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.