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.