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.