Community Through Technology: An Online ESL Instructor Toolkit

To help bring this research to the classroom, I have identified and listed below below key principles to consider when using technology to build community in online ESL classrooms for each of the three focus areas of gamification, community building, and storification.

Further down the page, you will find examples of specific online activities employing these strategies. Each activity is mapped to one or more of the key domains using the icons indicated below, and each activity is mapped to the top principles that it uses from the applicable domain(s). Many utilize more than three principles, but I have listed only what I consider to be the three with the strongest links to the specific activity.

Gamification

Community Building

Storification

Below are activities for you to use as is or to serve as inspiration and/or fodder for your own activities. To make it easier to identify those types you may be most interested in, depending on if you are more interested in pursuing strategies related to gamification, storification, or community building, each activity's focus area(s) are indicated by the icon(s).

Since these strategies are often complementary (for instance, Le (2020) finding that gamification can have positive impacts not only on intrinsic motivation and learner engagement, but also on collaborative learning, and that gamified environments often also incorporate storificaiton), many of the activities employ more than one of the three strategies and thus have more than one icon.