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.