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.