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.