Use Podcast in English Teaching

  English Café is a series of ESL podcast. It updates new episode every week. Each episode would talk about interesting topics on history, books, music, etc. I listened to the latest one episode, English Café 448, topic: Famous Songs – “Que Sera Sera”; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. In this episode, it provides the story of a famous song and a interesting book with a great deal of words to learn.

  I could use this episode as a motivator to engage students in learning new vocabulary. As all the new words are explicitly explained combined with the meaning of context--a song in the first part, student will learn new words while they learn how to sing a nice song and learn a nice story. It will be more interesting than simply ask them to recite those vocabularies.
  I could also use this podcast episode as a additional listening material for high school students to expand their horizon. I could ask students to write a refection paper or journal about what they learn from the content and bring it to the class to discuss. Students will discuss what they learned and the questions they got through the listening. Students will develop listening skills and communication skills through the task.
  Or I could make a list of questions for students to find answers through listening to the podcast. The object will be to let students improve the skill of grasping the gist of a content, learn how to locate key words in a listening material and predict meaning through the context. Or I could ask them to write down the script of the podcast.
  As this series is so helpful for students to expand their vocabulary, I would definitely recommend them to keep listening to it as a hobby.

Learn from the world

"Students are motivated to learn through experience, and with ePals I’ve introduced an experience beyond the classroom." M. Orlando, Italy

ePals is an online community that provides connections for people around the world. You can find numerous learning projects that incorporate students from around the world. You will realize that the world is so big and there are so many people just like you, eager to learn the outside world.

There are various good projects in the long list. If you were just curious about the world, scan the list and you will find many interesting projects. For example, I found a project posted by a group of students from India. They are 11-20 students of age group 11-13 seeking partners for friendship. In their project description they wrote that they would like to hear from Chinese students and discuss topics like Food, Preserving Monuments, Chinese Terracotta Army, etc. I like their topics; it feels good to know what people interested in my country. I would like to join their project and share my knowledge with them and also learn their culture.

So you can see that it is easy to put your goal on it and attract people from all over the world to participate in your project. ePal also provides categorized search on the side bar. You can narrow your target projects by choosing region, project type, duration, collaboration and common core. You can also simply type in the key words like topics or country.

For teachers, we would get inspired from various projects created by teachers and students around the world. A Korean teacher posted a Culture in a Box project. They send out a Culture Box full of posters, t-shirts, puzzles, pictures and messages about Korean culture each week. Similarly, a class in Japan seeks partners to exchange City Video. The creative thinking in teaching outside the classroom is perfectly revealed on this website.

And as a future ESL teacher I would say ePals is one of the best to teach student cultures because they could learn authentic content. I could also learn how to make a better lesson plan on teaching culture; there are so many experienced teachers posting gorgeous lesson plans, just like building a data base. Besides, by clicking Contact Leader in project page, I suppose I can contact and keep in touch with teachers, learn and share experience. I would definitely suggest my students and my college to use this site in the future.

Teaching with Comic Strip

Commander! May I ask you a question? 

  Here's a humor cartoon I made with GoAnimate.

  Considering some features of this comic strip website, I give the reasons for using this kind of tools in the future as follows:

1. Cartoon that moves is better. The one I made is based on an old joke. It looks more vivacious to watch those characters moving and make funny faces. Students will be more interested in moving actions. Teachers will get a better result in activating students. 
2. Using comic strip tools to create a micro-movie is fun. To make a gorgeous one, you have to think every point you gonna make: the plot, dialogues, spellings. Students could learn skills about how to be a good writer and director.

  I would like to use it as something could be used in a writing class. I'll give students short stories or articles to read; ask each one to write down the gist of the story and make a comic strip to show everybody what's going on in the story. Students will be able to improve their competence of summarizing and writing skills.

More Digital Storytelling

Welcome to Buffalo

   How to make such a cool stuff? Check Animoto!

You can create your own digital story with it; add photos you take,type something to record your life. Animoto provides different styles of slide shows and music played with your story.
  When I  made my first story with it, I started with checking my photos. Memories of good time with parents and friends flooded into my mind; scenery that I had seen became clear and vivacious again. Then I started to think, one of the functions by making a digital story is memory recalling. Teachers could make good use of this function in many ways. Teachers could ask students to use what they learn to make a digital story and share with each other; when students watch their videos, they review the knowledge and consolidate what they have learned. Teachers could also ask student to keep a digital diary that records their life and make a presentation to share with others.
  Another thing about digital storytelling is activating students in the classroom. The students will be motivated to present, share ideas; with teachers' help, they will find using pictures to tell a story or present something interesting is so much fun. They will also learn considering what their audience would like in order to make a attractive work, which is very important in future writing.

Storytelling--Let's do it in digital ways

You can learned some basic concepts of digital storytelling in "7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling". By combining the art of telling stories with graphic, audio, video and Web publishing,

we created digital storytelling. The resources available to incorporate into a digital story are virtually limitless; they made digital stories instructional, persuasive, historical or reflective.

Digital storytelling can be used to facilitate various learning styles and connect to students’ interest in technology. There are storytelling programs promoting the notion that user with little or technical background should be able to create digital stories. In fact, a number of simple applications can be used to make digital stories, for example VoiceTread. The storyteller can use a script and add audio effects or images into the story to rich and support the emotions and ideas in it.

Creating digital stories would benefit students from thinking critically about effective combinations among audio and visual elements. It’s not just combining things together in whatever ways. Students have to think how to use them to support their ideas and consider how their audience would be attracted into their stories. Thus they could improve their logic thinking and challenge themselves to do their best while searching for resources and making decisions to accomplish their goals.

Digital storytelling can be used both by teachers and students. As I said above, digital storytelling could be a good way to assign students to tasks such like presentations and brainstorms. Students would share their stories and get feedback from others. They can improve communicating skills and competences of expressing ideas. Teachers could use digital storytelling to connect students’ interests with various topics. A history story would not be boring with pictures and sound effects in early childhood education. You could find more inspiration in "The educational uses of storytelling."