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.

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.

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?