ESL Podcast

Podcast is a great way to learn languages in nowadays, because it has the advantages as followings: first, it has a relatively authentic dialogue setting: from the list of ESL Pod (learning customs), the dialogue often happens in real-life scenarios; second, the range of podcast topics is really wide to choose from, it almost covered every sides of language study. Another important feature to language learners, besides the audio dialogue itself, podcast also provide text scripts as well, which makes the materials more easy to understand. Usually, in the first part of podcast, is the record of a dialogue or conversation, then comes with the explanation to certain language points of the episode.

For language teachers, I will use podcast as part of my introduction material in the beginning of class,   as part of complementary material to introduce the certain topics or unit contents. In additional, the podcast can be used as the listening comprehension material to mark out key vocabulary and use of sentence patterns. I also want my students to read after the conversation because the speed of speakers is slow enough for even beginners to follow. Finally, I want my students to make up their own conversations and do the role-play.

ePals

ePals is a great integrated websites for language studying. It mainly have three parts: global community, Cricket--a reading resources which contains apps with various study resources for children, This is school is like a teacher's forum where teachers can share and search for teaching resources. 

For different study groups and various language learners, ePals have different categories like grades, languages and disciplines. It is much easier for both teachers and learners to locate the right sources and is helpful to find what they need at the same time. 

Another good feature of this website is it emphasize that students learn through experiences, in this case, the materials provided are mostly very authentic. It also has a good combination with technology of today, it provided learners with education app which enables learners all over the world have access to its resources. Therefore, I might utilize the teaching materials on this website in future and recommended this as complementary sources to my students as well. 

Storybird- Comics brings fun and knowledge

The first time I learnt about that comics could apply to education purpose is in one of my grammar class, my teacher used comics strips to demonstrate certain grammar knowledge, embedded with grammar structure within it. At that time, as a student myself, find out this way to teach grammar is quite engaging. 

So, today I made my own comics which are focus on grammar as well. This Thanksgiving Plan comics focus on demonstrate the way of how to asking for people's opinions. And two structure I used here is quite basic and simple one: how about/what about doing something. 

Overall, I think the idea of introducing grammar via comics is great for teachers. Also, I think instead of making students do regular grammar exercises, asking them to make their own comic strips with the apply of target structure is a good way to check their understanding as well. 

Stupeflix-A simple way to make your own photo stories

This is my first time to try make my own video and with the help of online tools, the outcome is quite satisfying. The tool I used is called "Stupeflix", it is an online editing video tool that can assist users to create their own videos. The fabulous feature of this tool is: a) it provide new users with 60 second photo show; and b) the video can be converted to HD version for free(one-time trail).

I made a short video about "how to plan a trip" and I think this can be used as a warm-up activity at the beginning of a class, since watching a video and then introducing the topic is always an attracting and popular way in a second language classroom.

In future, I think not only myself, but also my students can utilize this tool to complete assignments like: video presentation, digital story telling, field trip slide show...and much more. The advantage of easy to make and time-saving makes this a really great tool to use. 

Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling, as it entails from the name itself, it is a kind of storytelling that through the means of technology tools like computers, internet. According to an article named "What is Storytelling", digital storytelling is "around the idea of the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia". 

Nowadays, education and technology are really closely combine together, both teachers and students are highly relied on high-techs, therefore digital storytelling is welcoming to learners as an educational tool. To apply this approach, there are seven elements should be bear in mind as The 7 Elements of Storytelling refers to as followings:"point of view; a dramatic question; emotional content; the gift of your voice; the power of the soundtrack; economy; pacing." However, for educational purpose, the requirements are slightly different from the elements above.

First thing is to determine the overall purpose of the story, then choose the perspective of narrator's point of view. A dramatic question or questions should also been make, after that is the choice of content. The clarity of voice and pacing of the narrative also matters in the storytelling, with the use of a meaningful audio soundtrack, quality images, video and other multimedia elements can really add content to the story itself. Last, it is the story detail and grammar/language usage part should be pay attention to. Overall, digital storytelling is a good variety form to apply in class. 

Serious Games for Autonomous Learning

The game I played is Third World Farmer: "an experiment in the genre of Serious Games, it simulates some of the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd world countries."In the game, the player gets to run a farm located in Africa and is faced with difficult choices that bring by poverty and war.

In the game setting, players will see many different reasons that result in money loss or even the death of family members, for instance: civil war, corrupt officials, corn harvest fails, etc. After each turns, the player will get a brief summary of balance and a short description of reasons lead to this results. 

 To better understand the meaning that game designers want to convey through, students/players should fully comprehend the explanation/reasons of "Event of the Year", this often provided randomly, however, after playing several turns, the player will gradually realized one accidental events can lead to serious outcome like starvation or family death. This is unimaginable for people who lives in industrialized society because none of these events will happened on us. After playing this game, I will ask students to write a report of what events they've encountered in this game and what kind of actions they think can takes to prevent those happened. 

To assess the students' understanding, they need to summarize the issues and events which lead to a specific results; put forward suggestions of how they think can help to improve the current situation. Finally, through playing, I hope students can understand the initial intent of game developer, start to make change from them own.  

Gamification in L2 Classroom

This week's topic is gamification, by a definition provided from a website called Gamification Wiki:"Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging". By this definition, we can understand that one important reason to introduce game into learning and education is game is able to create fun and engaging atmosphere in the process of learning. 

To get a better idea, I read 10 Gaming Genres to Adapt in Class, in this article, the writer wrote about which kind of games can be used and how to apply it in real classroom environment. Next, it's time for me to try one of those games! I choose Bathroom Escape because I've already played similar games like this before. The key to this sort of game is try to find out every details, collect all useful items and try to apply those in the right place.  For this game, I was lucky enough to get through in one time. During the process of playing, I considered that if I use this game for my language teaching classes, my teaching objectives might focus on vocabularies and grammar (directional propositions), I will have my students try to play this game and remember the words and items names that appeared, also I will ask them to describe the place between two or three objects. For example: in this picture, I will ask the position between the picture on the wall and the vase on the floor. The expected answer should be: the painting is above the vase or the vase is under the painting.  

In a large classroom, if I decided to adopt this game, I might divide the whole class into several different groups, each group can finish this game independently, try to make them compete with each other. Me, as a teacher, I will play the role of monitor and observer, if they come across any difficulties during the game, I can give them explicit/implicit hints. I will not use a walk through during activity, but if they fell this game is really too difficult or get stuck with last few steps, I will demonstrate a walk through in front of the whole class. Also, for the review of vocabulary and grammar, I will use the screen shot from scenes of the game to help them reinforce knowledge. Last, to assess whether students have acquired the things I want them to learn, I will have a quiz in the following class to check their understanding. 

Connected Classroom

When I first get in touch with Twitter and that sort of tools, I always think twitter is just another popular chat website. Never thinking about education and social media entertainment could somehow blend together. In this week, after I joined my first twitter chat and browsed several articles which concerned with professional development between education and twitter, I realized all this time I have been underestimate the power of twitter. 

First thing is, there are a lot people don't realize twitter is a powerful search engine just like google. As in one of blog It's All about Hashtag mentions that "if you know how to search effectively, you can find pretty much everything" and one of search skill is using hashtag. For example, I mentioned that I joined a twitter chat last week, which is about foreign language learning, the hashtag used in this chat is #langchat. If you need to find resources or join this chat, simply type #langchat, then you can see all the instant results of all discussions under this topic. On the other hand, you can also create hashtag, build some topics that you want to discuss with people who also interested in the same question. With the effective use of hashtag really makes you become more informed and open-minded. 

The second blog post I read is called "60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom", in this post, the author is quite straight forward in introducing the ways that twitter can be used in classroom. By listing and explaining 60 different ways of twitter works between teachers and students, I really inspired by some of practicals that mentioned in the post. One is "student engagement in large lectures", since how to involve many students as possible in a large size class is always a question that teacher needs to be answered (especially teachers in China, because it is normal that there are 50-70 students in one class). It is difficult for 70 students doing group work at the same time because it might cause chaos, however, if students can use twitter to participate the discussion in class, their ideas can be pop up instantly in screen and teacher can choose some of tweets to ask further explanation. The rest of these tweets can still be discussed after class due to time limits. In a nutshell, I think this is another effective way of instant communication. 

In summarize, twitter can be a good mediator for learners and students. There are many possible ways to use it for effective learning and teaching. Therefore, from now on twitter is playing an increasing important role for professional development. 

Twitter Chat#langchat

Today I joined a twitter chat #langchat, which topic is foreign language. It is really amazing that I can see so many people post their thoughts and share useful links at the same time, and I scroll down find out something I really interested on about foreign language learning.

I found a website called"Speak to the Future", there is a learning campaign named "1000 words challenge", the writer said "not everyone will become a fluent linguist, but the aspiration of everyone to have 1000 words in another language is realistic and achievable". I found this quite convincible so I decided to give a try, sign in with my Facebook account and the screen begin to show japanese words with English explanation. After introduce those words, the system will test the meaning in English immediately with time limit. Since I have learned a little Japanese before, the result is fine and I felt really good about this learning website because I think I  can actually learned something might useful in future. (The picture below is my test result)

Overall, I found twitter chat is really form for professional development because it provides so many ways and possibilities for both educators and learners to follow. You are the center of learning, you can choose what content you'd like to follow and browse. Moreover, you can find people just like you, share common interest and have connected through this way. 

Google Plus- My Social Networking Group

I think Google Plus is a good place for me and I joined a group named Educational Technology. This is a group aimed at advancing education through technology, therefore in this community people can share all things to do with Educational Technology. 

By participating in this group, it allows me to scroll and refresh newly ideas which concerned with newest educational technology and teaching ideas from all aspects. I can also add comments and share my points under each post. In all, this circle/community keeps me informed and catch up with latest thoughts. 

Learners are like traveler

To start with, I believe almost everyone have heard this cliche saying "life is like a journey", we live and we learn. So whether you want it or not, the life you've been through kept teaching you something. "Tell me and I forgot, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn", said by Benjamin Franklin. We, as learners, are like travelers living and learning during this life-long journey. 

As Cristina Costa mentioned in her blog Learning is like traveling, she think learners should seek to travel/learn in various ways to catch up with today's world. In terms of types of travelers, there are certain sort of traveler who likes travel around places, just for taking pictures then mark this place as "been here before"; there are also travels who like particular type of places or interests to visit, for instance some people travel only for explore the architecture or historic buildings while others might travel for good foods and delicate shops; also, some people are inclined to take adventure, explore the mysterious world. Whichever way are all different styles of traveling. Now, learning is not just read a book or listen to a class, studying seems to always intertwine with different disciplines, as Siemens mentioned in his article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age：“many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime”.

Since technology is in constant progress, as Siemens in the video The Impact of Social Software on Learning  suggested "Knowledge in technology field changes really quickly", hence those knowledges we already known must be updated for everyday and such learning is like traveling metaphor is useful. Learners can always start with familiar things then gradually explore the unknown area with the help of technology tools. Nowadays, there are even more ways through Internet allowed us to absorb information we needed for our course. As Networked Student suggested, with the assist of possible tools, a student can get best sources instantly from all over the world. 

Overall, by experiencing things by learners themselves, people can learn better and memory could lasts longer. In addition, in today's highly connected world within the use of Internet, learners need also to be catch up with those progress and make adaption constantly. 

Diigo v.s. Scoop. it

Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows us to make annotations, tag web-pages and highlight texts. Therefore, Diigo users can highlight text in saved pages and attach notes besides it as well. By looking up in wikipedia, "Diigo" is an acronym from "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and other stuff". With the use of Diigo, you can browse your bookmarks on every computers now. 

On the other hand, Scoop. it! is a website where you can build your own topics and then aggregate relevant websites, some people described this as "your own digital magazine". Therefore, we can tell that Scoop. it is more like a social media website which shares a common feature: they all have a fancy graphic user interface! I love fancy things and good design, at least this is one of the most important feature which appealing to me when I become an user of a website. 

Both two websites have its own APP, though Diigo seems have more negative reviews based on the ratings in apple store. Multiple tags can be used; and readers can make comments on your site; it allows us to follow people or topics we are interested in. Conversely, you can also followed by others. 

However, in some aspects, those two have its distinctive features: the most useful feature of Diigo is that it allows you to highlight certain experts from the text, make notes to it. This can save a lot of time if you try to find certain sentences and words among a large paragraph. In terms of suggestion, the advantage of Scoop. it! is quite obvious. It offered suggestions based on key words/terms that we give.  



Overall, I prefer Scoop. it than Diigo for the reason that it has better-look interface and community circle, as for the feature of highlight and make annotations, I think I can always find another tools to replace it. 

Everything Can be Done within Your Finger

Our life today is largely depends on high-tech, internet and social media. After watching several videos about future teaching and educational change, I think this might give me some ideas to thinking about how to combine education with technology for future teaching.

One of the videos that I watched is "Classroom of Tomorrow", it shows a series of scenarios that might take place in our future classroom. Every students have their own smartphones, iPads or screens for display or search informations that they need to use in classroom. Projection just become so easy to operate for teacher, all teachers needs to do is use their fingers to point from their screen to the projector. Icons on the screen can be zoomed in with two fingers. There will be no paper or textbook, paperless classroom can be realized by the use of those smart terminals based on the internet and technology. 

The other video that I watched is "Social Media Revolution 2011", in this video it shows how great changes that social media have brought into this world, to our daily life. It seems that social media brings the whole world and populations together: news events spreads way fast than in TV channels; if there is a gossip about a super idol, millions of people might knew this in no more than 12 hours because the function of "repost"...It's hard to define whether social medias brings us more benefit or drawbacks to some degrees, but still there is one thing I know for sure: social media is still going to play an important role in every aspects of our life. 

In conclusion, through those videos that I watched, I learned that future education is based on the development of internet, technology and social medias in multiple ways. Being a teacher in future is more challenging than 20 or 30 years ago because teachers are now standing in an era of Information Explosion which means they have to keep up with those educational changes all the time! Overall, I'm excited about using new technologies to bring novel ideas to my students. 

Using Blogs to Meet Learning Standards

Using blogs in language teaching is quite a new and challenging idea to me, but after I read about articles on Blogging in Language Teaching and Seven Reason's Teachers Should Blog, I think I start to  have something in my mind about how to combine blogs and teaching. 

One way I came up with is collaborative writing. Since Rita Zeinstejer suggested in her blog that blogging have the feature of collaborative learning tools. By commenting and exchanging ideas through experts and peers, blogging is one of the most effective way to share thoughts as well as enhancing learning ability. On the one hand, mentors or teachers can easily provide feedbacks on students' work; on the other hand, by watching how other peers are doing their jobs, students themselves also have a better understanding of the assignment or inspired by new ideas. Therefore, using blog for writing assignment is perfect for mediation, and offering feedbacks as well. 

Another option is students can using blog for sharing something they read or write, videos or pictures they found interesting. Blogging can be used as a diary to keep important ideas and memories. A space to express their opinions on contents they are studying. 

Overall, using blog not only can help students improve their writing skills on  collaborative writing, summary, reviews etc., blogging also provide students a chance to be creative in language studying. 

National Standards for Foreign Language Education

COMMUNICATE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
• Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics
• Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.