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.

Twitter as a useful tool for Teaching and Professional Developemt

Through the article—‘A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom’ and ‘Using Twitter for Teachers’ Professional Development’, I have found so many useful strategies that I could apply to my future classroom and my own development, I list them as following:

1, Classroom Management:

       Firstly, using twitter as a bulletin board is very convenient for informing students all kinds of news, like reminder of the due date of their homework, brief introduction of the content for the coming class. Secondly, twitter could be an efficient communication tool between teachers and students. Twitter could provide ambient office hours for students who have problems and wish to discuss with teacher privately. Thirdly, twitter is a reliable assistant in managing classroom discipline. For students who have trouble making it to class on time, send reminders before school to get them in the door earlier. Also, if encountering extremely bad weather, teachers could send their students weather alert to inform them keep warm and take care.

2, Teaching:

       Firstly, teachers could share helpful articles and materials via twitter, also we can hold interesting online educational games to engage students. Secondly, if students have any questions, teachers or other peers can help them even after school through twitter. Thirdly, teachers could use online survey to get to know what materials and topics students prefer to apply and discuss in class. Fourthly, Twitter makes it easy to get instant approval and disapproval of discussions, issues, and more right in the classroom. Lastly, teachers can assign online homework which students can complete and post online before due day. It’s more flexible for them to arrange their own time, just like what we do for this course.

3, Professional Development:

       Teaching is never constrained within individual subject, it’s associated with other knowledge from all fields. By learning educational psychology, teachers could understand their students much better. Using twitter, we could find articles and talk with experts in this area.

       Also using twitter we can get to know up-to-date pop culture which can help you pull your students closer. And by applying these new cultures into game design, students would be willing to get more involved into these hands-on games.

       Through twitter, teachers could exchange each other’s experiences on applying different teaching methods. By discussing the advantages and disadvantages, it can save much time not to repeat the same mistake that others had made.

First contact with Twitterchat

Actually it’s the first time for me to get to know twitter, I knew it’s a social application before, but I’ve never considered it as an assistance for learning and teaching!

Firstly, by following each steps in the instruction article what is a twitterchat and how can it help you in 15 minutes or less, I finally found the group of #edtechchat, which holds two meetings each week, on 8-9 pm EST, every Monday and Wednesday. Through instant chatting, people share their opinions, experience and thoughts on how to use technology to create a better classroom, tips, strategies and so on.

Secondly, by reading some good articles and webpages shared by other participants, I’ve found        

some useful and inspiring materials for future learning and teaching. However, I think this chat was a little chaotic, that you might get lost in people’s diverse thoughts. Perhaps it’s the first time that I attended a twitterchat, and with more and more experiences attending twitter chat I will summarize my own way to gain benefits and give constructive suggestions too.

Lastly, there is one thing about twitterchat that I think is very helpful, which is you can post your questions around the topic during one chat, and then you can get instant solutions. That’s very efficient.

About EFL Classroom 2.0

It’s the first time for me to know about this website--EFL Classroom 2.0 --about English as a Foreign Language teaching. The first impression is that the website looks like a communal blog that English teachers can share each other’s experiences. As a beginner in the field of English language teaching, I found many useful materials in this networking website, such as 50“Best Practices” For Language Teachers which taught me 50 useful strategies to color the language activities up. And also, just as Alan Levine said in his video that you can post whatever you need to be solved in this site. Because you can meet many smart teachers here who will give you good suggestions.

Learners today

With the changing happened in humans’ lives, many common things nowadays cannot even been imagined in human kinds’ brains many decades ago. The way people learn knowledge shouldn't be an exception. Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. Information development was slow. The life of knowledge was measured in decades (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). However, in recent decades perhaps no one can guarantee that he/she would never change a job which belongs to another brand new field. The pattern of education many decades ago was more like cultivating plants. The moment people entered school was like a seed being planted in its own place. Teachers were like gardeners that through watering and fertilizing each little plants with knowledge, someday they would grow up to what they were already decided to be. Nowadays, this kind of education mode should be altered undoubtedly because the changing of knowledge is so fast that maybe after students graduated from college they would find out what they learned were already obsolete. Just as the article of The Role of Blended Learning in the World of Technology describes: One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete. Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD). To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.

With the coming of digital era, today’s learners are more like individual digital player with its own USB wire. We can learn what we choose efficiently and accurately by simply connecting ourselves with the terminal which stores all kinds of knowledge online and copying or replacing the old knowledge that we already have. Once the process finished, we would own updated knowledge which could make us adapt to the ever changing world much better. But one skill must be mastered before we connected ourselves with the knowledge terminal, which is: the need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins (Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age). Moreover, learners can not only download useful knowledge from the databases, but also share what they thought was helpful to themselves with other learners by uploading their thoughts and knowledge to the terminal. This point has also been described in Siemens’s journal: The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual.

Further more, through the video What is Connectivism, I learned more about connectivism. The explanation of connectivism is that we build on the foundation of how we engage with others and how we interact with the world. Knowledge in its many forms of representations was networked and distributed in nature. The experience of learning is one of forming new neural, conceptual and external networks. Also it occurs in complex, chaotic and shifting spaces, which could be increasingly aided by technology. In other words connectivism defines the process of learning just like how neurons in our brain handle all the information by connecting with each other. Such connections create meaning. One thing we should pay more attention to is this connected learning process could not be apart with the assistance of modern tools, which could not only optimize this process but also save us lots of time.

Diigo vs. Scoop.it

 Diigo may be unfamiliar with lots of people, at least it’s the first time for me to use this web management tool. Traditionally, I use internet explorer to save and manage all the frequently used web pages. However, I can only find the web sites on my own computer, and also it’s hard to share all the interesting findings with friends. Diigo is easy to manage all your web sites too, but it can do more than traditional explorer, you can find them on all your devices and you can personalize your bookmarks by adding multiple tags for each one. Moreover, by following your friends’ diigo, you can easily surf the websites they collect and give them comment.

Scoop.it is another useful social web tool, it’s more like a blog that allow you to display websites and articles you would like to share with others. Also, it has many suggestions in the field you are searching for, which means you can get more than you’ve ordered at the same time. But this feature is not always that useful, the suggestions it offered are not targeted that it might be a waste of time if you read them all.

In the future, I will continue to use these two tools. Diigo is better for managing websites while Scoop.it is better for searching materials and articles.

Get Equipped to Be a Future Teacher

Get Equipped to Be a Future Teacher

To become a future teacher is not only to teach our future students what we know for now, but also to teach them what they should know for their future. For this purpose, we should always challenge our current teaching style, and instantly ask ourselves whether there is anything that need to be changed?

      For the issue of Educational Change Challenge, different people have different point of views. But the first question in this video really worth our time to ponder: locking 25 students in a small room with one adult for several hours a day is the best way for students to be educated? Teachers need to exist in the space that students exist, understand their culture. According to my experience, the particular type of teachers who want to listen to students’ voice, like the things students like were always the most popular and welcomed teachers.

      New technologies will undoubtedly become a useful tool that connect teachers and students more tightly, which also can infuse more fun and diversity to attract students and inspire them in many ways. A vision of 21st century teachers displayed so many ways that teachers apply new technologies into their teaching and how students acquire and feel as a result of their new teaching ways. Like the teachers ‘said’ in their board: I’m a 21^st century teacher, I spend 4 hours a week maintaining a class website, 20 hours carrying out interactive white board activities, 5-10 hours online researching learning resources, and my students collaborate to create multimedia reports, construct knowledge about novels on our wiki, blog to share analysis of literature create digital music mixes for presentation soundtracks, shoot videos to express themselves….  All those things sound so different from our traditional teaching styles that some people may argue that teachers should always focus on the knowledge that we should impart to our students, no matter in what form, because the content is way more important. However, it should be viewed from a higher level, that we are not preparing students for our age, but for theirs!! That’s the core why we should get well equipped to be a future teacher.

     All in all, who dare to teach must never cease to learn!

Why teachers would better keep a blog? It's helpful for both teachers and students.

      According to the article of “Blogging in Language Learning”, many advantages have been introduced about setting up a blog with students. Some of them really impressed me so much, such as writing reflection or summary after each class, foster group discussion about articles or textbooks, and write reviews of books that they enjoy reading, etc. For the learners of a second language, it’s very important to use the language they’ve learned as much as possible so that they can make obvious progress. However, just practicing in class is far less than enough. They need more opportunities to communicate with each other. Thus, a blog is a nice place for them to share thoughts and communicate in target language. For example, teacher could post a topic per week for students to speak their minds that if some students had different opinion with the others, they could use the evidence that they collected from other places to argue with each other. And all these words, websites, or pictures they found were all supposed to be relevant with the topic, and should be in target language. In this way, teacher would better be an outsider and also a manager to make sure that every student’s voice should be heard. Such topic could be commenting a movie or short article, or maybe an English popular song, or something about arts or history that students can learn not only the target language and also the culture at the same time. According to the  TESOL standards for P-12, culture is a very important part in language learning, however, most of English classes are focusing on the knowledge of language. How can we combine the culture imbuing into this language teaching process? Blog could be one of our facilitators as a display of the culture in target language, which is even more vivid than only talking in the classroom.
       From my point of view, students' keeping a blog could meet the requirement of the standards in following aspects:
      1. ELLs can communicate with each other for social, intercultural, and instructional purposes within the the school settings.
      2.  ELLs can communicate with each information, ideas and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of language arts, science and social studies.
       Beyond all these school requirements, I think blog can also be a place for students to do free talk, share whatever thoughts they want. The basic line is they are using target language to communicate with each other.  I think teacher's job would better be arousing their interests in keeping a blog in their second language and under this prerequisite we can choose topics as nearer as the standards claim.

       Keeping a blog is not only beneficial for the learners, teachers can also be beneficiaries too. The article “seven reasons teachers should blog” gives us many concrete reasons why teachers should do so. I remembered in last semester, I’ve learned that teachers should better keep a diary or a tape record which we can investigate what we’ve done created what results, what need to be adjusted, or to add what could solve the problem better. Clearly, a blog is a great tool for teachers to do so. We can write what we got after each class, students’ reactions, what particular events in class had happened, and what we’ve learned from other teachers. Among them, I think the greatest thing is blog can give teachers strength, especially for new teachers. By writing down some inspiring words, share some useful and also cheerful pictures or music, or even to write down something that made us feel unhappy or frustrated, we can also gain power by doing all these kinds of things in blog. Also it’s a good archive that we can keep all the good experiences of teaching in a neat order so that it’s easy to find out in the future.