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.