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.