Absolutely Intercultural Podcast

This week, I find this podcast episode, internationalize yourself at home through simulations in teaching to overcomesocial barriers and culture shock very interesting.  The episode is divided into four parts: Absolutely foreign, absolutely privileged, absolutely real and absolutely simulated. In the first section, absolutely foreign, they have university students to share with audiences their own experience of how to prepare themselves to be internationalized by study abroad or work abroad. In the second section absolutely privileged, the episode focuses on a game called “How far can I get in my society.” The game makes people aware of the social barriers in a society visible. In the third part, absolutely real, it talks about it is very helpful if you have already experienced what you will encounter for intercultural preparation. Zydrune shares her own experience in Germany in this part. In the final part, absolutely simulated, the university lecture intercultural communication helps a lot with interviews about advantages and disadvantages of simulations.

I find this podcast episode is very useful especially for language teaching. In the future, I want to go back to China to teach middle school students English. Since studying abroad is still a very hot issue in China, most of my students will be interested studying abroad, that means most of them will encounter something like cultural shock. I think this podcast is very helpful for them if they could listen to other’s real life experiences and use strategies to get them better prepared to be internationalized. Also, language learning is always about culture learning too, so it is necessary for them to be aware of cultural issues even for those students who do not want to study abroad. It is still a good tool to help them gain a global view.

ePals!

After exploring the ePals site, I found it a very useful website that offers opportunities around the world to collaborate in learning using technological resources in different subjects. There are many featured projects on this website such as “Class in China Seeks Partners forInvent It! An ePals Project”, which is a collaborative writing project between Chinese second year college students and native English speakers. The project is about learning, cross-cultural communication, environment and global awareness.  They will use resources like Key Steps of the Invention Process, Invention Reading List, Innovative Lives, Invent It Challenge, Invention Educational Materials, Power Point Template to correspond by email and write at least once a month. The project also culminates with students creating multimedia presentations that name, explain and sell their new inventions.

There are other features of this site like Finding a Classroom, teachers can find a collaborative classroom that they are interested in. Also, the website offers instructions of how to use ePals in classrooms, and there are searching categories like specific region, project type, duration, collaboration and common core. This website has so many features that I would definitely use in my future language class to assist my teaching. The most interesting aspect that attracts me a lot is that this website focuses on global collaboration which is a trend especially in language teaching and learning and language learners will definitely benefit a lot from it!

Digital Storytelling by Stupeflix

This is my digital storytelling by using Stupeflix, which is a free a tool that I can add pictures, music, text or even my own videos to make a short digital story.

 I really enjoyed creating my story through this great tool. It’s easy and convenient to conduct and can be very creative since you can upload your own materials. I think in my future English class, it’s a great tool to let my students using digital storytelling to practice writing skills and strategies. They can upload a series photos and add texts on them to narrate their own story by applying specific grammar knowledge and particular writing strategies. Also, it’s great for teacher to conduct collaborative writing activities. Teachers can upload creative pictures and let their students work in groups to write with their imagination. In my future class, I would definitely try Stupeflix for English writing class!

Interesting Experiences on Voice Thread

Among our peers’ voice threads, I enjoyed participated in Miao’s Get Acquainted with Each Other very much. Her class is the ESL class which focuses on communication for international students. She used voice thread to let everybody get acquainted with each other and let everybody talk about their own experiences of studying abroad, either interesting things or difficulties. Her voice thread is very suitable for her teaching purpose because for a speaking class, the purpose is to get everyone speak. To avoid awkward, she come up with these topics that closely related to international students so that it’s easy for students to talk about. And by sharing their own experiences, they can know each other better by having the same feeling in others. 

Also I enjoyed Li Ying’s Princess Class as well, the instructions are very clear by giving examples. She provide an interesting topic for younger learner, the topic will let students engage in the activity with various answers.

All in all, both of their voice threads are very suitable for their teaching purposes and I enjoyed them a lot!

Bookr for Digital Story-telling

I'm very enjoyed using Bookr to create my story, it's very interesting and easy to operate on computers. I have discussed the advantages of digital storytelling for language learning for students. And Bookr is such a good tool to incorporate Flickr photos.
In my future teaching, I would use this tool for culture teaching in a language class. My objectives would be culture teaching. As we all know, culture is very important for language learning because it enables students with more communicative competence rather than only linguistic knowledge. In my class, I may use Bookr to let students create stories about English festivals, historical events, food culture or any aspects that they are interested in. I would let them work in groups and present their digital story to the whole class. It's an interesting way to engage students in culture learning and also a more creative way to do presentation.
Although there are limitation about this tool, such as limited photo resources, it is still a wonderful tool for both teacher and student to use in language class!

Digital Story-telling with Flickr

Photo by school Principal Okc
The picture above is an English class in Minibees English Preparatory School in Guangzhou in China. The  children in the photo seems very engaging in the class. I hope when I come back to China to teach English, I can organize such a great class.
As I read in Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, digital storytelling is a computer based tool to tell stories which basically suitable for all subjects. The main idea of digital storytelling is to combine the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia, including graphics, audio, video and Web publishing.

“Digital storytelling is an emerging art form of personal, heartfelt expression that enables individual and communities to reclaim their personal cultures while exploring their artistic creativity.” Through using various kinds of multimedia, it is easier for student to create their own story more vividly and has more visual impact on audiences.

When it comes to L2 teaching and learning, digital storytelling is a great choice for both teachers and students. For teachers, we can use this tool to facilitate us to illustrate new concepts or present new materials. It’s also an engaging way to attract students, especially those visual learners. For students, digital storytelling gives them an opportunity to express their own ideas in a more creative way. Sometimes, language learning is not only about learning linguistic system, it also has something to do with cultures. In my future teaching, I want my students to use digital storytelling to create stories about their own cultures and target language cultures. I think they will benefit a lot from it.

Third World Farmer

As I read in Wikipedia, serious games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem.  Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. This category includes some educational games and advergames, political games, or evangelical games and they are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education.

Among the serious games, I played Third World Farmer for several times. This is a game that puts you in the shoes of a family of farmers in one of the poorest areas of the world. This remarkable simulation lets you make the important decisions that will determine if your family will prosper, or starve. Upon my experience, it is really not easy to play well. I had six turns but I only had 34 dollars left. Every decision you make should be very careful. You should think twice before action. If I would use this game for my future language teaching, my teaching objectives would be also teaching vocabularies. There are words like corn, cotton, wheat, chicken, cattle and so on. Since it is an out classroom game, I can add my students as family members in this game and I can keep interacting with them and see how they get along with the game. To assess the learning objectives, I would ask students how they make the money in this game. They would describe their selling and buying process by using target vocabularies. And I will also occasionally arrange a competition for them in class to assess their learning outcome of these vocabularies. Thus, through playing the game, they would acquire vocabularies in such a fun way!

Kitchen Escape

As I read in 7 Things You Should Know about Gamification, gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior. In academe, gamification typically employs elements like points, badges to engage or motivate students in learning process.

For me, in language teaching, gamification offers an opportunity for students to interact with each other while engaging their imaginations and motivations at the same time. Teachers can enliven their instruction with contests or rewards that encourage students a positive attitude toward language learning.  The game took advantage of human desire to compete and socialize as well as to measure progress toward clear goals. Therefore, through gamification, students can generate unexpected solutions to the course objects.

Among the Escape the Room Games, I found Kitchen Escape very interesting. At first, I totally get lost in this game because I don’t know what I am supposed to do. After I watched the walk through video for the game, I got a clear goal and was familiar with the rules. Then I played the game for three times, it was really fun!

For language teaching, I think this game can be used to facilitate teaching vocabularies and description of objects. So by using this game, students’ learning objectives would be learning vocabularies. In this game, students need to find several objects in order to escape the kitchen. During this process, they will learn words like kettle, battery, leather and so on.  When I learned English, vocabulary memorizing is always a boring process, but through this game, students can remember words easily with vivid visual impact and a lot of fun. What’s more, instead of solely memorize the word, students can get a better understanding of how to use the word, like use kettle to boil water; use boiled water to cook frozen fish, etc. By competing with each other that who escape faster, students can be involved while learning.

As a teacher, the role in this activity is like the walk through, that give students hints and instructions when they have difficulties and guide them towards learning. Game is just to assist learning process, teachers don’t want it to bring negative influences to students. For me, I would definitely use the walk through for the game, because I don’t want my students to be discouraged. And I will consistently give them prompts. After they all played the game, I will arrange a speed answering game to assess whether they acquire the vocabularies by holding pictures and to see who is the first to answer correctly. I will using the images in the game for my assessing part. For example, I will hold the picture of kettle, and student who answer kettle first will be awarded a badge for his/her performance. I could not wait using this kind of game in my class!

Twitter for Teaching

On the DIIGO account, I found two interesting articles about the potential micro-blogging in education. The articles are A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom- Educational Technology and Great Twitter Tools for your Professional Development. In the article A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in your Classroom- Educational Technology, there are four aspects that teachers can use twitter to assist their teaching: communication, resources, writing skills and twitter experience.

I found all of them are very fascinating, but considered to my future teaching context which I want to go back to China to teach high school students English, I'm really interested in silencing blurters, assignment coordinator and parent communication. First of all, in China, our class settings in high school are not that interactive and cooperative like it does in America. However, language learning is about communicating with other people. So I will primarily focus on communicative use of twitter in my class. Since our class settings are not interactive, students in China don't like interact with teachers, they only answer questions when teacher ask them to answer. Thus, most of them are silencing blurters in the class. While through twitter, I can encourage my students who have trouble with disruptive blurting, allow them to instantly tweet their blurts silently instead of out loud. They will feel much more comfortable and encouraged to speak online and if the result is good, that will also be a good motivation for them in language learning. Second, Assignment coordination is an efficient way for students to exchange ideas instead of emailing each other or waiting to meet in class. They can collaborate on projects and keep track of changes by using a Twitter hashtag. In this digital world, young people checked their mobile phone maybe every half an hour. By using twitter on their assignment is much more time saving and it's convenient for them to update their assignment anywhere anytime. Finally, twitter can also be the platform for parents to follow what's going on in the class. Our teaching is becoming more and more transparency so that we can break the gap between students and their parents.In article Great Twitter Tools for you Professional Development, I'm interested in youtwit. 

You Twit allows users to find trending YouTube videos on Twitter. These videos are sorted according to their popularity which is measured by the number of tweets they get. For a language class, it's also important that we apply multimedia to get students more engaged in class. When it comes to language learning, it's not only about linguistic system acquisition, but also about culture acquisition. In order to teaching cultures, we can show students trending YouTube videos related to politics, entertainments, traditional festivals and so on through youtwit. And since the videos are sorted according to their popularity among students, it is helpful for teacher to choose future visual teaching material for further teaching.

Teacher 2.0

The website Teacher 2.0 is really an eye catching website because I think it will be a great tool for my future teaching career. Generally speaking, the website is an independent community for educators to explore and develop their interests and passions. It aims at building a network of support for educators at all levels. By communicating online through events, interviews and workshops, the goal is to let educators help each other in their teaching career and in their contributions to the world.

On this website, there are ideas, members, forum, groups, books and readings and more. The most useful thing I find is a group called Great Ideas for the Classroom. In this group, I can share with other educators about various teaching methods in classroom. Also, I can learn from others about their efficient way of teaching and thus apply it in my own class setting. It’s a great platform for all educators to share and exchange ideas and difficulties they have encountered. In my future career, I would be very glad to keep in touch within this group!

A Learner Is Like a Web

A learner is like a web because a web has infinite threads, many learners today move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. The threads are the variety fields that learners get attached to. In Connectivism: A LearningTheory for the Digital Age, the author George Siemens holds that “connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories”. In connectivism, “the ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill”. In this digital era, more and more integrated knowledge is required and learner’s ability to learn what they need for tomorrow is more significant than what they know today.

In the video, The Changing Nature of Knowledge, Paulo Vieira quotes what George Siemens says that “learning is something exclusively limited or occurs exclusively within individual’s mind”. So knowledge is really about the distribution that occurs across the entire network. And it has two components. On one hand, it’s the internal neuro network, which is within learner’s mind. On the other hand is the external network, which is our connection with outside environments. The threads on the web are like the connections between learners and outside world. In this age, we are all buried by all kinds of information. As a learner, one should be able to develop his owe relations and connections and has the power to control it.

All in all, a learner is a like a web, he has many possible threads and connections with the external world that enables himself to update knowledge for a lifetime.

Edutaiment-Teach through Lively Activities

The name of the post on which I commented is Paperman in the blog named Film English. I'm interested in it because the lesson plans allow language teachers to teach through lively activities. When learning a second language, I think motivation is of great importance to one's learning result during second language acquisition, especially for younger learners. In China, there is a very popular English private institution called New Oriental School. They have a Film English course for teenagers during every summer and winter vocation. The course is very popular among students because they can learn from fun compared to other traditional language classes.

In this blog, the author used an Oscar-nominated short film as teaching material to teach students how to write a narrative using specific tenses. The most enlightened part of this lesson plan is step 2, the author ask students to work together in small groups to write a prediction of the story development after showing the picture.

This step integrate writing, speaking and social communication skills together in a L2 class through a fun way. When discussing in the small groups, students can practice their oral English and learn to cooperate with each other first, then they have the chance to produce a written production which practice their writing skills.
As technologies develop more and more rapidly, it's time that educator learn to use multi-media in language classes. Film is one of a good ways to engage students in learning by lively activities. Edutaiment is absolutely a popular way in such a digital world nowadays.

We Have to Change

After watching two videos on the YouTube, which entitled Educational Change Challenge and Social Media Revolution 2011, I am so impressed by the data and information displayed in them.

Educational Change Challenge

From this video, I strongly agree with the narration that teachers exist in the space where students exist. In this digital world, the generation we will teach is highly media-driven generation. Look at ourselves, I can’t imagine one day that without cellphones, laptops because I’m so rely on social media to communicate with the world myself. Let alone our students in the future. As the development of globalization, we are developing rapidly from one room school house to on world school house. If we can’t keep up with technologies, we lose relevant. But educators must be relevant. We need to change and we have to change!

Social Media Revolution 2011

I’m so impressed by the data and quotes displayed in this video. I’m really surprised that even kindergartens are learning on iPads. The new generation is growing in an intensive world combined by social media. The data provides us a direct visual shock that how powerful transmissibility and influential ability the social media has. Although, popular social networks in western country like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are not accessible in China yet, we have our own fast developing social network all around the country. As I mentioned in my last blog, weibo now is among the most popular social media in China. As the video mentioned that 93% marketers use social media in business, we are right now living in a social media revolution era. The world has change so fast since I was a child. I’m really happy to be a part of it witnessing the changes and will contribute myself in education for further revolutions.

Technologies in Language Teaching

Technologies in Language Teaching

Gabriella

With booming development of technologies, people are getting much more access to the Internet anytime and anywhere than we used to be. Thus, people around the world become increasingly closer to each other and the internet becomes a huge data base for everyone to share and communicate. However, according to Will Richardson, as the world is changing around us, educators react very slowly. Today, students are out there using a variety of technologies like blogs, twitter, podcast that they can’t use in school without teacher’s proper guidance. I feel the same way as a student. In China, the class setting is very traditional, although teachers begin to realize applying some technologies in class, mostly they use no more than power point to assist their lectures. There is a lack of interactions and cooperation between students and teachers by letting students experience the advances of technologies in learning themselves. Therefore, internet is more like an entertainment tool for Chinese students and has little function in education.

As a future language teacher, I intend to teach Chinese high school students English, as described on the ACTFL: National Standards for Foreign Language Education, which represent a variety of languages, levels of instruction, program models, and geographic regions, undertook the task of defining content standards — what students should know and be able to do — in foreign language education. Among the standards for foreign language learning, there is a focus on the communication. The description is as follows:

• 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.

Therefore I feel strongly using technologies in my class to give students more valuable resources and more opportunities to share ideas with each other. In the first three chapters in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, the author mainly talks about weblogs. Actually nowadays, there is a very popular social network tool in China called weibo. Its Chinese name means micro-blogs. Everyone can share his or her news within 140 words. The operating model is very like Twitter in America. Weibo has quickly become the hottest way among people in China to communicate in just a few years. People talk about everything like politics, social events, pop news, their lives, etc in weibo. So if I’m going to apply technologies like weblogs in my teaching settings, I will choose weibo to assist my teaching. For example, I can create a public homepage in weibo to share more interesting resources related to culture learning and have students involved in discussion on that homepage. By doing so, I can encourage students who are reticent in class to share their thoughts in writing forms. As I will teach English, I will require my students to communicate in English. And as internet is a double edged sword, by sharing resources and materials using a public homepage, I can set a good example for students to filter what is appropriate to learn and what is unhealthy to follow. Thus, I can do as best as I can to keep my students safe online.

Another way that I can use weblogs is to create a class portal. By putting all materials like syllabus, homework, assignments, reading materials online, it is not only much more time consuming and easy to track student’s minds, but also convenient for parents to get access to our class and supervise their children’s learning process.

Therefore, students get more opportunities and a good platform to communicate in English. Although technology has so many advantages in this digital area, we should never forget that every coin has two sides. As educators, our first priority is the benefit of our students. We can apply technology but not too depend on it. We must do our best to keep balance and make the best choice for our students.