Practice Your English Through Podcasts

      Podcasts are digital medium consisting of an episodic series of audio or video, which allow users to freely download to their computers or mobile devices. According to wikipedia, “the word is a neologism and portmanteau derived from "broadcast" and "pod" from the success of the iPod, as audio podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.” But I prefer the explanation provided by Lee Lefever that “pod” is the abbreviation of personal on demand. Because it is true that users can choose their own podcasts based on their needs and interests, and most of them are charge free.

      Here, I would like to recommend ESL Pod.com to both teachers and students who want to find authentic English teaching or learning materials. The website will post a new podcast on every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Each podcast is about 20 minutes including a conversation (both in slow pace and normal pace) with transcripts and detailed explanations. Furthermore, the topics are of very wide range. You can find what you need through tags such as entertainment, business, health, and daily life; or you can just directly select your demand in the search engine. 

      What I found might be useful in my future teaching is DescribingPeople’s Looks.  I really like this topic because description is a basic skill for both speaking and writing in many real-life situations. And the adjectives that can be used to describe people are also very basic and important for intermediate language learners. Moreover, since it is an audio, students can also improve their listening by repeatedly listen to the dialogue and explanations. Therefore, my teaching procedures are as the follow:

        1) Answer the questions after you hear the conversation twice in the slow pace: 
                 What have been described in the dialogue?                                                                      
                 What adjectives are used to describe each appearance? 
        2) Describe a person (family member, friend, or your favorite star) you are familiar with by          using the word you found in the dialogue
        3) Prepare and bring your product to the class and share with your classmates.

       To sum up, podcast is a useful tool to enlarge students’ amount of information of language. And the information always keeps in pace with the time. Teachers and students only need to down load the audio or video in their personal devices. Then they can enjoy the process of language learning at anytime and anywhere.

 

ePals Projects

    ePals is an education online media, which offers a platform for both teachers and students to build or join in the educational communities. Major purposes of this site are to provide quality digital content and facilitate collaboration for effective learning. One of the attracting sections of ePals is its projects.

       Teachers are able to create their own projects and let students who are interested in the projects to join in. Almost all the projects are authentic, meaningful and can be finished in teamwork. For example, one teacher creates a project to help her students to have a chance to communicate with other people who are from India, Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China because what students currently learned is the ancient cultures of those countries. What the teacher is interested in having her students compare the modern day culture with the old ones. Finally, the project will be present in the form of Powerpoint.

       If you want to join in a project, ePals is also convenient to help you find the one that you might interested in. You can search the projects based on the language, region, projects types, and so on.

       There are also some featured projects which might have higher requirements and more interesting. One of featured projects is CollaborativeDetective Story. The students have to work together to composes the paragraph of a collaborative detective story. Students can e-mail each other and brainstorm together to determine what is going to happen next. The exchange continues until the story ends. Native speakers can read and proofread, making any grammatical/spelling corrections needed.

       This inspires me that ePals can be used as another tool to teach storytelling through internet besides Animoto and GoAnimate. But I think detective story is hard for most of the intermediate students, I would like to change the genre into fairy tale. As the teacher and instructor, I can provide the first sentence and correct students’ grammar. Each of the students will have a chance to make contributions to compose the story by providing at least one complete sentence. I can also offer a brief lecture about what elements should be involved in fairy tales before they start writing.

       To sum up, ePals is helpful to promote meaningful teaching and learning by using technology strategically. Moreover, collaborative learning is another “selling point” of ePals to attract more people to join in the projects together. Collaboration is also an important skill in both language learning and social interaction.

Leanring through comic strip

GoAnimate is a cloud-based platform for creating and distributing animated videos. It allows users to develop both narrative videos and video presentations. The service is provided on a freemium basis to consumers, and has multiple subscription levels available for businesses.

    As far as I concerned, there are at least three advantages of using GoAnimate as tool to assist teaching in the classroom.

·Authentic setting

It is hard to teach language under a circumstance when a real situation is happened in front you. But this tool could help teacher to imitate the real situation, and display it to the whole class. Teaching language under an authentic context makes learning more meaningful.   

·Cartoon

Cartoon is a good way to catch students’ attention and makes the learning more interesting. On the other hand, since it is cartoon, the teacher can also make up something funny but still contain the language points.

·Voices

A powerful function of GoAnimate is that the teacher can type the content and make the characters speak what have been typed. So it can also be used to practice the listening.

I designed a dialogue between a man and a woman. They are in a restaurant. And the story begins when they have finished their mael…

Pay the bill by Mary Ma on GoAnimate

Learning through Video Slideshows

      Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows. It is also a convenient and useful tool for language learners to practice writing through the form of storytelling or digital diary.

   
Colors Around You
      I designed a 30 second video slideshow, named Colors Around Me. I assume that the target vocabulary is about colors. Then I want my students to choose one color which is their favorite. Then they have to choose at least 5 objects that are around the students related with colors. Since the students have to write a short a brief description of the objects, they could improve their writing and enlarge their vocabulary at the same time. Furthermore, during the process of making this video, students could share their personal preferences with the teacher and other classmates, and also feel relax and comfortable to express themselves.       

     At last, in the completed output of students, texts in the video are what the teacher should pay more attention to. And pictures and music facilitate the process of writing with much more fun. Animoto ensures that students will learn and have fun at the same time.

Digital Storytelling: A New Way to Tell Your Story

    Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie. Simple techniques such as a set of slides with corresponding narration or music can constitute a basic digital story. And the content of stories can be instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective.

  According to 7 Things You Should KnowAbout Digital Storytelling, there are several advantages of digital storytelling applying in the classroom:

◎Storytelling can be effectively applied to nearly any subject.
◎User who has no technical background should be able to create digital stories.
◎Offers an opportunity to create a story reflecting on life and out-of-class experience.
◎Highlights specific characteristics or events of the storytellers.
◎Develops language proficiency with multimedia applications.
◎Develops a discerning eye for online resources, increasing their technology and media literacy.

 

(the video Frankenstein is an example of storytelling from The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling)

    As far as I concerned, I would like to use digital storytelling as a weekly journal. Students are able to tell whatever happened to them in the weekdays. The content is flexible. It could be something excited, or frightened, something they like or hate, and something they would like to appreciate or complain about. But the only rule is that the story must be told in past tense because I also want to use this tool to monitor their grammar.  

    To sum up, the essences of story-telling is to share words and information with others. And now with the help of technology, the story-telling become more vivid and interesting. Through the process of creating and watching digital stories, students are able to increase the information literacy, and also demonstrate the stu­dent’s learning and growth.

Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Strategy Games

First of all, I am a huge fan of Big Fish Games, and I really enjoy their hidden objects game. My favorite one is The Black Cat which is adapted from Edgar Ellen Poe’s novel. Since I had read the novel before, I already knew the plot and the ending of the game. But the game treated you with delicate pictures and lifelike sound effects. I was totally attracted by its tense scenes and creepy atmosphere. As you know, hidden objects games always have a lot of vocabulary which you need to know and to pick them out from a mess picture. So you can also learn some new words. And I’m pretty sure that I learned and memorized the word “cane” from The Black Cat because it occurred several times. However, I won’t recommend this to young students for it is not free and the some of the scene is really scary.

    What I would like to introduce is Big Fish’s Games: The Dark Manor (available for PC, ipad and iphone). It is a combination of strategy game and hidden objects. The player is the heir of a ghost manor (still a little bit horrible but I think it is acceptable to high school students). The mission is to manage the manor and try to set other friendly ghosts free. The following the pictures are the scenes from my manor. And I am still a beginner (only level 2).

    If I could apply this game in the language teaching, my objectives will be:

    To enlarge student’s vocabulary: In the game, the player has to match the correct pictures with the words to move on to a new chapter of the story. So during this process, students should know the meaning of the word. If they don’t, they can look them up in dictionaries. What if they don’t want to look up the dictionary and randomly point their fingers on the screen? Don’t worry. The game itself will warn the player and pause the game for seconds. In order to check whether students are familiar with the words that occur in the game, I could make an informal quiz, and the student who has remembered most words will be awarded a prize.

    To improve writing skills in a long-term practice: The setting of the game is based on a narrative story and has a character upgrade system. In other words, the game could be played for a quite long time. Thus, I could ask my students to write a daily “management diary” which let students write down what they did in the game, how long they played the game, or what they feel about today’s game. This will help students to form a habit of writing. Although it is in the form of diary, I will focus on the grammar and content, and give them feedbacks. I think this will improve students’ writing gradually. And I could assess this objective through comparing their outputs and I’m sure I will find the improvements. (Similar as the idea in Casual Game)  

    All in all, strategy games could stimulate players’ autonomous decision-making skills and internal decisions. Thus, we can use the game to catch students’ attentions. And then the game itself will naturally stimulate the language learning process. By the way, if you are interested in this kind of hidden objects games, I am willing to recommend some to you, but the games might not be free.    

Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Casual Games

      Before introducing my idea of applying a causal game in the future classroom, I would like to talk about gamification first.

What is gamification?

      According to 7Things You Should Know About Gamification, “Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior”. In other words, designing a language learning task in the form of a game is the gamification.

What are the benefits of using gamification in the classroom?

      To summarize the answer from Tom Chatfield, there are benefits:

      1. Easy to motivate or stimulate learners’ interests through beautiful and settings.

      2. Clear indications for measuring progress of each learner.

      3. Well-planned long-term and short-term goals for learners to achieve gradually.

      4. Positive reward (fictitious money, trophy or XP) and feedback both for the teacher and the player.

      5. Try to finish some tasks in collaborative and interactive atmosphere.

How to use gamification in the English class?

      This time, I would like to use a causal game as an example. I found a game named Happy Pets through 10Gaming Genres to Adapt in Class. Happy Pets is a webpage game operated by Facebook. It offers players a platform to adopt pets and raise them with care. Although this the first time I play this game, I could easily understand the operations and instructions within 10 minutes.

      I decide to use this game as an assist to help students to practice their writing skills. I can design a topic, such as what pets do you have, why would you choose this pet, or if you can raise a real one, will you choose another pet etc. Or just let them keep a weekly diary to report their pets’ growth. During this process, students should describe the images and explain the reasons in English which will practice their writing skills. Furthermore, since it is a game from Facebook, it would be easier for them to share their playing conditions with their friends and classmates. And Happy Pets has a system of giving gifts to others in order to finish a mission. Thus, I think this game would also enhance the communication or interaction between the classmates outside the classroom. I might not use a walk thourgh and the images from the game because Happy Pets does not contain much techniques. What the studetns need to do is to offer their pets some daily care. And although the images of the game is very cute, it is not very useful in the teaching.

      On the other hand, I could use prizes to keep students to get involved in the game and form a good habit of writing. And the prize will be given based on their writings rather than who has a higher level of the game. In this gamificationized writing task, the role of the teacher (me) is the controller and the judge. I should control students do not pay too much time on the game and judge their outputs both of the writing and the pets (outcome of the game).

      I think I could assess my learning objectives through my students production. Since I decide to make it a long-range task, I will find whether students' writing skills are improves or not by comparing their writings, and I could find out what efforts should I make to better support their writing.

      To sum up, gamification offers teachers an advanced but easy to get students involved in the language learning tasks, and it offers students opportunities for recognition and a positive attitude toward their work.

  

Twitterchat: Q&A within 128 words

       I joined a Twitterchat with the hashtag #Edtechchat. When I entered the chat room, many people were already started talking. Some of the members were new to this chat room just like me, and they tweeted a brief introduction of them.

       Before I joined his group, I thought they talked the specific techniques about applying technology in the classroom or something very academic. But later, I found that their first question of the day was about the bad weather and school. I felt a little surprised and breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t feel nervous anymore because I could say something about this topic. I studied in Buffalo where the cold weather was everyday’s fare and snowing was routine.

       However, a problem came up. The limitation of each tweet was 128 characters, which was apparently long enough for my reply. So I had to reorganize my sentence and chose shorter words instead. At first, I thought this was a little bit annoying. Why should there be a restriction on the letters? But a few seconds later, I told myself that maybe the reason why it named “tweet”, a short, high sound. And I think I could express myself clearly in short words. To be honest, it was interesting when you have to struggling with the words. Maybe I will use “words limitation” in my teaching for some writing tasks or word games. Furthermore, Twitterchat  is a good place for quick ask and quick answer. May be I could use it as a sample to make a similar Q&A responses board for my students to let them ask and answer the questions of what they have learned. And that is also convenient for me to monitor my students’ study.

       All in all, Twitterchat offers me a platform to communicate with other people who have the same or even more knowledge than me. I can always learn new things from them, and the internet tools can always bring me ideas to apply in real classroom.

Let's Tweet!

Twitter has proven itself to be an interesting and useful tool for educators around the globe. If being used appropriately in language teaching, students would learn new knowledge and have fun at the same time. The Teacher’s Guide to Twitter suggests four tips for teachers using Twitter. Briefly, they are creating it, connecting it, sharing it and keeping it.

As a future teacher, I have an idea that using Twitter to form a study group. I can give mu students four course-related topics each week. And ask students to choose their interested group. After they form the group, each member should share a link of related article and post their comments on each others’ sharing. Then appointing one student to tweet a complete review of all the members’ ideas and sharing it with the whole class. In this process, students should first searching articles,  and then selecting the appropriate one. Finally, they should write down their feelings or opinions in correct sentence structure. The main purpose of doing so is to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

I also come up with three basic rules which are inspired by 10 Twitter MistakesYou Should Avoid. Even though there are no official instructions to teach students how to use Twitter correctly, the teacher has the responsibility to remind students what they could do and they’d better not do. 1.  Do not randomly connect or share on your Twitter without concrete motivation 2. Do not provide unfounded or unreliable information on Twitter 3. Show respects to others’ sharing and comments.

To sum up, Twitter is a wonderful assistant to support teaching outside the classroom, which is convenient and low cost than many real books and teaching materials. Twitter will bring infinite benefits to both teachers and learners only if we use it reasonably.

Learning from the Virtual Community

        I joined in a Google Communities named English language learning.The creator of this community is a TESOL certified English teacher with qualifications from Oxford Seminars. And this community is created for people around the world who interested in learning the English. You can feel free to post any questions you may have, the other members of the community could help you to find the answer. This is a community where people with all varying degrees of language proficiency can learn from one another.

        As a non-native speaker, I could learn a lot of new knowledge and informations from this community, such as  specific grammar point (Commonly Misused Adjectives in the English Language; Rules in Using the Apostrophe), culture (Halloween experience in the USA), and using English in daily life(Asking for directions).

        On the other hand, as a future teacher, all the information in this community could be my teaching materials in my classroom. All the knowledge are there, clearly and systematically. What I need to do is digest them first ,and then find an appropriate way to put them out and teach to my student.  For example, if I am teaching adjectives and I want to enlarge my students’ vocabulary, I might only use adjectives part (see the picture on the left side, which is sited from my community) , because the verb part is not related to my teaching plan and that is too much information for my students to digest.

        At last, since all the members are from different parts of the world. I could also ask them about their English learning and teaching situations in their countries and compare them with my in China. I always want to know the similarities and differences about teaching English. Sometimes, it is amazing to find out that the people you never know before have the same idea as yours, and even you all teaching English, but the way people teach is differ in thousands of ways.

The Learner of Today

        George Siemens pointed out in his article, Connectivism: ALearning Theory for the Digital Age, that the foundational principles of knowledge has been changed and is growing exponentially. With the development of technology and networks, the structures and the manners of learning are changing, such as formal classroom to informal one, separate works to cooperative works, or from a small group to a larger group. Seimens(2005) declared that connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations. Thus, he present a new theory as “connectivism”.

        Then, what is connectivism? According to Seimens, “connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual”. Moreover, in the video What is Connectivism, “knowledge is networked and distributed, which is increasingly aided by technology”.  Based on this idea, I’d like to describe the individual learner as the airport. The internet is the airplane. And the knowledge and information that people learned from others are the passengers of the airplane. Different airports send passengers to different destinations through airplanes. In other words, the individual, as the starting point, uses internet as a tool to exchange information and knowledge with another individual. Gradually, each individual will form their own routine and systemic social network.

        To sum up, applying technology is the trend of teaching and learning in the future. It is necessary for the learners to cultivate an ability to synthesize and recognize the target knowledge from the large amount of information and transfer them to own use.

Diigo or Scoop.it? That's a question

Both Scoop. it and Diigo are two great tools to create, share, and annotate the websites that you like. They offer teachers a platform to create or join a group and share knowledge with colleagues, students, and others. But, if someone ask me which one is better, my answer will definitely be “it depends”.

        Here is a brief form I made to compare Diigo and Scoop. it:

        As you can see in the form, neither Diigo nor Scoop. it is perfect to meet every requirement. Well, as far as I concerned, I would prefer to use Diigo. I really like the idea that you can highlight the information that you want. Because I have a habit to take notes, and underline the words or sentences while I am reading. This might make feel more comfortable to continue reading. And also Diigo is convenient for me to track down other articles from the whole collection. All in all, the one fits you is the best for you. 
       
 
FYI: I am not very familiar with these two tools. If there are some uses I missed or misunderstood, please comment on my blog, and I will try to adjust my content. Thank you!
 

Want Learners to be Self-Motivated? Internet Makes it Come True

Many pedagogical theories and studies showed that student will learn better if they are being appropriately motivated. But what kind of teaching approach or who can motivate students? Dose it suit everybody? After watching two videos about future teaching through Internet, the answer should be learner themselves.         

The first one is Future LearningDocumentary. Video games was described as “powerful learning tools that have ever been created” in the video. It is amazing that you can always notice that no matter how old a person is, he or she will play the game again and again until reach a higher score or even master the game. During the whole process, the player completes the task independently and continuously. Furthermore, some video games are designed to be relevant with daily life, and also usually present it in a fun way. As a language learner, I want design a video game just like The Sims Games which you have to live in the TL country to survive by communicating with your neighbors, your friends, and your boss. If the player could use the language and vocabulary correctly and appropriately, he might be a successful businessman and rich otherwise he might get punched or lose his job. With the development of science and technology, I hope my idea will come true some day.

Another video is A Vision of 21^st Century Teachers. All the teacher said nothing but holding a white board to show what they want to say. I think this might indicate an image of future teacher. Just as the first video has mentioned, when children are given the permission to the Internet, there should also be an absence of teacher to let students to try to learn by themselves. But by ‘absence’, I do not mean that teachers are unnecessary or disappear in the future. What teachers need to do in the future is to give high quality orders and let computer to do the basic works, which offers students an opportunity to explore the information freely and independently.  

To sum up, online resources are boundless and powerful. Sometimes the teaching activities or materials might not be motivated enough for everyone in the class. But what if find a way to let students motivate themselves in a cyber-classroom? That would be easy to make students study spontaneously and have fun at the same time. Internet tools such as blog, twitter, YouTube, will polish your teaching with fascinating effects and surprising outcomes.   

Using Blogs to Meet Learning Standards

Interacting with others is an effective way to learn language, and because of the power of Internet, interaction becomes more and more convenient and interesting. Blog, as one of the popular internet tools, allows people to share information and their thoughts with each other whenever they want. Thus, as an English teacher in the future, I would love to use blog to build a platform for my students to inspire and motivate each other.

Language proficiency should be accomplished through four language domains: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In the following, I will describe how blogs could be used in reading and writing. 

 

Reading:

Before starting a new lesson, teachers usually ask students to preview the texts. For example, the next paragraph is an excerpt from Oxford English S1A (Shanghai Edition), Unit 2 Care for hair:

        “Shampoo and conditioner

         Choose a shampoo that suits your type of hair (i.e., oily, dry or normal hair). Apply it after wetting your hair with warm water. After shampooing, squeeze out the extra water."

In this paragraph “shampoo” , “conditioner” and “squeeze” are new words. I could link pictures with new words to help students remember the meaning and have a direct view of them. Besides, I could share links of some course-related reading materials or videos, such as A Brief History of Hairdressing Salon, What Hairstyles Suit What Faces,Barber by Chaplin, etc. Blogs could help students to read the text in a vivid and fun way.

Writing:

After reading the materials, I could ask students to share their tips about how they take care of their hair. Or students can draw(sketch-paint) their favorite hairstyle and other students can make comments. Writing skills can be improved gradually by commenting others' work. Furthermore, this could motivated students before they learn the text, and helps me to make sure that everyone gets involved.

Based on American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTEL), 3 National Standards for Foreign Language Education could be met in blogging this way:  

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emptions, and exchange opinions.
• Standard 3.1: Students reinforce and further their knowledge od other disciplines through the foreign language.
• Standard 5.1: Students use the language both between and beyond the school setting.

To sum up, blogs can be used as a tool for students to communicate for social, intercultural and instructional purposes based on school settings. Blogs can provide a comfortable atmosphere to let everyone speak, and it is easy for teacher to keep in connect with students even outside of class.