Using Podcast in language education

I listened to the Podcast named ESL Podcast 991 – Describing Distances, which talks about a conversation between a man and a woman discussing about the distances. In this podcast there are a lot of vocabulary words that describing the distances. As a future Chinese teacher in China, I found these kind of Podcasts are highly helpful in English education. Take this Podcast as an example, the speakers speak the dialog very slow and clear, which makes it easier for Chinese students to understand as well as practicing their listening skills. Further more, if I am going to teach something about describing distances, I can let the students to listen to the Podcast firstly before our lesson to have a general idea of our theme. There is also a script of the dialog on the website, which helps the listeners to fully understand. 

The explanations of each sentence and each word are very clear and elaborate. This Podcast is just like a short lesson, where the host is the teacher. I will encourage my future students to subscribe the Podcasts they like and listen to them frequently, of course they have to be related to English learning. While they learning new knowledge about English, they also practicing their English listening by listening to the native speakers' pronunciation, which is hard to get access to in China. 

If I can find some good Podcasts, I can use them as the contents to teach in class. Like some passages or dialogues that I can use as materials to assist my teaching. Students can benefit a lot from the Podcasting. 

Exploring Epals

Epals is a website which provide world-wide connections for people to understand the world better.In this website, there are several features that worth our attentions.
The first feature is the "2014 Junior Folklorist Challenge", where students from age 8-18 can join this program and discover a tradition to share with others. In another program named "Spark Lab", students can become an inventor and join the Global Invent-It Challenge. Students can experience new cultures without leaving classrooms.

By selecting languages and ages, students can match a classroom on the website. Once there are a list of classrooms you can join, by reviewing the details, students can find the most interested classroom and take part in it. Students can contact and collaborate with the teachers that they interested. They can also find some projects on the website, where they can find a project and join one to collaborate with other students from all over the world.

There are many centers for students to explore, such as common core implementation center, the game room, science center, and the writing center, etc.

In the teacher resources part, we can find several collaborating tools, experiences, resources that teachers can use in their classrooms.There is also a teacher forum for teachers to communicate and exchange ideas.

For me, this website is so strong and multi-faced. I would like to let my students to join one classroom and contact with those excellent teachers to learn and ask questions. As for teacher myself, the collaboration tools that I can take into my classroom are of great help. 

Comic strip generators

I learned three comic strip generators in this mod, and I used the Dvolver to make my own comic. My movie is the Spring Break.

This is the most interesting mod I have ever finished. I like comics myself, and I believe the students also like comics. Using the cartoon characters to perform a conversation or tell a story is a great way to teach the target language. I can use these tools to create comic strips which presenting the conversations in the textbooks. Instead of reading the books, students can watch an interesting comic, while learn some new words and sentences. The interesting and vivid comic strips can no doubt attract the students' attention and leave a deeper impression in their heads. If allowed, I would like to make every conversation scripts in the book into comics in my future teaching. I think this is a great way to make the classes more attractive and effective. And also, the students can make their own comics using their own words and knowledge as their homework, which can increase their willing to learn and create.
All in all, these kind of comic strip generators are great education tools. Teachers should think about using them in their teaching process.

Use Animoto to create a story

In this mod 10, I learned how to make free short video using the internet tool named Animoto. The video I made is cute and more attractive than text and pictures. Because videos are always more vivid and visually attractive. I can use this program to let students to take photos in their daily routines, upload the phones to their computers and then they can make their own videos using their target language to write down the captions or text. And also I can create interesting videos telling a story in target language and play them in class to let the students to learn the target language in a relax atmosphere. As a teacher, I can also make videos for my class, such as making a video about our class activities, in order to track the students' improvement. In this case, this tool is a means to keep journals.

Following is the link to my video.
One day, a hungry fox came across with some grapes...

Digital Storytelling

"Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content,including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component." (7 Things YouShould Know About Digital Storytelling)."Digital storytelling at its most basic core is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. There are a wealth of other terms used to describe this practice, such as digital documentaries, computer-based narratives, digital essays, electronic memoirs, interactive storytelling, etc." (The Educational Uses of DigitalStorytelling).Using multiple media applications to write a story and share it worldwide online is a great method in education field. As a teacher, I can create my own stories online with sound, pictures, videos, and many others media to make the stories vivid and interesting. I believe students can learn new vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structures from the e-stories I made. And also, students can make their own digital stories online and share them with teachers and classmates. In this way, students not only can learn language, but also can learn many skills in various fields.

A Serious Game that students can play off class

I chose the game named "third world farmer".This game contains knowledge of different vocabulary, and can foster students' sense of mathematics. In this game, there are two adult farmers and their children, and they can give birth to newborns according to the players' will. There are several fields that players can plant different kinds of crops. But a player have to use the limited amount of money to buy some crops and plant them. When the crops have been planted, players have to click the button on the upper right side to let time goes by. One year goes by very quickly and the crops are ready to be collected. On the screen we can see the details about what happened during the year and the amount of money the we made by selling the crops. I played the game for sixteen times and I found that even though this game is simple, it can teach us a lot of knowledge. First of all, there may have some unfamiliar words to the learners, thus they will get to know the words by playing this game. Moreover, this game teaches us to balance the population and the annual income of a family, and teaches us to consider the situations of weather and the country's economy. Students can not only learn language through this game, but also can learn some skill of mathematics and whole-picture consideration. This was the first time I played it and my farm was in poor management and money became less and less. This game is not to easy to play and calls for some strategies.

Students will learn more than they can get n a classroom. Such as the decision making about what crops should plant and how many money should they spend, and even whether the two farmers can have another baby or not. This game is a kind of simulation game which teaches players about the knowledge of management.Thus, the objectives of playing this game can be learning new words relating to the farm work, as well as learning to manage and balance the expense and income.

For the words part, I shall use a simple quiz to assess their master of those new words, or let them  to write a report of their farms' benefits. For the management skills, I can see who earned the most amount of money after a certain period of time. And also, students have to write a reflection about what they have learned from this game.

Let Us "Escape The Room"

As i learned the term gamification, I knew that it has been defined in a number of different ways.

"Wiki defines Gamification as the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics, and/or game style into anything. This definition is purposely broad to support the many uses of the word outside of the context of business." Games can be attractive and make students feel engaged, which can help them learn and practice. Games are primarily valuable due to the emotional responses they evoke and the experiences they engender in their players.Franciosi suggests that "both casual games and serious games can play arole in second language development. He states that arcade type or flashcard gameswould work well for practicing discrete subsets of skills because they tend to be repetitive andrequire players to practice isolated or very small sets of skills, and comewith the added benefit of a dynamic, computer-mediated interaction thatsupports flow. On the other hand, role play games, strategy gamesor simulations can be used to integrate skillsin holistic problem-solving activities." From his article we can learn that gamification in education is also rational and important. 

The game I played is named "The Ballard of Ketinetto 7 ".It is an "escape" game, which I found a little bit difficult and asked for patience and intelligence to perform. I played it for a long time but still cannot "escape". The learning objectives can be learning new words from the walkthroughs or learning how to write a walkthrough by playing escape games. Students are asked to play the game in pairs under the guidance of the walkthrough, and because the game itself is very interesting and engaging, students are easily get involved. As teachers, we can choose a game that has vocabulary which is relevant to the needs and level of the learners, and guide the learners to play the game step by step. A walkthrough is a step-by-step solution to the game, and I will use it either as a guidance when students are playing the game and meeting with some difficulties, or as a post-game review to help students learn the language in the walkthrough. Using images from the game can be great helpful because the images are vivid explanation about each step we should take. I will use images when showing learners what to do next. The simple way to assess weather the objectives have been meet is to give out a little quiz about what we learned on the class, perhaps it is a quiz about new vocabulary or new sentence structures. 

 

How Should We Use Twitter For Professional Development And Teaching

As technology developing rapidly, using lots of Internet tools for educational purpose are not unusual. In the learning of this mod, I learnt about how to use micro-blogging, namely Tweeter, to improve teaching competence.

In the article named "using Tweeter for teachers' professional development", the author mainly talked about using Tweeter for personal use. As a PLA, Tweeter act an important role in professional development. We can get suggestions, resources, answers, and supports from following others on Tweeter, and also we can give offers, encourages, and answers by writing tweets. Further more, I have learnt that there is a tool named Tweeter lists, where I can find tons of lists of people in educational field who share newest resources with the world. I can either subscribe the lists I am interested in, or follow someone inside the list to keep myself being updated about the latest news, resources, links, researches, and many more areas that I am interested in.

"The best way to get the most out of Tweeter is to use it."I learnt that lots of people stop at following and reading, but the best way that can benefits you is to really use it. Tweeter has so many functions waiting for me to exploring. As using Tweeter, I am sharing while learning, reading while writing. Not only my knowledge database can be broaden, but also the writing skill will improving over time. 

Although I am a new user of Tweeter and there are still lots of things that stay miserable about it , I believe Tweeter is a great help and resources for my own professional development.

Join a Twitter Chat

This is the first time I learnt that there is a Twitter chat for people to communicate online.I joined the group named "Education Chat" that began from 12 pm on Tuesday.To write a Tweet and join the conversation,I should add a hashtag "#edchat" for everyone else in the group to see my Tweet.I asked a question but maybe because I joined suddenly and all others were busying talking,no one replied to my question.However,I can read others' micro blogs and their conversations and discussions about a certain topic raised by someone in the chat.I saw someone asked what will happen if we let blogging be a part of CCSS. And some people thought it should be put in the CCSS. Although sometimes I can not follow their thoughts because so many people were talking, which made it a little messy, I still found the Twitter chat is a great way to sharing and learning from others, who may be the experts in your interested field. Further more, I can not only find people talking about their thoughts, but also they sharing some useful links in their Tweets for participants to read and refer. Here we can find tons of worthy and helpful information filtered by others, which is much better than you spend years finding something in the knowledge of sea online. People sharing everything they think useful for educators, talking about their thoughts regarding to a specific topic, discussing about different opinions in the Twitter chat online. Thus, as a new in this field, I definitely will learn a lot from theirs thoughts and experiences. If I keeping join chats like this, I believe it will help me significantly in improving my teaching proficiency.

Social Networking in Education

After I learned the importance of the theory of connectivism,I joined a networking community named "Classroom 2.0".And I found it significantly helpful in sharing and learning with others.

I can find lots of videos made by other members in this community.The videos are mostly about different lessons given by others.By watching these videos I believe I can learn tons of new knowledge about education.There is also a forum in which members can posting their opinions and discuss with each other,in order to sharing and learning.There are also different groups of different sub-fields,which facilitate every member coming with their own specific interested field.Members are all willing to share what they know, and there is a great amount of useful information on the website waiting for me to discover.I can learn from people who are far more expert than me in this social networking website.Further inspection is needed to utilize it to the most.

A learner is like a...

As the article named " A Learning Theory for the Digital Age"says, "Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual."In my point of view,a learner is like a computer,which needs a "programmer" to input some programs for it to function appropriately,in order to give it the ability to resolve problems independently.Like a computer,a learner firstly needs a teacher to instruct him how to learn before they gain the ability to learn from outside world by themselves.

After reading the passage and listening to the radio,I learned a new concept--connectivism."Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories."Like what I said above,a learner is like a computer because s/he needs teachers' instruction of how to learn on their own, and every learner needs to connect to each other as well as the overwhelming information around the world,in order to learn from cooperation,not only with other individuals, but also with organizations.As professor Siemens said in the radio "What is connectivism","we have a need to socialize and negotiate around knowledge." Definitely, today's world is a brand new one in which connections are indispensable,this is true in every field,including education.Because the amount of knowledge today is remarkably large,so we cannot continue the independent learning method any longer.Learners should alternate their primary learning theory and adjust to a new theory which is more fitful into this new digital world.Namely,connectivism. Through cooperating with others,we learn faster,much efficiently.

The use of Curationl Tools----Diigo and Scoop it !

In the Mod 4, I got the first access to two curation tools, which are Diigo and Scoop. To understand what is curation, I checked the website given by the professor. "Social media curation is when you filter, select, review and reposition quality content on the web for a specific audience and/or topic."

The two Internet tools are indeed very helpful nowadays because there are a huge amount of resources out there, which can be reached simply by several mouse clicks. Thus, while those materials and resources provide us with extreme amount of information, they also are time-consuming for us to find what we really need.

Diigo is a cloud-base personal information management system, where I can put anything I collected into the cloud named "my library". And I can get access to my collections from anywhere that support Diigo. "Scoop.it" is similar to "Diigo". It is a "semi-automated curation platform. Scoop.it crawls the web according to a pre-determined criteria and then allows the curator to review and reposition the filtered material prior to publishing." By using these two curation tools, I found they are extremely helpful when collecting something on any website. Also, I would like to compare these two tools by their features for you to choose which one to use.

We can use either of them to save any website and articles in order to reach them easily in the future. They all have the function of highlighting text and adding sticky notes. In addition, they provide the feature to let us add annotations to any text. And all the highlights and annotations can be pertained and access by any device you use. Because they have already been saved in the cloud. We can also use multiple tags to the website we saved for us to find them much easier in both tools. Moreover, in both tools, we can copy and paste from original article to appear in comments about site. In both tools, we can also follow others by simply click on the buttons. Of course others can follow us in reverse. 

The slight differences I noticed are as follows. First, in Diigo we can commend on each other's items but in Scoop, we can not commend but only "like" them. What's more, in Scoop I was offered many recommendations related to my topic but in Diigo there was no suggestion.

I think I will continue using both of them because the Diigo is convenient to save website while the Scoop has its advantage in follow others' topics that I am interested in. Thus both of them has some features that I really like to utilize in the future. I believe my life will be much more easier with the help of them.

By The Year of 2046

By The Year of 2046

    After I watched these two videos named "Classroom of Tomorrow" and "The Future Starts Now", I get a better understanding of the importance of utilizing advanced technology in education.Future education will embrace its revolution caused by technology.

    As technology improving, we now have tons of gadgets, such as iPad, laptop, smart mobile phone etc.,all of which can help us get access to all kinds of books and information in the world.When I was watching the video "Classroom of Tomorrow", I was so excited to see what the classroom looks like in the future.No blackboard, no chalks,and a teacher can put pictures onto the screen from his phone by simply waving his right hand!It was like watching a scientific movie.Students can even communicate with Siri in their iPhones and ask "him" whatever questions they have.Moreover,I was astonished when a boy change a window into a big screen of his phone,and manipulate apps on the window!

    Advanced technology just make education much easier in the future.All teaching processes and activities can be done under technology.Most importantly,students are interested in learning with the help of ICT,which is short for "Information and Communication Technology".Students will definitely learn better by using ICT.ICT makes school more relevant and motivating for students, and if more students learn better, more will be motivated and fewer will drop off the university.Thus,utilizing ICT in school as well as in education can also help build a knowledge-based society. Advanced technology just make learning and teaching much more easier in the future,for all the information in the world is just at our fingertips,a few mouse clicks away.

    However,problem is how to utilize ICT smartly to improve learning.A good start is to make ICT as the fifth basic skill in the curriculum apart from reading,writing,speaking and maths.

    Schools had better take students' interests in ICT, and use ICT in teacher training process, which may encourage teachers to use ICT in their future classes.

    I am excited and encouraged by these videos.I can hardly imagine what the world will be like in the near future. But whatever it turns into, I believe it must be a better and brighter world embraced by advanced technology.

    

     

Using Blogs in English Learning and Teaching

    Students are always more enjoy using Internet than studying in classroom.They are exercising reading and writing skills under no awareness.Thus,if we can import Internet tools into language teaching,the effectiveness will be unusually significant.Blog is one of those Internet tools that can be used by both language teachers and students to posting ideas,sharing materials,making comments and so on.This exciting method of learning and teaching can reduce the tedious of traditional task.
    The first way I can use the blog is to create a reflective,journal-type blog.By using this blog,a language teacher can reflect on the teaching experience weekly or monthly.And reviewing what I wrote before can help me decide what worked for the students and what did not work well.Furthermore,teachers can share ideas for teaching activities and language games using in the classroom by posting blogs,reading others', and making comments.This is a beneficial tool for communication.
    The second way I can use the blog is to start a class blog in order to post class-related information like syllabus and homework.I can also sharing reading and video materials to the students to facilitate their off-class self-study.By making a reflection about a finished class,students can make comments on the activities,which will help teachers to improve their future decisions.Moreover,language learners can benefit from each other from the sharing materials and comments they made.    Learning standards:    Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions.

My first day at Blogger !

This is interesting! Although I wrote a blog back in my home country, I did not keep it as a regular thing to do.It has been a long time since I wrote my last blog. I think it maybe because only few people read what I wrote,which discouraged me a little.I love it here because it somehow relax me, perhaps owing to the comfortable background.