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.