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.

  

  "Microblogging enables a real-time interaction between users, using different devices, technologies and applications." (Holotescu C & Grosseck G) Twitter, one of the best known microblog platform has more than 600 million users among which one of five are college students. The great potential of education Holotescu and Grosseck's study, they presented a course using a specially designed microblogging platform called Cirip.ro. they suggested that differing from Twitter which open to all the public user, specially designed microblogging, Cirip.ro, comes with the following features:

use in microblogging had already stimulate educators to develop new methodology and explore educational features in micro blogging. In

•   Users have the possibility to specify the domain about which they will write the notes; this makes finding microblogs from a specific domain easier, particularly the educational ones;
•   Creating user groups; pupils, students, teachers can create public or private groups(in the private ones the notes are visible only for members);
•   The possibility to embed images, audio and (live) video files, presentations, documents in notes;
•   The possibility to subscribe to search feeds or to feeds offered by sites / blogs / social networks –the same as users and groups, the feeds can be monitored, online, by IM, or by SMS.

  They suggested that using such a educational microblogging, students gained interest in life-long learning, motivations and flexibility in developing their own educational and vocational route. The advantage of flexibility was also mentioned in Tweeting for learning: A critical analysis of research on microblogging in education (Gao F. 2012). "learning can happen beyond pre-scheduled class times, and learners' time on task may be significantly expanded by opportunities of spontaneous and sustained learning."

  But microblogging in education also face challenges. One of the most inmportant ones is participants' unfamiliarity with microblogging. The technology developed so fast that the Twitter now isn't the same as is was half year ago. A starter may face great challenges to use microblogging and this may lead to their uncomfortable feeling in the learning process. So it's teachers' responsibility to help learners to learn how to use microblogging and help them find the great advantages in this form of learning; show them the joy of express and share ideas in the unlimited network. Though it is a long way to go, we already have a good start.

#Find Your Interest#

  I joined #edutechchat this Thursday. I am not a new microblog user, but really a novice of Twitter. So before I joined the Twitterchat, I took a little time to research what a Twitterchat is. I am very familiar with Weibo, a mainstream Chinese microblog, and I dig it from my memory that there's something with # as well. So, I made a comparison between Weibo and Twitter to make a better understanding about Twitterchat.


  The word "chat" was a little confusing for me. In Weibo, when you post your piece of microblog with #hashtag#， then your blog will be categorized into what we called 话题(topic). So, anyone who want to share his/her mind or looking for others ideas about this topic can search those microblogs and also post theirs with #hashtag#. It's a really fun to search topic like #what will you do or #super recipes in Weibo. But usually what we do is sharing or reposting with short comment such as "perfect!" or just a . There's really few communication between users that could make me connect it with "chat". This function is really as same as Twitterchat, the only difference is two # vs. one. The picture on the right is what I searched for #EnglishEdu in Weibo.  One more thing I found is that the Twitterchat isn't limited in certain time, whenever I come up with an idea or problem, I can Tweet it with #hashtag and wait for someone discovering it.

  Consider my teaching career, I regard Twitterchat as a very eye-opening way to explore useful resources and an approach to get help from other teachers, even those famous, influential ones. I found many who in the same chat sharing  teaching methods and new invents within the field. These tweets can be retweet a million times and spread to world in a few minutes. This means twitter is one of the fast way to acquire the latest information and learn the newest creative thinking. And talking about getting help from others, it is amazing because I will never know who will help me solve my problem, it might be dean from Oxford who I've never met. Through the chat, I might know more people in my field as well. So Twitterchat really gathers people from the same field and provide a space for them to exchange ideas, for my professional development it is really a contributing tool. But I must say, the twitter needs  long-term keeping and active participating; it's just like the human resource network. The more influential, the more chances your tweets would be focused  in millions of tweets.

Classroom 2.0

   Talking about Classroom 2.0, "This website is really doing it seriously.", that's what came into my mind
when I was filling in my applying information. The website requires me to give the reason why I want to join this network. "Wow, that's something I never expect." Then the administrator will decide whether you can join this network. What does this mean? This means this website is really specifically  professional; the members on this network are all real professional in this field. Because they are qualified for such a standard.
    And it really is professional. You can explore various educational resources on the site; it provides literature, videos for new teachers which are really helpful to widen their horizon. Within this site, it also forms a network among teachers from all over the world. From the view of connectivism, this is definitely a huge resource to learn from if you fully enrolled in it.
   I

What’s mine is yours!

    This is an era of information explosion. Siemens G. mentioned the extent that the knowledge expanding in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. “One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago.” In other way to think about this, what you have learned now will not satisfy you in 10 years. We need to absorb knowledge and refresh our minds as quickly as we can to keep pace with the changing world. The traditional way of learning won’t fit; you may never think about this, we learned a lot through on-line network through the last decades. We are a new type of learners, the connectivism learners. What is connectivism? "The relationship between work experience, learning, and knowledge, as expressed in the concept of ‘connectivity, is central to connectivism, motivating the theory's name.” The central aspect of connectivism is the metaphor of a network with nodes and connections.  In this metaphor, a node is anything that can be connected to another node such as an organization, information, data, feelings, and images.

So, learners are like sponges in a big vessel full of knowledge of water. Every sponge will absorb certain part or amount of knowledge at first as we start to learn knowledge. Then we squeeze the water out as we share knowledge with others. In this process, the knowledge will mix and maybe create more chemistry as motivate new ideas and then be absorbed by others again. This ‘absorb-squeeze-absorb’ process happens among every sponge thus creates a multi-linked network. Through the network exchanging knowledge, we share information and learn new stuffs from others. Back to reality, this network exists in our internet technology. Today our connections base on social networks such as Facebook and twitter connect us more efficiently. The network is learning, isn't it? Being educators, we should make advantages of all these technology to instruct our next generation learn in a fast-pace world.

    And one more things to mention, when you read this, you’ve already become a connectivism learner!

Create Your On-line Library

If you are also a fan of technology and love reading on-line instead of holding heavy books. DIIGO is an amazing site for you. Just quickly sign up a free account for it, then you will have a cloud library. The best part of Diigo is that you can make on-line notes and highlight lines right on the sites when you visit any websites, and all the notes you made will be saved once and forever! Then you can bookmark the websites you would like to visit some day again and share them with your friends. For convenience, you can put tags on every site so all the websites you collected are organized into lists according to tags. You can also explore new sites by following others' diggo and make new friends who share the same interests!

If you are a expressionist, then Diigo seems a little bit plain. Try Scoop.it! With Scoop.it, you can save your favorite websites with fancy title pictures and show them all on a 'photo wall'; isn't it fancier to watch your collections show off than simply get a list? What's more, Scoop.it will automatically provide you suggestion about websites according to your topic key words. You can do all the same stuffs that you can do on Diggo, like commenting websites, giving tags, following friends, EXCEPT you can't make on-line notes or highlight lines :( What a pity! But at least you have a fancy collection websites :)

I would suggest Diigo to those who consider more on working convenience using mobile devices; and Scoop.it is the best choice for those who want to make a social net work while collecting web resources. Anyway, the best way to figure out which one is your thing is check them out yourself!

Classroom and Teachers of Tomorrow

What do you think the future classroom will look like? A giant floating classroom? Robot teachers? Directly put knowledge into your brain? Wow, that's cool.

Take a glance at what classroom of tomorrow will look like. You might be a little surprised and disappointed. But yes, we are already experiencing a part of future classroom. The technology is changing our classroom and we have already put some hot stuff into use. We use smart phones and tablets in the classroom to read, calculate, search information and give lectures and presentations. These devices not only replaced heavy books and notes, they tend to become all-purpose belongings. With diverse apps supported, we can use them in so many ways in the classroom, like rulers, lights, or maybe broadcast radio station.

       Technology is still developing at an unexpected speed. The smart touch technology has made our dream come true to use only our fingers to operate different apps on large screens with touching and swiping.  Mobile devices can be used everywhere and at any time, especially when you want to make a difference. What will be the next change? Everything happened in science fiction movies may become real tomorrow.

The changing of technology of classroom also requires teachers’ constant learning and adapting. Years ago, “Adapting and evolving, teachers digitally empower diverse learners to connect, communicate collaborate, and create in an interactive technology-rich environment” is exactly a vision of 21^st century teachers. Have teachers reached the goal yet? Yes, absolutely, I think. With technology as a tool, students grasp knowledge more efficiently under teachers’ help. They have more resources to learn, share and have more spaces and possibilities to invent and explore. But because of the fast pace of technology development, teachers have to spend more time learning and exploring useful tools and preparing classes; this set a higher standards in the field of teaching. Quote Dana J. “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” As teachers, we mustn't fall behind the pace of technology. 

What students expected is also what we should make our effort to achieve. I will try my best to work on this, will you?

Teaching with blogs

Blog, as an innovative product of internet culture, serves as platform for everyone to express ideas and thoughts; the blog culture stimulates people’s desire for knowledge. For it is open and has a variety of features, there are many possibilities to engage blog in language education use.

We can put reading resources and relative links on blogs and have our students post feedback on their own blog or comment on what they interest most. Due to the development of mobile devices, we can easily access blog everywhere; inside or outside school, students and teachers can share what they hear and see whenever a spark jumps out of mind. By reading others’ posts, one may follow the posters’ mind and get the knowledge from others; while the posters get satisfaction feeling being one of knowledge discriminators. Thus, blog provide a bridge of positive communication between teachers and students and even build a study network within students themselves.

Blog can also be used as a multimedia resource index. As mentioned above, we can put reading materials on blog. More than that, thanks to technology, we can have multimedia tools on blogs to share with our students. For example, for a student who is writing linguistic paper, we may introduce him how to type IPA symbols in the blog. We may also categorize our blogs for students so they can search information easily. Generally, we can use blog as a specific library that accumulates what we've studied. It can be useful for a teacher to improve his teaching as well.

What do you think? I’d like to hear your comments. Here are some official learning standards that meet my ideas:

ACTFL standards

COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
• Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.

       COMMUNITIES

       PARTICIPATE IN MULTILINGUAL COMMUNITIES AT HOME & AROUND THE WORLD

• Standard 5.1: Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting
• Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.