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.

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.

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.