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.

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.