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 21st 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.
I enjoyed reading your blog very much. We are in such a vast sea of technologies nowadays with so much resources and information to share with each other. I agree with you that school exists for the information sharing and as educator, our job is how to use provide useful, helpful information to our students by using new technologies.I'm glad that we are now all learning technologies and hope that we can apply it to our future English class in China.
ReplyDeleteYour portrayal of a teacher as guide is a very accurate picture of our role as 21st century teachers.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Social Media can become an ally for teachers to help students to improve their results. However, I would not use Facebook to work with my students. Even though I think Facebook can provide me and my students with the tools we need, there are some other aspects that push me away from using it in the classroom as safety, exposure of my students to the world wide web, lack of control, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are other sources develop by and for teachers, that lead teachers and students to the same results, avoiding security problems. I recommend you to take a look to www.edmondo.com. Using a Facebook-like interface, students get familiar with the technology and teachers have more control over what is going on with their students online.
I watched A Vision of K-12 Students Today too. At the end of this video, students ask teachers to teach them to think, to create, to analyze, to evaluate, to apply, to tell story digitally. They hope teachers can engage them with technology. But students' goal is far beyond using technology tools. What they want is to be creative learners via the use of digital tools. It impressed me a lot. It also reminds me again the learning outcome of this course. It is not just showing some interesting international tools. Through the study of this course, we should realize that we are talents who can jump out of the traditional teaching box and solve problems in new ways.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was still in college, sometimes my teacher would be interested in the topic we discussed, but they just couldn't understand that. I often feel pity for them and remember that teachers should not only learn in their study field, but also in the field of their students lived. Following the pace of the time can also make them become popular and help them communicate with students.
ReplyDelete