Podcast: one thing in a French day

  More and more multimedia publishings on the Web are self made entertainment.  It's much easier to create one's own podcast online as well. Since Apple has incorporated support for listening and subscribing to podcast into iTunes, which make listening to the podcast from all over the world, with different topics and in different languages easier to get. No specific technologies are needed, while everyone could subscribe, or make a podcast by themselves.

 

  I used to listen to podcast of music each week, I liked it so much and it was made by an individual who was a big fan of music, and I also listened to the ESLpod ,these days, which has different topics every a couple of days. It offers a variety of topics, like business, social, cultural... and it speaks in a lower speed in cater to the language proficiency to ESL learners, to learn the language in a context of learning cultural. This podcast is really interesting for ESL learners, especially for those beginners or intermediate level students who are in a EFL environment, where they could not have much exposure to the English.

         

  Meanwhile, I found another one which is really interesting,  which helps me to learn French,One Thing In A French Day , it is made and produced by an individual each week, she talked about the tourist attractions, cultural issues of France, and with a natural speed of speaking, the best thing is it has the text on the website, which could be taken as the reading or dictation materials.  If I teach English or French, I would like my students to listen to these more natural podcast which relate to cultural issue, and make them interested in learning this languages. I can also expand the topic.  For example, one podcast of it is about the vacation plans,Les prochaines vacances, I could let students to dictate it, and talk about their own vacation plans as an oral practice or let them write with some target vocabulary as a writing exercises.

ePals- Connect the students

   Epals is a global teaching and learning community which connects more than 200 countries and territories. It's a great platform which promotes a meaningful and secure web 2.0 environment, and also it helps teachers and students from different age to reach  other learners of different background and reach different online sources for learning. Epals projects are centered around content and experience require teamwork, brainstorm and communication. By learning about relevant issues, students, teachers work together, and different people share their ideas. It's a communicative way to learn and teach, and  this learning experience motivates students for self-study, and helps their future career as well.

  I love the Global community products of ePals. It helps students and teachers to connect the others to cooperate and learn through communication. For example, Class in USA Seeks Email Exchange in Chinese , the teacher is asking for exchange of emails and skype for the students who learn Chinese in the states. It's a great way for students to learn the original languages, and to motivate their interests. I cannot help but thinking that if I were younger and I know to use ePals, I would have more connection to the English native speakers as well. Technology Class in Texas, USA Seeks Partners for Countries Around the World Project

is also a good project, which help students around the world to communicate based on the exploration of the Internet, and it also requires the learning of powerpoint, and students can learn the public presenting skills through the project.

  I'd like to apply the use of ePals in my future classroom, and I will start the project for the objects of letting Chinese students connect to the native English speakers of the same age, and letting my students to change the emails and skypes to communicate with others, and gain knowledge of both cultural and linguistic.

  

Voice thread in teaching

 Voice Thread is a popular online tool for teaching.
 T he best thing of it is that it provides students and teacher a place to have direct interactions, and to comment by different types of media on an artifact.
  Besides, it can be a great online classroom, because no matter where the students or teachers are,they can communicate with Voice Thread instantly and frequently. They can hear and watch each other to know the peers' thinking and the teacher's feedback/
 Also, Voice Thread can help to record the progress of study,or even build an e-portfolio on it.
 This week, I tried to make a Voice Thread class on the topic of language use in Quebec, it's quite interesting to hear myself, and see the class content I designed. I commented on 2 peers.Erin's and Yuechen's, I find they clearly explain how to use Voice Thread, and chose an interesting topic to let students talk more.

Interesting comic strip makers

Ele's sad news by Qinchun on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.

  I used GoAnimate to make a little comic strip story. To insert a daily dialogue and an issue about the animal protection.On one hand,for a teacher, it has some benefits:
1. Time saving for curriculum-related classroom activities.
2. Interesting content make students hooked on reading comics, helps to engage students
3.Dialogue form is easy for students to learn target language especially daily use language.
  On the other hand, for students, if they are assigned to make a comic strip, they will probably find it's great fun. By make comic strips, they can spark their creativity to express themselves. Students can also learn some serious social issues by reading or making funny comics.
  Besides, I made a little video about Beijing winter by Animoto, which is also very vivid and interesting digital story telling tool. These tools can both help teacher to make classroom activated and help students to spark their creativity and learning motivation.

Bookr-Digital story telling

I like bookr so much! By connecting with flickr, it helps to share the photo easily. By making a digital book,the content become visualized, and more vivid. readers feel more attracted by the moving pictures and the texts. I made a book about my hometown Shanghai, I like the photos on flickr and I'm glad I could share them via bookr. Students can use bookr to express their own thinking, sharing the pictures with texts, and make it look appealing. Also, it could be a e-portfolio to collect the information and progress of their study. I probably will ask students to make their own portfolio by bookr, or ask them to share their background information like creating a book about their hometown, their family or learning experience. Besides, students could learn vocabulary efficiently if the teacher create a beautiful book with pictures and new vocabulary. Personally, I'd like to use bookr as well, for sharing new things or good memories.

Flickr-Digital story telling

Paris Exposition: Champ de Mars and Eiffel Tower, Paris, France, 1900, a photo by Brooklyn Museum on Flickr.

Digital storytelling is practice of combining narrative with digital content: imagine, sounds, video, to create a short movie.  According to 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling , the digital story telling is often begin with a script, in order to enrich the content,  it is edited the sounds, images in to it, and it looks like a two to four minutes emotional movie.

Teacher could ask students to make a digital storytelling project for cooperative task, and help them to develop the creativity, and the technique skills, also, they can build their e-portfolio via it.  For teacher, it helps to ameliorate the display by using digital storytelling which contains a rich content with different media.

Using "Escape the room"game in teaching

  Gamification is the process of transferring the game design thinking into non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. According to the gaming theorist, Tom Chatfield, games, with their immersive quests and deeply satisfying virtual rewards,area a great place to test new approaches to real-world systems that need a reboot.

   I like the idea of gamification, for us Asian student, study is really a burden for our childhood, and teenage period, then, playing games while learning would be such a great thing. Especially for language learning, it's a long and hard march, while with the help of games, it will and fun and interest for students to learn insistently. Game also help teacher to make a context that the learning content is meaningful and useful because the students need to know the meaning of the game instructions and purpose...It's quite motivating and challenging to insert games in the language class.

  I tried playing one of the escape the  room game: The great living room escape, personally, I played three times,finally, by watching the walk through, I reached it.

 
  This game could be inserted in the speaking or writing class for the purpose of learning vocabulary. The objective of language learning could be the  reviewing of  direction prepositions or the leaning of the nouns in the living room, students could also learn how to describe an environment through playing this escape game.
At the same time, teacher's role could be a guide to introduce these nouns or prepositions, and also help students to learn how to describe the environment by giving examples. Teachers could test and check the understanding and comprehension of students by using this game as well.

  In my opinion, I will use the walk through for the game, because the escape the room game needs a clear instruction, if not, it's hard and time costing for students to solve out. And by the explanation of the instruction   or even only describing the walk through may help students to learn more vocabulary, and practice the listening comprehension.   I will also use the image as well, for instance, as the following picture shows, students could learn from the picture description, how to describe up, down, under, beside...these prepositions....

   For the assessment, the teacher could let students to have an oral or writing test by introducing their way to get out of the room, or describe a given picture from the game. Teachers could get the feedback quickly and directly through it to see if students really understand or

Serious game: Half the sky

  A serious game is a game designed for the first purpose not only for pure entertainment.  Half the sky is a serious game which is a new facebook game for raising awareness and funds for women and girls from all over the world.  It turns online social experience to real-world activism.

  

  The game is based on a poor Indian woman who wants to collect money to help her sick daughter. She is faced with the loss job of her husband,  she has to sell the fruits to the market, she has to face with different problem from the local police and hospitals... 

   

  There's no counting of times for playing it. I logged several times to play it, and "I"'m now still stay in India (because of lack of "money"...)  Later, if the" money" is enough, "I" can also travel to other countries and experience and see how other countries look like.

  The Half the sky is not only a game for NGO purpose, but also it can be used in language learning classroom. For the social skills, communication skills, and the learning of different cultures.  For me, I'd like to use it specifically for vocabulary and oral class to increase the vocabulary and the communication skills. Because, there appears a lot of new worlds in the roles' dialogues, and their are different language in using in different places, to different people.  

   

  Students can play it not only in class, but also after class, and they will probably continue to play it because of the good design of the story . And also, because they can see different cultures from this game, I guess they will learn more deeply.

  

  To assess the learning of vocabulary, and the communicative skills from the game, teachers can give some quiz about the vocabulary in the dialogues of the roles, besides, teacher can let students to role play to perform a dialogue for example between the main character and his husband, or between the doctor and the little daughter, etc. 

Using microblogs in teaching

   As a big fan of micro blog, I like this topic very much.  I used a lot the Chinese twitter: weibo, and this week, after reading and following in deed, I found the fun of using twitter as well. Twitter, as an online social network,and micro blogging service influence our life these days.
The most important characteristic for twitter is that it's very instant. To share the instant information through twitter is very easy , at the same time, the twitter covers the sharing of picture, video, and web links, almost everything, so its function as a instant media source is quite crucial.

   For us as the future teacher, how to use twitter as our helper of teaching? According to the articles I read, BLOGS & MICROBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM, because of the limit of the texts (usually 140 words for twitter), and the source of sharing (videos, images...), micro blogs reflect the real thinking at that time, the short text could convey a lot. Writing down the most essential content in the micro blogs could be an challenge as well.  Teachers could share the most important announcement or guidelines through twitter,they can also share with instant those good learning sources, at the same time,  teacher  can also ask students to write twitter to practice their ability of writing and condensing content.

   Micro blogs can act as a prompter to encourage students and teacher to write and read more efficiently, and share information widely, and quickly. Using twitter can not only make life more fun, but also, motivate the classroom. As Teaching with Twitter – turning microblogging into learning said, "Twitter is now an accepted method of communication in world events, entertainment, and breaking news, but it has just as much value in the day to day activities of our own lives."  Twitter can undoubtedly add more new experience in our future education.

EFL Classroom 2.0

  Browsing all these groups, I like the EFL Classroom 2.0 a lot.

  This group is a sharing group which has more than 27,000 members.  There are both sources for teachers to learn and for learners to refer to. The members of these group are mostly EFL teachers. They share their teaching experiences, such as they share the text book like "we teach, we learn", all free.  And there is activity for each day in digital version. They also share good resources for students to learn English, such as they share the latest music video, the talk show episodes, and also those famous people's speech, also, free to all members.  And even, there are a lot of interesting division in the group , like kids karaoke which shares those great kids song in English, and also Mr. Bean, the funnest one..

   Learning and Sharing on this group is a great fun. There are varieties of things to do. And let both students and teachers to develop.without too much stress. I'd like to surf on this group frequently in the future and I will recommend my future students to look at at it as well.

A learner is like a boa

After reading the Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age , the image of the boa appeared in my mind.  I remember in the first Chapter of <the Little prince>, it is said: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.”  However, the smart learners know how to digest from the big food, and make the best use of it. The learning process is like the process of digestion the knowledge.

Referring to the conclusion in the article:

“Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.”

As in the explanation of connectivism in the video What is connectivism, "the experience of learning, is one of forming new neural, conceptual and external works, when facing with the significant changes of knowledge, building and creating are crucially aided through technology."

In this fast developing era, learners are faced with the explosion of information, while how to pick out the most useful one, and how to update the latest knowledge is an ability to learn as well.  While the network technologies are eagerly to be learned to face with all these learning needs, and aid greatly the learners to "digest" well all the knowledge they need in deed.

Google translate, use it or not

   The post I commented on was the one from ICT FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS about the use of Google translate. Google Translate: friend or foe? It is really an interesting question, because we use Google Translate so much, especially for students who study foreign languages or study abroad. 

  The author picture out the situation of the use Google Translate, as the post said, I totally agree, students use them to make strange sentences which are full of grammar mistakes, and this often drives teachers mad. 

  I can understand the situation, as I myself am also a language learner, sometimes, the fastest way to find out the translation of an article is to use Google Translate. It helps me to have a general idea of the articles or sentences, which helps me to fast read and write. At the same time, when I helped my friends to correct an assignment in French, I could find that some sentences were made up by using Google Translate, because some of the vocabulary usages were hard to understand.

  While the post author list out some of the questions which are very suggestive for me :

  For our future teaching career, how we treat the situation of using much of the online translator?  Should we accept it? And should we use the wrong grammar usage from the reference of online translator as an teaching example?

  I do think this post has a good analysis and quite suggestive for us to read, not only as a foreign students who are forced to use non-native language in our fast read and write, but also, as an master student major in education related field, the online reference should be used in a balancing way.

Use it to learn whenever, whatever and whoever

      Watching on the Youtube about the Social Media revolution, I suddenly realize that the websites I spent mostly my leisure time on are those social media.  Youtube is second largest browser in the world, each second there is one more new user of linkedin. That’s really amazing.  I never thought that even in China, there emerges so many new websites every day, stories like some social media appear and get popular, but people switched to another websites in a couple of years happen too. Those legends of social media show the fast develop of the influence of social media, but how can we use it in the class? For teacher, the social media could be a pool of information as well. Using social media to share information is much faster and efficient than paper sharing, since the social media support the sharing of video and audio, and also source from the whole internet. For example, teacher might use facebook to share a source from google scholar by linking or share his/her class note to let students learn without any delay.

  The other piece of video shocked me either:A Vision of K-12 Students Today. This looks a video from several years ago, but it predicted that China would have the largest population of speaking English in 2016. That is quite unbelievable, as a Tesol major student, how big will be the market then! Students speak out that they need to learn what is creative, what is really useful, in that case, the variety of the online sources do meet the needs. Even now, students spend less time on the traditional paper work, they spend more time on the digital source, from TVs, from Internet, the 21^st century learners are totally different from our childhood’s teaching style, they listen to podcasts to learn, they blog to share.  As someone said before, schools exist for the information sharing. Now, the information is on the "www".  No matter the students from America or the students from China, anywhere in the planet, with the assistance of the internet, information are easily to get, as showed in: The Future of Learning, Networked Society, more students are exposed, the more confident they will become.

  The things that the teachers do for this situation is the guidance, I think. A good guidance for the students to get the good source of information is that important. For us, we should learn at first the online technologies to guide, and share the best for students to learn, and let them think more, and create more. Wish one day, the online teaching and learning could be accepted by anyone and available for everywhere in the world, and whenever they want to learn.

Weblog bloom

  Upon reading the first chapters from Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms of Will Richardson, I think with the immense and rapid growth of web tools, as listed, wikis, weblogs, aggregators, online photo galleries, twitter…it is required for a teacher to tap into the potential of these tools for teaching and learning in nowadays situation.  Among these, having weblogs is such a bloom these years in the whole world, as well as in China. Especially, even the most popular social websites like facebook is based on the idea and formula of blogging. Because of the willingness to get a bunch of information and share  them, people use different features like video, graphics, photos, audio files in their blogs. Referring to Will Richardson‘s claim, blog can promote critical and analytical thinking of the user, combine the best of solitary and social interaction, and is a medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information.  In my personal experience of using blogs, they help me to share and collect information fast, help me to record my growth, and it’s a way for others to know me better.

  
  I intend to teach adults in institutions in China, instructions in China also required the merge of new technology. According to Standards for ESL/EFL Teachers of Adults Framework,one of the important domains for teacher is to have a good planning, weblog could be a journal-type one, it helps to record the teaching experience, and provide some teaching tips for other teachers. At the same time, something happened in the classroom recorded on weblogs can help teachers to look back and assess to have a further planning for the class. The other important domain mentioned in the frame is instructing. Using weblogs to post class-related documents are quite efficient, such as calendars, events, homework assignments, and other notifications, students are easily share and follow them online For example, students can either use it to gather the information, but also hand in assignments as well. Teacher provide online readings or reference websites is a good way to promote students to learn more, besides, sharing some related study content or the class review can easily be commented on the weblogs, this facilitates the interaction between teachers and students. Especially, for some adult students, weblog provides an easy and convenient way for them to learn and communicate.

  In all, using weblog meets the technical trends today, and also meets the great needs of online learning and instruction. For both sides of teachers and students, it offers a space to gather information and share experience. On the other hand, it requires the teacher to have a more organized planning to maximize the benefits of online study.