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."

Sim 3 : A perfect game to learn America

  Sim 3 is really a fantastic strategy game for players to learn American culture and everyday English vocabulary. In this game, players can create their own virtual sims making livings, developing skills and explore endless possibilities of life. I installed it in my laptop and have played it more than a hundred times, it's a life-time game and really never lost its attraction.

  The learning objectives of this game can be numerous, here I list the two main objectives:

  First, students are able to learn American cultures through the game. For example, the most interesting and challenging part of this game is socializing. Players can learn how to socialize in America. Players have to control their sims socialize with other sims in the game to expend their circles and make relationships with others in order to meet the needs for socializing and explore new opportunities. By choosing the different options in the conversation, such like chat, get to know, joke about work, apologize (there're just so many options), their sims or players will find traits of others and gradually grasp certain social rules to make friends and better relationship faster and efficiently.

  Second, students are able to expand their vocabulary through the game. Sim 3 provides a building mode for players to build their house and decorate their rooms of their own (in fact, I found many American families like to build and fix house by themselves). In the building mode, there are just so many stuffs categorized by plumbing, appliance, surface, etc. In this mode, players can find almost everything they could think in the real world, and use them to make an ideal house. The game also require them to buy certain items in this mode in order to meet the needs of their sims. In the world map, players can find more places like market and theater, their sims could buy groceries and get recreation according to different situation. Through this building or purchasing process, students are able to learn a lot of words of everyday life.
  The game is so easy to handle because it's just to make the sim live and learn while the player also learn how to live a life and learn new thing. For the assessment, I think group discussion would be fit for the culture aspect. Students could share what they learned through the game and techniques in social communication while they could also put them into use in the discussion. And for vocabulary, a small quiz on certain category  of vocabulary or a vocabulary competition in groups would be the choice.
  Students would love this game! If you want to know more about Sim. Check here.

Let's play games!

 

Do your find language learning boring? Do you feel it's a daunting process to learn grammar and memorize vocabularies? If yes, then you should ask yourself another question -- Do you love GAMEs?

  I believe you must like games, there's ought to be one game you love to play. But what if I told you the essence of game is just like opening a million of boxes to find 15 pie? You should take a little time to watch the lecture given by Chatfield T, "7 ways game reward the brain". In his lecture, he explained that "this sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling." A game is able to make boring stuff interesting! How?

  Chatfield T provided us the functions of how games can do that. First, games are never made too difficult nor too easy for you to play, they keep you confident to play while make you feel achievement bit by bit. Players also enjoy the experience bars measuring progress, they could see

they are making progress. Second, games provide you multiple long and short tasks,people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged. Third, reward, games reward you for your achievement but don't punish failure. Fourth, feed back, through the game we could teach lesson of things that hard to touch and understand. And the last one, the element of uncertainty, games always have uncertainty to make you curious and keep on exploring.

  Isn't it amazing? What if we combine games with language learning? Can we also make language learning interesting and engaging? Sure, that's what we called gamification, "applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging."

   Let's take a look at the game pacman, one of my favorite which I played thousands of times in my life. It's a very simple games, you only need four keys to control the pacman to eat all the beans while avoid the

monsters. It's a very good way to teach kids simple expression of directions through this game. I once used this game in my teaching. An objective for me to use this game is to teach my students the basic direction words, and other basic vocabularies such as different fruits (I believe there's another version of pacman that will reward player different fruits at the end of each level). Besides, the game is a good ice-breaker for shy students to get familiar with everybody (I have to say silent kids have talent in playing games), while they can shout out and help one who was playing the game, they also improve their communication skills. Students engaged in the game very much through competing with each other, I group them into groups and set the time limitation, the group using the less time and scoring more would win. They took turns to play and the atmosphere was really exciting while I heard them shouting out in English. I think a walkthrough at the beginning of this game activity is necessary, through instructing students how to play this game and how should they effectively help each other through speaking  in the competition. As teacher, I only monitored the competition and made a free chat with them after the game as a motivator, I asked them how many monster they skilled and who scored the most and how many kinds of fruits they collected. These questions motivated their will to speak; I always found topics to connect my teaching with these game.  There're many ways to assess students' knowledge. The discussion is one of them, through the free discussion of anything happened in the game, teachers are able to know each student's level and how they find the game and how much they engaged in it. I would also use other games to assess them; let students write certain category vocabulary in groups or instruct them directions and let them raise hands and point out directions to response. The images of this game is not that clear but I think I can make use of the cartoon figure of pacman and monsters in other lessons, for example, make up story using them, which would make the story more attractive to students since they are so familiar with them.