Podcasting, of great help in EFL class!

Podcasting is a website provides all kinds of audios, on which people can exchange each other’s thoughts from all over the world. As in the video Podcasting in Plain English described, it has three main advantages: 1 anyone can record an audio and share with others simply; 2 it’s convenient to subscribe and receive future shows; 3 you can download the listening materials to any devices like mp3 player, PC and iPod or iPad and listen to them whenever you want.

 For me podcasting is not a new tool to learn English, I used it to download lots of authentic listening materials like Tedtalk, which were of great help for my preparing for TOFEL test. As for my future teaching, I’ve found the website BBC World News for Children very helpful. In my high-school English class, our teacher would always let us do English speech dictation at least once a week. Those English speeches are not only authentic materials for practicing English listening but also set a great

model for students to write English essays.

 I choose to use the famous speech—‘I have a dream’ from Martin Luther King, Jr. as an example to make a lesson plan:

1. I will play this audio once without telling students any background knowledge to let them guess on what time and about what event he made this speech.

2. As students get some guessing of this audio, I will teach the background knowledge so that students’ questions about this audio could be answered.

3. Play the part of ‘I have a dream’ to let students do dictation. Play this part several times so that students can dictate more information.

4. Students will share the sentences they write down one by one as the order of the speech, so if one student didn’t catch the sentence, teacher can pay more attention to teach this part. (grammatical or structural problems, or new words)

5 Students try to read this speech as if they were Martin Luther King, Jr.

6 As for homework, students will write a speech for themselves imitating the structure “I have a dream, that …” to describe their future dreams.

Let’s find out what can ePals do to help you in English teaching?

When you firstly enter the realm of ePals, the first thing that draw your attention is the notebook style which easily make you feel you are in an online classroom. The website designed for ePals is very academic-like.

The next step is clearly to match a classroom suitable for you. You can filter the most appropriate classroom by typing in the language and the students’ age that you want to search, and then here we go, the results are listed neatly for you!! If you want to narrow down the results, you can choose to provide more information to make the results even more accurate.

Once you find a suitable classroom, you can email to contact the teacher for further information after you’ve signed in as a member of ePals. It’s very convenient for teachers who teach the same age group and same language to exchange experience via email.

The second point I have to mention here is the amount of teachers’ resources in ePals, you can read the articles shared by other members. Also you can narrow down your search by choosing students’ age, number, subjects and topic, etc. Like as shown in the picture, you can download these articles after you become a member. These articles can be used for making lesson plan, which is especially helpful for new teachers.

Where are you from?—digital comic for teaching directions

This week I created a digital story comic using GoAnimate, which is very convenient to use.

where are you from? on GoAnimate

This story comic can be used for teaching directions in English. Because I remember when I first learned to tell directions in English, it’s very confusing that my teacher only pointed the direction so that it’s a little difficult for me to understand. Using this dialog, students can look at the map and listen to the dialog at the same time. Teachers don’t have to explain which each direction is and at mean time the dialog could be imitated for conversation practices.

Photo stories—a good tool for teaching writing

Still in trouble on how to give instruction guidelines to your students for writing tasks? Digital stories come to rescue!

This week our star guest is Animoto. Through simply uploading photos and typing in the words you want to say, then congratulations, you just make one mini-film.

 

Save our home

As for this short digital story I made using Animoto, I think it’s very helpful especially in writing class.

Advantages are:

1. More engaging than words on the blackboard.                         

2. Can be re-used in the future.
3. Clearer to give students guidelines through pictures.

This class is designed as a topic writing class which is around environment protection. Firstly, students will watch this video and understand the theme they will compose. Students can use the sentence structure appeared in the video—I don’t want to--to make sentences in their writings. And then they can talk about how pollutions harm our only home earth so that they can write around this topic through different aspects. Next, they will watch this video again and this time they will focus on the beauty of Earth so that they can understand the significance of protecting our home planet. For this part, they can write sentences like “I want to, or I hope” etc. to express their wishes for environment protection.

 It’s a meaningful writing task, which not only practice writing skills on particular sentence structures but also cultivate students’ awareness on saving our home--Earth.

Digital storytelling for beginners

       With the development of cutting-edge technology, storytelling is no longer restricted to the traditional way that parents or teachers holding a book and reading stories to children. There is a new

way to tell story which is not only easy to conduct but also more fascinating—digital storytelling, the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component.

       Wow, it seems like to create one digital story you should prepare so many things. Don’t get bewildered! Although groups of students can collaborate on digital stories, the form is well suited to projects by individual users. Most digital storytelling programs promote the notion that users with little or no technical background should be able to create digital stories. For beginners, I have a good suggestion: paying so much attention on digital technic is unnecessary, starting by focusing on script and writing a good story is more effective.

       Why is digital storytelling significant to education? The cooperative learning process of debate, discussion, and reflection that students engage in as they work together to storyboard, shoot, and edit

their digital stories is critical to the learning process. (The educational uses of digital storytelling) As we can see, through creating an original story, students can practice logical thinking and writing skills, which involves using learned knowledge and acquiring new knowledge needed in this procedure.
      
       How to use digital storytelling in classroom? Firstly, give students a clear example of how to create a digital story. It doesn’t need to contain too much cool digital effect, but rather focus on procedure instruction, step by step. Secondly, give students a concrete topic to write about, for example, to create a newly version fairy tale which they can imagine happened in nowadays. Students can do group work so that they can learn how to write cooperatively and make their story more completed and creative. Thirdly, students can find pictures and videos around their story to make it attracting. For each step, teachers would better give feedback and assistance in time, good suggestions and encouragement can be a good motivation for them to fulfill the task excellently.

Games in classroom? Yes, it’s for learning!

For this part, I am so happy to talk about my own experience before. I like to play all kinds of games, like most of the players, I think it’s very good way to get relaxed and at the same time to obtain the sense of achievement when you conquered one difficult obstacle. When I was preparing for the exam of TOEFL, I only had 3 months to study for it which always made me feel nervous, so that’s when I wanted to play games to get calm down. At that time I found some good strategy games designed by Big Fish game company (actually I am a big fan of Big Fish games, sometimes I even pay to get the full version), all of which had very fantastic scenes. Also by playing these games I’ve learned lots of new words, because they had many levels to let you find the listed things in a messy picture.

By connecting the pictures with the words, I could remember them much easier, like the words caterpillar, rifle and many things in daily life that I didn’t know how to say in English. The games I used to play were: HiddenExpedition: Titanic, Azada, Hidden Expedition: Everest, PuppetShow: Mystery ofJoyville, Awakening: The Dreamless Castle, Drawn: The Painted Tower, HiddenExpedition: Amazon, Hidden in Time: Mirror Mirror, Hidden Mysteries - CivilWar, Awakening: Moonfell Wood, Secret Mission: The Forgotten Island, HauntedManor: Lord of Mirrors, etc.

My objectives for playing these games were to memorize vocabulary, and sometimes I can also practice listening through the narrative of the story background. I think the learning result was good, because it involves repetition of finding same things in different levels, then you could practice new words more times and finally build the connections of words and pictures in your mind.

If I use one of these games in my future classroom, I would choose Titanic, the following is my teaching plan:
1. Before playing this game, I would introduce the background knowledge of Titanic, the history of the event, so that students will learn vocabulary within relevant context.
2. The theme of this game is to find things according to the list in each picture, so in this step I would group students into 4, and each group will get a different picture and a different list.
3 To avoid students tapping things randomly, each group will receive a blank form to write down the things they find and give their explanation of each word.
4 To make this game more challenging, they would finish the task under limited time, so by the end of the game, there would be a winner team.
5 After this game, teacher would collect all the forms in order to find out difficult words and wrong words, so that in the following class teacher could pay more attention in teaching those words.
This game could be applied repetedly until students master all the words in this game. To assess students' learning effect, students could be asked to write a short description of a particular picture by using all the words listed below as shown in the picture.

Games, Not Only for Recreation

As the development of teaching methods, games are no longer an enemy of all teachers, they can be treated as efficient assistant now. Gamification is not totally new in education area, which is defined in the article ‘7 ThingsYou Should Know About Gamification’ as: the application of game elements in nongaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.

Gamifacation being applied in classroom has many advantages. Firstly, gamification has the potential to help build connections among members of the academic community, drawing in shy students, supporting collaboration, and engendering interest in course content that students might not have otherwise explored. Secondly, gaining success in these learning games will give students sense of accomplishment, those emotional, individual and collective rewards make learning process more funny and appealing. Lastly, with the help of particular game activity, teachers could make important knowledge point more salient. The second and third point has been mentioned in the video‘7 ways games reward the brain’.

Let’s talk about concrete games that I think are beneficial for learning. One of my favorite game   genre is Escape the room, it’s not only good for language learning but also helpful for logical thinking. Also it can be used to teach different kinds of knowledge. For example, if we are aimed to teach new vocabulary within a particular area, like tools, take lighter as an example (in the real class, there will be more tools like scissor, can-opener, pliers, tweezers, magnet, magnifying glass, etc.) so the class would be designed as the following steps:
1. firstly I will put all kinds of tools in different places of classroom.
2. each students will get a handout of the instructions about how to find out the tools they need to escape the room.
3. on the handout there are the steps they should follow, for example: for the students who trying to find a lighter, they should follow something warm and bright. So the place where they could find the lighter could be by the window, where is full of sunshine.
4. after students find the lighter, they can light up a candle to look for the key in a dark corner, then they can escape the room.
As for assessing students' learning effect, I would group students into 4 to 5, and let them describe to each other how they use the tools they found to escape the room successfully. During their discussion, I would walk around and talk with them to find out their questions around this game class. After playing this game, students would not only know the names of different tools, but also how to use them. If students are too young to use those tools, which might be a little bit dangerous for them, teachers could replace real tools with pictures. Another example is using the game of escape the room to let students practice listening skill. Teachers may give the instruction or hint using particular key words or sentence structures to make students get more familiar with those grammar usages.

As for assessing whether the learning objectives had been met, it’s easy to be observed through whether the problem had been solved or directly from students’ behaviors. Thus teachers can know which part is particularly difficult for student or which part should be improved by spending more time.