small town. The program features animated graphics showing people in houses, buildings and around town. Students can even design the citizens of the town--the kinds of clothes they wear, where they eat, where they go each day etc. As the town grows it uses up water and produces garbage so teams of students need to negotiate how they will keep their town growing and healthy.
Role-playing game with voice recognition. Fully-functional shareware program. The object of the game for students is to go through a house collecting money and fighting monsters. But instead of passively clicking on buttons to make their character act, students direct the action with their voices.
Learners use the included picture cards to create a story that they can then tell to their classmates. Learners click on and drag the images they want to the desired location on the page. Students can also type in words. The Deluxe version reads words letter by letter, word by word, or by sentence and supports QuickTime movies. This graphical program will require a task set by the teacher for students to have much language learning benefit from using it. Runs on a CD-ROM under Windows or on the Mac.
In this HyperCard stack from Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, students attempt to identify states and/or capitals on a US map. Students can also jump to a reference section. High scorers are recorded in a permanent Hall of Fame.
This multimedia CD-ROM is based on forty-eight authentic video interviews recorded on the streets of Cambridge in England. The program is built around task-based activities in which learners use language to achieve real outcomes like reporting people's opinions on widely-discussed issues. This is supplemented with a closer look at some of the particular features of authentic everyday language.
Detective mystery/ adventure. Students need to use travel and geographic clues to solve the mystery. From Gary Towne: I first used an older version of Carman on a HD-less AT. I highly recommend having an atlas and an international almanac that includes color pictures of the flags of the world on just a few pages to facilitate easy scanning. If your class has a variety of ethnicities represented, the class-room corporate knowledge of the world should be fairly diverse, but there are often some real stumpers in Carmen that maybe no one would know. I asked for volunteers to take turns on the keyboard, to handle the atlas and almanac, as well as to record the clues and progress on the board for all to see. This makes the progress more logical. Also, I had the students take turns reading the text on the screen. They loved it. Some of us ended up staying after school to try to catch Carmen, because too much class time would be used to finish the whole game. This is where having a computer lab of some sort would be useful. Enjoy!
CD-ROM interactive mystery. Versions are available in a variety of languages, so students could try it in their language first, then again in English.
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