Listen to Me

Podcast is an online tool for people to get information they they want. Unlike broadcast, podcast bring a lot of convenience to people. They can create podcast just with a microphone and a computer. They can download the podcasts to their computer and listen to them whenever they want, not worrying about missing a podcast. They can also transfer podcasts to other devices, such as ipod, thus they can listen to it wherever they want.

I listened to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on BBC World News for Children, and I realized that it is a great tool for practicing listening. In my future teaching, I will mainly use podcast for teaching listening to advanced level students. For example, I can ask students to listen to a podcast, and try to write down the story they have heard. Such activity will be mainly applied to teaching advanced level English to adults. I can also ask students to retell the story after they have heard it.    

I Want To Teach

  

ePals is an education media company and a global learning network. Three main parts are included in ePal: Globalcommunity, Criket,and Tools for School. And each part has its own sub-parts. Basically, the website offers educators and students a platform of building communities, sharing resources and exchanging ideas.
     

One special thing of this website for me is that it contains culture, which is very important in teaching. And i can connect to a class around the world, which is really cool. I can also contact the teachers privately.

There are many projects created by educators, either. For example, Class in Texas, USA Seeks Partners for Life in Our Countries Project is a culture project, aiming at helping students see more about the world.

Through the website, I can get teaching resources. The website provides kinds of resources, for example books or magazines for teaching reading, writing, or listening. I can also communicate with teachers around the world, exchanging ideas about teaching.

Tell Me A Story

     I have made a short story, The Story of Fun, with the online tool, Storybird. It was fun, and I just love it. 

     With such tool, I can teach vocabulary by putting words together and making them into a story or dialogues. It will help student learn vocabulary, because it offers student context for learning. In addition, I can use it for grammar teaching, making stories based on the grammar I am teaching, ehlping students  learn the correct use of certain grammar. 

     I can also encourage my students to make stories with Storybird.It can be a very good way for me to check whehter my studetns have learned wellor what kind of help do they need. Besides, it can be a very good tool to encourage creativeness, avoiding boring styles of teaching and learning, making students get interested and excited in doing homework. 

I use videos for teaching. It's cool!

     

     I created a video,My Christmas on Animoto. It is a very short video, and not very clear, because I did not upgrade my account. But anyway, I had fun making it, because it was simple and the instruction was direct and clear.

     Videos can be widely used in education. For example, they can be used for introduction of a topic. And it can be very interesting and attractive, because they consist of music, pictures, backgrounds,and texts. In other words, it can arouse students' interest in learning effectively. For another example, they can be used in vocabulary teaching. With the combination of pictures and vocabulary in a video, students can have a better understanding to the new words.

    Besides being used for teaching in class, video can also be a kind of homework. I can ask my students to make videos based on what they have learned, and present them to their fellow students.I will also encourage students to create videos for other areas.

Let's Learn Through Stories!

According to Digital Storytelling, digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video,to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. Sophisticated 

digital stories can be interactive movies that include highly produced audio and visual effects, but a set of slides with corresponding narration or music constitutes a basic digital story. It is fundamentally the application of technology to the age-old experience of sharing personal narratives. With digital storytelling, students are encouraged to be creative in their learning.Therefore, it will be very helpful for my future teaching.

According to Digital Storytelling, People tell stories to teach beliefs and values to others. It is very nice and necessary to teach proper value to students via stories, a way that attract students' attention. Teaching is not always about knowledge. it can be related to value education, either. And digital storytelling can help me with that.Through playing digital stories, I can melt the values into stories, making them interesting and understandable.

According to Digital Storytelling, it connections with the subject matter of a course or with an out-of-class experience.Teaching is not all about learning in the classroom. What we have learned should be able to be applied to real life. There are many ways for teacher to reach that teaching goal, and digital storytelling can be one of them. 

Digital storytelling can help teachers organize teaching and make teaching clear. According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, teacher-created digital stories can be used to enhanced current lessons within a larger unit, as a way to facilitate discussion about the topics presented a story and as a way of making abstract or conceptual content more understandable. For example, when teaching complicated concepts, teachers can use digital storytelling to illustrate the concept, combining images or videos.  

To conclude, digital storytelling can be very helpful for teaching and learning. It not only offer teachers a way to organize and enrich their teaching, but also give students opportunities to engage in learning and to be creative.  

Games Can Be Serious

The game I played was Third World Farmer. The game requires people to experience the life of poor farmers, earning money and raising kids. All I do is to make the family survive from year to year. I played it for twice, and I found it uneasy, even frustrating sometimes, especially when I just realized that a kid somehow disappeared (I guess he died. Oh God...I am so sorry.). I grew up in a big city, and I have never experienced such life. This game gave me an illusion of struggling to live a little bit.

Comparing to casual games, such serious game might do a better job in improving students' ability of solving problems. Instead of simply enjoying the fun given by games, such games might actually offer students opportunities to solve real problems.

With this game, I can teach counting numbers in English, because there are plenty of numbers available in it. Besides the numbers, I can also teach other words appear in the game, such as hen, pig, and corn. In addition, I can make a competition based on this game. For example, students will be asked to play the game individually to see who survive the longest time. The winner will have to present his/her "blueprint". To see whether the objectives have been met, I can just ask students to present their solutions, in which target words will be used.

Learn Through Play

It is important to make learning fun, especially for kids. Therefore, applying game to teaching is an amazing way to reach that goal. According to the article THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT GAMIFICATION, gamification is the application of game elements in non-game situations. Through games, children will be able to comprehend what they are learning or have learned, apply knowledge to problem solving, as well as enjoy learning new knowledge or skills.

The game I played was Polleke's Blue Room, and I played it for twice. It is a nice game for teaching, because it supply many English words for players, which is good for them to learn vocabulary. It also provides many sentences. Therefore, it will be a nice tool for grammar teaching, either.

When the teacher use this game for teaching, it would be better if the teacher pretends to be a person "who needs help". Standing in front of the classroom, the teacher controls the game which is shown to the whole class and asks "what should I do next". Students will have to tell the teacher what should be clicked or dragged. In other words, students have to help the teacher finish the game.

Walk through is necessarily used in such activity, especially when students are stuck in the game. However, it does not mean that the teacher should show the walk through directly to students. Instead, the teacher learns the walk through, and orally offer hints. Images, on the other hand, are not necessary in this activity, since the teacher can use the pic in the game for teaching.

To assess whether the objectives are achieved, the teacher can use pictures to make an Q & A activity, either asking students to speak the names of pictures, or asking them to make sentences on the pictures.

Twitter for Teaching

     

     Known as an efficient and effective tool for communication, twitter can help with teaching and learning as well. Based on my experience, it is not rare to see that students forget due dates and thus lose points on their homework. And twitter will do me a great favor. According to Teaching HUB, twitter can help with posting due dates. Reminding due dates via twitter can be a good solution to such problem. Twitter can also work as a tool for assignments. Teachers can also post homework on the twitter, and let students post comments. Besides using twitter as a tool for reminding due dates and post assignments, I will use it as a tool for question answering. It is amazing that twitter can be a place for Q & A, according to Teaching HUB, especially during the lecture. 

     Education should not be limited in the classroom. It will be awesome if students who are not able to attend class learn together with their fellow students. In my future teaching, I will use it to help students catch up with class. According to the article, Twitter - Expanding our Classroom - Shrinking the World, "it broke down the walls of our classroom and allowed students in classrooms across the country to interact and learn from each other." There should not be walls between in-the-class and -out-of-the-class. And breaking the wall is one of the responsibilities of teachers.

Tweetchat - Reflection

I attended #langchat.In the chat room, different topics were developed.I can either post my questions, or reply other people's post.It is a nice place to share ideas and suggestions with each other.I can get immediate response from other educators, which is awesome!

A problem with tweet chat is that since it is a chat room, things can look a little bit messy. Sometimes I lost track on the topic I am interested, because people kept posting and changing topics at any time.

Networking group

The group I have joined is Google Tools of NYSCATE. Known as a the most powerful online searching engine in the world, google has developed kinds of tools for its customer, such as google map. As a teacher, it is also important to be familiar with the tools, in order to improve teaching. It is also essential to improve students' learning experience. Therefore, being sensitive and willing to exploring new tools is a very good quality for a teacher.



Google Tools

Spider Web

The whole world seems to be a big chaos, in which all kinds of information connect and twist with each other like a huge mess.However,we human seem to be perfectly fine living in the overwhelming mess. Why? Because we have spider-web-like minds.

Our minds works in certain patterns.In other words, as I quote from What Is Connectivism,our mind is a patterning mind. No matter how messy and overwhelming the information is, our minds deal with with in patterns. The information will always be sorted. For example, when we saw kinds of fruit that we don't know, we will focus on the label that they are all fruit, and whether we can actually remember their names does not really matter, because we know they are fruit, and that is enough for most of the time.

It is because of the feature of connecting of the spider web, the spider can catch as many insect as possible.When an insect bumps into a tiny part of the web, the whole web will shake, thus the spider knows that it is time for food. The network we have built help us to learning more. According to Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age,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.That is to say, new knowledge is always connected to the old one.  

However, without the mucus, the web will lose its function. To learn knowledge, our minds need aids. And tools we have developed nowadays are the aids of learning.In addition, technology is altering (rewriting) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.Our knowledge has helped us develop tools, at the same time tools have changed our ways to learn.For example, instead of doing homework by writing on paper like 10 years ago, we use computer and hand homework in online. 

Diigo the Scoopit.

Although I struggled a little bit when I just began to use Diigo and Scoopit, I found these two web tools extremely useful. They both help me collect save, and share information. I hope I knew Diigo earlier. Losing all the websites that are collected is really frustrating, and I was upset for a long time after it happened to me, because I might not get some important websites ever again.Scoopit is fun.And it is more attractive than Diigo, which, for me, is more of a tool to save websites or texts. It offers me a lot of resources in different forms that are related to the topic I am interested in.

                     

        Scoopit                                               Diigo

You can follow and be followed.                   You can follow and be followed.

Posting comments is allowed.                        Posting comments is allowed.

You can add tags.                                    You can add tags.

You cannot highlight texts.                          You can highlight texts.

You can offer suggestion.                          You cannot offer suggestion.


For my future teaching, I will introduce these two web tools to class, especially Scoopit. For example, I can ask students to collect information based on a topic and share it with their fellow students. It also help with doing presentations in class. All in all, I believe they will offer me more choices and a broader way for teaching.

Car and Tunnel: What I Saw From The Two Videos

   
     The two videos, Educational Change Challenge and A Vision of 21st Century Teachers, has given me the ideas of the reflection of class to the outside world, as well as the importance of using technology in teaching and learning.

     As a place where students accept education together, a classroom is just like a tunnel that connects different parts of world. In the classroom, students learn knowledge, share experiences,and join activities, in order to build values, find themselves, and develop connections to the outside world.In other words, a classroom is never a simply little safe room for students to stay. Instead, it is a locker room for football players to prepare for games.

     Technology has been playing an important role around the world, and it is also essential in current teaching and learning, without which teaching and learning will lose relevance to the society. Technology can make teaching and learning interesting and efficient. For example,teachers use use tools such as PPT and Prezi to present knowledge. For another example, students use iPad to take notes and track the schedule of classes. Applying technology to education can also help develop both teachers' and students' competence of using technology, as well as develop a sharp sense of discovering and learning new tools.

ACTFL standard

Two Ways of Using Blogs

1. Blog can help me with communicating with other teachers, sharing experiences and learn from each other.Through blogs, teachers offer valuable feedbacks to each other.For example, if a teacher want to design an activity, but he does not have a good idea about it, he can ask for ideas from other teachers via writing a blog. Other teachers can also learn interesting ideas of activity design from him. To conclude, blog is a platform for information sharing among educators.

2. Blogs provide me a direct and efficient way to interact with my students. Through blogs,students can post their homework as comments. They can also ask for help on it, instead of sending me emails. The questions students have asked can be shared with their fellow students, thus everyone can learn from the comments.In other words, blog is a place where students can solve their problems on learning and also learn from each other.

STATEMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Language and communication are at the heart of the human experience. The United States must educate students who are linguistically and culturally equipped to communicate successfully in a pluralistic American society and abroad. This imperative envisions a future in which ALL students will develop and maintain proficiency in English and at least one other language, modern or classical. Children who come to school from non-English backgrounds should also have opportunities to develop further proficiencies in their first language.

STANDARDS FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
• Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics
• Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.

CULTURES

GAIN KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF OTHER CULTURES

• Standard 2.1: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied
• Standard 2.2: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied

National Standards for Foreign Language Education