Multifunctional podcast.

The podcast website I chose was ESL Pod. And after having scanned the posts, I chose ESL Podcast 742 –Admiring Someone from Afar as my teaching material.

The first reason that I chose this one was because the topic was really attractive. Most of my students were adult learners, so topics about love, relationships were quite interesting to them. Being a teacher, knowing what kind of topic could draw students' attention was one of the most important things we needed to do.

Secondly, the speed of this pod was slow enough, this was the ideal listening material for students of intermediate level. They could practice keeping notes when they were listening to the post. The good thing for this website was it offered complete transcript of the podcast so that students could easily check their spellings and mistakes after they finished the notes.

Thirdly, there were several native expressions appeared in this podcast, such as "out of one's league", "out of the blue", "admire sb. from afar", etc. These were exactly what the students wanted to learn for oral English. I will not tell them the meaning of these phrases directly. Instead, I will make them guess first according to the context given here. This could make the students have a better understanding and a deeper impression of these expressions.

Last but not least, I will use this material to give them some cultural tips. How do you ask someone out? What is the difference between date and appointment? What do you need to pay attention to when you go out for a date? What is the basic manner in a date? Knowing these could help the students to adapt living in the foreign countries faster.

Knowledge learning all over the world.

This global community is a place for teachers and students to do collaborative projects and exchange information. The best thing is it allows teachers and students all over the world to participate in different programs and get familiar with life in other countries.

Firstly, this website has its own column for teachers. Teachers can exchange teaching experience there, and also they can exchange information of their students so that they can do some exchange projects with some other children together. For example, a teacher wrote a post about her class project. The children are willing to make some Christmas cards, and they want to exchange with children from some other areas. And another teacher gave her response saying she and her students would be excited to exchange Christmas cards with them. I think it is a great opportunity for the students to interactive with some other kids through language learning program. Also, there were some teachers looking for English language practice partners for their students because the students’ native language is Spanish. This is a very effective way for the teachers to share resources through this platform.

Secondly, for the students there are also special designed program. Students can learn knowledge from different aspects such as culture, language, geography, etc. There are even free e-movies offered for the kids so that they can learn some valuable information with visual aids. This website also allows students to do storytelling. They can make their stories, watch others’ stories, and also they can share the stories with other audience. Learning from peers is always a good way to let knowledge leave deep impression to the students.

Last but not least, the community offers forums both for teachers and students. There are different posts discussing different issues there. As I have stated above, both teachers and students can use it to ask for help, share information, and complete series of interesting collaborative projects.

In the future I think I will start to use this website from posting my problems in teaching. Sometimes we read books to search for answers, but some other times, experienced teachers are even better than books. There are so many situations which are not included in the books, so it is a good place for teachers to ask for help and suggestion. Also, I will introduce this website to my students, I am sure they will find something they are interested in there. Also I will search opportunities to complete some exchange collaborative projects with students from other countries. I think it is always meaningful and interesting to get to know other people’s life and then gain some knowledge from it.

Using a video to teach.

The link to my video is http://studio.stupeflix.com/v/ajtfyb5TuY/?autoplay=1.

I plan to use this story to teach the students how to use the "If..." clause. There were two poems in the video, and each of them included several sentences which were wrote with the "If..." clause. I will make the students watch it, and then translate it into their first language, and then try to analyze the grammar rules here. And then, in order to check if they understand this grammar rule, I will ask them to make several sentences in class using the "If..." clause.

Also, another purpose of this video is to let the students learn how to use "however" in their writing. They need to observe the video, and find out the "however" appeared in the video, and try to give a conclusion on how to use this word correctly.

An interesting way to teach language!

The link to my story is http://www.pimpampum.net/bookr/?id=31633.

This story is designed for younger English learner in elementary school or middle school.

The teaching objective of this class is teaching students to use past tense to narrate a story or a happend incident.

I wrote all of this story in past tense, and the students will need to observe the way I wrote the sentences and at the same time, they need to pay attention to the past tense of the verbs.

I will ask the students to distinguish the changed verbs, and then write down the original forms of those verbs. Also, they need to observe the rules about past tense, and I will also ask them to rewrite the story in present tense.

Teaching grammar in this way can draw the attention of the students effectively, and also can explain the grammar rules in a less boring way. Language starters will easily get tired of learning all the vocabulary and grammar rules because most of those knowledge are tedious. If we add digital storytelling as a visual aid, the students may be more interested in learning all those things.

Digital storytelling--Being new while being old

The definition of digital story is “A short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.” And 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.”

People use digital telling to teach culture, beliefs and values. It is a good way to let people that know a little technology make short videos so that they can exchange information and communicate with people far away. Also, according to 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, this dynamic creates an opportunity to reflect on life and find deep connections with the subject matter of a course or with an out-of-class experience, such as a trip abroad. It’s a fresh way to combine technology with the nontechnology subjects together.

Photo by Bryan Alexander

As language teachers, I think we have many choices to adapt this digital storytelling into our language teaching. I watched several stories from Center for Digital Storytelling, and got inspirations from them.

We could make a video in English, or any second language we want to teach. We narrate our stories, and add language points we want to teach in those stories. For example, if we want to teach the past tense, we could narrate the story in past tense, and then asked the students to figure out how we use that tense. Or we could add the new vocabulary into our story, and let students guess the meaning and the usage of the new words. Although we are narrating the story in the second language, we still need to put subtitle in the students’ first language so that they have no trouble understanding the story. Keeping them in pace is important because once they start to get confused of the story, they will soon lose concentration.

Another way to use digital storytelling in our language teaching is that we can give the students the same pictures as materials for the video making, and then ask them to make up stories based on those pictures. Although the pictures are the same, apparently they will come up with different stories because they have different imaginations and experience. Also, the teacher can give them some extra requirements such as try to use certain sentence pattern in your storytelling, or try to use certain tense in your storytelling, etc. It’s a good way to help the students practice their speaking and writing skills.

In conclusion, although digital storytelling is not a brand new thing, we still need to explore it from language teaching aspect. It’s a simple and interesting way to combine technology and language teaching. I believe as long as we use it properly, both us teachers and students will benefit from it.

                                                             Photo by Seriykotik1970

Reference

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling

Center for Digital Storytelling.

Be thoughtful, be wise.

It is really a brand new way to use twitter this way. To be honest, I was not very clear about how to use this kind of microblogs for language teaching. However, after have read the article How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching and 28 Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter, I started to realize that there were quite a lot of advantages I could get from microblogs.

Firstly, I could get the responses from the students faster. If I post a question for discussion, or something valuable I got from other resources, the students can see them immediately, and they could post their reflections at once under my question. This way of teaching will make the “outside-classroom” discussions possible. This kind of communication will allow the teacher and the students to have some more effective interactions.

Secondly, since there are so many professionals are microblog users, both the students and the teachers can have a great channel to communicate with those professionals which is impossible for us to do in other ways. We could discover so many shining points by talking with those authorities and masters in our research field. And those discoveries might me very helpful for our future teaching.

Last but not least, microblogs are good places for teachers to post important information about the class. We could use it to post our syllabus, the assignments, or even the notes for our classes. Microblogs are better than the school’s systems sometimes because they are more interesting and enjoyable, so the students tend to check them more often. In this way, they can get the important information easier and faster, and they will not miss much contents, too.

In conclusion, like Ernesto Priego said, “Social media is becoming increasingly important in teaching and research work but tutors must remember, it’s conversation not a lecture.” That means what we need to form is a better environment for the teachers and the students to better interact. The students’ responses seem to be more important at this point. Although more and more teachers start to realize that social media is a good tool for language teaching, we still need to use it carefully and wisely.

EVOnline2002--a new place for us to talk.

There are so many group networks that can help us with our language teaching field. Usually I only know some general ones such as Face book, Twitter, Sina Mini Blog, etc. This time, I got the chance to take a glance at some other group networks that may have closer connection with education. The one I’m interested in is EVOnline2002.

It’s a group network belongs to Yahoo. It allows ESL and EFL teachers and also students from different countries to communicate each other. They can exchange their opinions about different issues, also the good thing I found there is they could carry out some surveys in this place. If someone is doing certain kind of research, and she needs 30 people to finish a questionnaire, she could post an “announcement” to ask if there is anyone who would like to help her conduct this survey. If I’m interested, I will leave her a message under her announcement to let her know that she could count me in. I think it’s always good for us to have some place to do some professional discussion with people that from different background with us. We could always get benefits from other culture and other teaching system.

Use your "silk" to connect the world!

A teacher is like a spider today.

I know my analogy would seem to be a little weird, because no one wants to be an insect really. However, after have read the article and seen some of the videos, my first impression of teachers’ image nowadays is spiders. Please read my post, and then you will understand why I had this thought.

There are two things that impressed me in the article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. (Siemens, G. 2005, January). There are two principles he mentioned in Principles of Connectivism. The first one is “Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.” And the second one is “Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.”  

Since the technology is developing really fast these days, we have to change our original way of teaching. In the past, one just needed to master the knowledge in his own field. For example, a lawyer only needed to know all the legal items and the cases in the past, but he needs to know much more knowledge nowadays. Because the cases varies, and there are so many different cases that involves information of different field. If a lawyer wants to engage a lawsuit for a farmer, he may need to get some basic understanding of agriculture, eg: the procedures of planting, the fertilizer they use, and the product they sell, etc. Or he may easily lose the suit because he’s lack of some concepts of the agricultural field, and he cannot grab any emphasis about the case. As a result, the trend of the learning procedures of the times is the students need to connect different subjects together, because all these subjects are related to each other, and they form our life together. If a student only likes to learn physics, but he’s a terrible English learner, he may encounter much more difficulties than he imagines if he goes abroad for further study. Those difficulties may not be academic, but they could still be very tough. Therefore, teachers need to change our role from a person who teaches one single subject to an educator who could help the students to make the connections from his own subject to others. So being a teacher, we need to obtain more knowledge than we did before, or we cannot satisfy the students’ request. Therefore, I consider a teacher as a spider, because a spider has the ability to produce the silk and make the silk to a net. Using the net, we can reach every spot we need and get what we want to get. Moreover, the spider can control the direction of the silk splitting, so it just seems like a teacher can connect to any field of knowledge related to the subject she is teaching.

Being like a “spider” is not a very simple thing. Although I said a teacher in these days needs to obtain more knowledge than before, it is always easier to say than to do. Thanks God we have technology and we have computer. In the video The Changing Nature of Knowledge, the man mentioned the old-style computer we used to use. It was the computers with black screen, and the exact words the man said were “To use it was more of a challenge than to not to use it.” One common person cannot know information of all the fields, so the way we make connection is to form a combination of database and other resources. We cannot stall everything in our brains, but we can save them in the computer, and take them out when it’s necessary. The important thing is we need to let the students realize how important the connection is, and what the benefits are to make the connections during their learning process.

“Knowledge is really about the distribution occurs across the entire network.” We need to know that everything on the world is not isolated. Everything has its own connection with others. Using this magic power, we could become a better “spider”, and at the same time, we would save a lot of time “splitting|”.

It's gonna be a great helper!!

The blog I like is http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/09/we-video-collaborative-online-video.html.

The reason why I found it interesting is, in my oral English class, I always liked to show my students some videos from a sitcom or a movie. As you know the most basic and important part of oral English is the pronunciation and intonation, it is always a good way to let the students imitate the native speakers’ talk. Although there are so many videos we can use nowadays, it is difficult for the students to tell which part can both help them improve their spoken English and be related to their real life. As a result, I tried to find different videos about different aspects of life, shopping, eating in a restaurant, meeting new classmates, or going to a movie theater, and the students could imitate the pronunciation and intonation from the videos while they could also learn some native expressions from those shows.

However, my problem was I could not find a way to select certain part of the video and combine it with the other related ones together. It was a waste of time to show the whole video to the students, so the best way for this “visual aid” would be put all the related video clips together, and let the students get better understanding of that scene. That is why I am so excited to find this blog. I am going to try this software out. If I can learn to use it, it would be a great help for me to enrich my own class.

We are teachers of the new generation!

First of all, I really enjoyed watching these videos, and I actually had some fun! After having watched “Educational Change Challenge” and “Pay Attention”, I start to think about the education systems today. I have never taken this issue seriously, because I still stay in my generation, in my old impression of the students. I’m not moving forward, but these videos told me that students today are totally different from those in the past.

There are several things that impressed me a lot in the video. In the first video, a question was proposed: What is school for? In the past, the school was just a place for a bunch of students to listen to the teachers’ lectures. They learnt what the teacher taught, and did what the teachers asked them to do. You need to attend the classes to make sure that you did not miss any information. However, schools are more multifunctional these days. And they do not have so many limitations, either. They are changing from one-room schoolhouses to one-world schoolhouses. Students can absorb more knowledge than before even without going out of their own bedrooms. They use the World Wide Web, and different instant messaging tools to exchange information all over the world. They are more precocious than students in the past, so they like to challenge the teachers’ authority sometimes because they consider themselves as adults. As a result, teachers should not insist on their old teaching concept and method anymore, because that may increase the distance between them and the students. We need to understand students’ culture, or there would be “no meaning if we are not where they are”.   

During the next “Pay Attention” video, the video-maker proposed a series of questions that led us to think about the changes of students’ learning method. “How do your students learn?” “How much richness does your curriculum provide?” “Are you reaching them?” “Are you engaging them?” All of these questions are worthy thinking about. It not easy to satisfy today’s students, but that’s why we need to study their culture and try to work out some new systems to let them enjoy learning. Today’s students are expected to be creative, so our way of teaching should also be creative. Most of us have just started our exploration on using technology to teach, and we do not know how to use the high-tech tool wisely to accomplish our teaching goals. However, we have got a start, and all we need to do is to keep moving forward, and keep exploring.

There is one thing that I always believe, that is technology will never replace teachers. As human being, we have the ability to sense the students’ needs from a perceptual way, and we have the ability to give them the right guidance in time. Therefore, we need to do more research on how technology can help us to teach more effectively. Here I do not mean only to show some videos, download some articles, or use “Google Books” to introduce more books to the students, but also we need to see some other advantages that we can get from technology. In that way, we can learn to adopt some other methods which can make our class more vivid and advancing with the times. And that is how we make ourselves better educators.

Reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEHNhcdyMtc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEFKfXiCbLw&feature=related

Why technologies are important?

After reading this chapter, the idea which most impressed me is we need the high-tech teaching method because we do not have enough time!

As we all know, it will cost one a very long time to obtain the ability to use a second language to communicate with others fluently. The author here gave us a very clear picture by giving us statistic samples, "After years of experience in training field agents, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) estimates that anywhere from 700 to 1,320 hours of full-time instruction are needed to reach a level of high fluency (Bialystok and Hakuta 1994,34)." 1,320 hours! That is a large number. However, most of the students could not even meet the lowest standard. For a college student in China, if she chooses Spanish as her major, that means she only has four years to finish most of her Spanish study, from the alphabet to the most complicated grammar (because let’s face it, there’s hardly anyone that would still keep learning his undergraduate major after finding a job). Although four years seem to be a long time, think carefully, is it really enough to master a foreign language?

Take me as an example. I started to learn English when I was in the 4^th Grade, 9 years old. We had English class almost everyday, and for each class that was 45 minutes. Moreover, my major in college was English, too. As a result, I had learnt English for 13 years when I graduated from the university. However, I still could not communicate well at that time. My first time talking with my American colleague from the U.S, it was like a nightmare. I stumbled a lot, and I almost could not finish a whole sentence for several times. And also, when I was a junior student in college, I started to learn French. I have learnt it for 2 years, and about 4 hours every week. However, I still could not express even a simple paragraph after that two years’ study. I consider these as very suitable examples to support the author’s finding.

Also, the author stated the problem from another way. He mentioned, “In all fairness, colleagues teaching languages such as Chinese or Japanese, with complex writing systems …These writing systems impose a steep learning curve above and beyond the normal challenges of achieving oral proficiency. All upper-division language courses critically involve advanced levels of literary proficiency, in addition to oral proficiency, which is not normally achieved by Japanese and Chinese children in their native countries until early adolescence. It is unreasonable to expect university language students to gain advanced literacy in just four, short years without active guidance from their professors. ” In order to gain language proficiency in a shorter time, the most effective way would be to go abroad for further study so that the students can live in the L2 language environment at the same time. “Practice makes perfect.” That is why most students’ L2 made great progress after coming back from another country. However, for most students, they “are unable or unwilling to take advantage of study abroad”. Only being taught in class is far less enough. If one could not experience the atmosphere in a country, and could not use it again and again in her daily life, it would be really difficult for her to turn the language into her own asset. That is why our high-tech teaching method has been introduced in the education field.

According to the author, “there are three important technological platforms that provide tools to assist language learning, in order of increasing interactivity: the web, CD-ROM or hypermedia application, and network-based communication (i.e., e-mail, electronic mailing list, user groups, MOOs, chat programs, blogs, and wikis). All the tools that are under these three categories play different roles in the technological teaching. They allow the students to contact the outside world without getting out of the gate of their own country. Not only do the audios and videos let the students know more about the standard pronunciation and intonation of the target language, but also they can help the students to get better understanding of the culture and the spirit of the country. And those could make great contribution to students’ L2 teaching and learning, because we all know that understanding the culture of one country can help people better understand the hiding meaning of the language.    

The world is becoming smaller and smaller. Since globalization has brought so many benefits to our life, why not combine it with the high technology and use them wisely?

Reference:

http://idiom.nystesol.org/articles/vol38-01.html

http://uniroma3.academia.edu/PatrickBoylan/Papers/451551/What_does_it_mean_to_learn_a_language_in_todays_world_What_role_can_present-day_computer_technology_play

 

Reminder of Internet safety!

My dear students, although I have already told you how wonderful it is to use all the resources of the Internet, there are still a lot of dangers hiding behind the beautiful appearance. As your teacher, I must give you all the tips I know to prevent you from those dangers. When you are surfing online, you must remember the following things:

Firstly, stay away from those inappropriate contents. Although, the Internet is like a jewelry box that is full of beautiful gems, there is still something ugly staying at the dark corner. There might be some pornography, dirty language, or violent movies online. You need to have the ability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, and to control yourself.

Secondly, do not easily give out your personal information. There are always bad people who like to steal the information from you and use it to do some illegal things. You don’t want to be charged for others’ crime, do you? So next when you are clicking on those websites, make sure you know what they are about. Do not let those cons succeed.

Thirdly, do not chat with ANYBODY. There are dozens of IM software for you to communicate with friends, family, and some random strangers online. However, when you are chatting with some guys that you do not know, you need to pay very attention, especially for girls. Do not agree to meet an online friend without thinking about it, and do not meet an online friend alone! Do not expose yourself in danger. Think what you should do before you actually do it.

Last but not least, be careful to the online fraud. Sometimes you may receive some e-mails from your “bank”, your “school”, or your “friends”. They may tell you they had some trouble or some problem with your account, your tuition, or some other issue. They may ask you to send them some money, or to go to their “website” and do some operation. I must tell you, 99% of their websites are fake. There are a lot of people who are good at IT technology. Instead of using their ability to do something good, they’d rather use it to get some money. Do not let yourself become a victim of their crimes.

In conclusion, there might be a lot of good and valuable information online, but also, there are some unfortunate things happening all the time. You need to learn to protect yourself before roaming in the ocean of Internet.

For more information, please go to
www.connectsafely.org/...lying-from-the-inside-out.html
http://www.infinitelearninglab.org/

Three ways to teach with a blog!

As the high-pace development of technology, more and more people start to use Internet as a tool to work and study, because there is so much useful information online. A business man can handle his own business sitting at home instead of going abroad every month while a student can write his thesis using the references on the Internet instead of going to the library. In this trend, teachers nowadays are more different that those in the past. More and more teachers choose to add the network element into their teaching. It can help them to convey their idea faster, and also allow them to communicate with the students more. After reading some articles about teaching with the online sources, I found that there were some ways for us to use blog to teach our students.

First, we can post our lectures or newsletters on our blog. As one of the teaching standard of TESOL is "Teachers use knowledge of student performance to make decisions about planning and instruction 'on the spot' and for the future.  Teachers involve learners in determining what will be assessed and provide constructive feedback to learners, based on assessments of their learning", the students can view the articles and get some inspiration from them. Also, we can let them to leave some comments after they have read the blog, in that way, we can better understand the students’ thoughts, and can exchange opinions on some academic issues.

Secondly, a standard about instructering says "Teachers create supportive environments that engage all learners in purposeful learning and promote respectful classroom interactions." As a result, we can also using the online media source to make our class more vivid and enjoyable. We can post some videos on our blog. They could be our lecture of demonstration of some educational theories, or they could be some lectures of other professors which we consider it helpful to our teaching, or they could even be some fragments of movies or TV series in which we want the students to gain some cultural or academic knowledge.

Third, since we can link our blog with a lot of other blogs, we can let the students know more academic groups through our blog. Also, as another standard about language proficiency is "Teachers understand that language learning is most likely to occur when learners are trying to use the language for genuine communicative purposes", blog is a great platform for the students to post their own findings. It would be their own place to exchange ideas with their peers. Sometimes, it would be even more beneficial that just listening to the teacher.

Last but not least, blog is a good place for distance teaching. The teacher can teach students who live thousands of miles away, using the video casting function and other online tools. It could make our teaching more effective and unlimited. 

Reference
www.freetech4teachers.com/...educators-are-writers.html
www.elearnspace.org/...-media-there-is-no-there-there