Podcast for ESL Teaching

 
     I found BBC - Podcasts - World News For Schools a good resource for ESL teaching. This podcast select the hotest news from everyday BBC news that are suitable to the level of students between age 11 -14. I listened to the most recent episode, which is the piece of news on April 28th, 2011. It is about the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and the public voices towards this marriage. The host's pronounciation is clear and accurate. The piece of news also includes several short interviews, which are very authentic.
    I think this kind of NEWS could be a good listening practise for ESL students. The students take down notes about the piece of news, trying to capture the main idea, as well as some of the details of it. It could also be uesd as a intensive listening material for students to try to write down as much as they hear. After listening, students could exchange ideas about the piece of news. The authentic short interviews increase the difficulty in listening, but they prepare students with the various accents in real seetings.

ePals

This is my first time to contact with ePals, and it was found to be an interesting experience.

   I was attracted by its idea to connect classrooms of similar geographic features and teaching contents together. Without the internet tools, connections between classrooms are quite limited. But ePals provide teachers and students a platform to communicate with their counterparts, so that they could exchanges ideas and teaching or learning experiences. This feature also gives students opportunities to know more about the language and culture they are learning.

   The large amout of free resourses provided by other teachers also benefits inexperienced teachers a lot. By joining groups and connecting with other teachers, we could find many useful resources, like lesson plans, videos, and assessments that could be used in teaching.

   In my future classroom, I would like my students to use this site to work cooperatively with each other. Since the site includes a number of convinient web tools, such as forum and wiki, it will not be difficult for students to work on a project simutaniously and I could keep an eye on the their working log. When the project is finished, students' works could be published to the internet. Students will feel a sense of complishment when they see the final products of their efforts.

Movie poster -> story telling

My movie poster

I created a movie poster in Big Huge Labs, using a Flickr photo.
   I would like to use this poster in my EFL writing class. I would ask my students to say whatever they think of about the poster or about the title and note them down as a brainstorm activity. Then the students could write their imaginary scenario of this movie.
   This tool could be introduced to students for them to create their own posters and tell their stories, or to keep a photo diary of their own.
Students would be glad to see vivid images in the classroom. And interesting photos could arouse students' interests in writing.

Creative Commons licensing

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Their tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of the tools and the users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

There are four kinds of tools you may see on the lisense:

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, but not commercially.

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole.

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they license their new creations under the identical terms as yours. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

   And licenses are combinations of these tools, for example:

Attribution

·    This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike

·    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

 

Attribution-NoDerivs

·    This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

 

Attribution-NonCommercial

·    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

 

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

·    This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

·    This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain are also provided.

Photo by  bsabarnowl

 

Teaching with Microblogs

Microblogging have become popular in China in the recent two years. They are brief, immediate and convenient. You can not only view those microblogs on computer, but also from mobiles, which makes viewing and posting very handy. I really appreciate the sharing speed of posts on microblogs, but hardly ever consider its application in education. However some articles changed my mind.

   The first one, How to Use Microblogging for Education, suggests three ways to use microblogs for education.

1)       Research Group Information Sharing: The microblogging approach is great to spread information to all colleagues. And everyone can pick the information he likes and needs.

2)       Student Supervision: Microblogging is a good tool for supervision. It helps students to track their activities in microblogs, helps teachers to participate in the students’ work and understand their working process, and helps to create a history of the students’ work and the teachers’ activities.

3)       Special Interest and Projects: You can also create microblogs for everything interests you or for special purpose. And when you do not need them anymore, just end the special microblog.

Another author introduces more practical uses of Twitter for education in Teaching with Twitter:

1.        ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.

2.        ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.

3.        ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

4.        ‘Twitter Stalking’ Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event (During the recent U.S. Presidential elections, many people followed @BarackObama and kept up to date with his speeches, etc).

5.        ‘Time Tweet’ Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

6.        ‘Micro Meet’ Hold discussions involving all the subscribing students. As long as everyone is following the whole group, no-one should miss out on the Twitter stream. All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.

7.        ‘Micro Write’ Progressive collaborative writing on Twitter. Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.

8.        ‘Lingua Tweeta’ Good for modern language learning. Send tweets in foreign languages and ask students to respond in the same language or to translate the tweet into their native language.

9.        ‘Tweming’ Start off a meme – agree on a common hash-tag so that all the created content is automatically captured by Twemes or another aggregator.

10.    ‘Twitter Pals’ Encourage students to find a Twitter ‘penpal’ and regularly converse with them over a period of time to find out about their culture, hobbies, friends, family etc. Ideal for learning about people from other cultures.

The usages and activities suggested in the two articles are useful and thought provoking. In my future teaching career, I’d like to use microblogging in three ways. First, I will follow some famous researchers in the education field, listening to what they will be thinking about education. Second, I will pay attention to recommended resources on the internet, enlarging my horizon or furthering them to my students. Third, I will consider use microblogging for assignments, class or group discussion, and tracks for teaching.

Design a Panda Habitat

I found an interesting post, which introduces an activity called Design a Panda Habitat.  As it has been described in the post, "this activity would be a great context to use graphic organizers to gather information and make decisions about the elements of the habitat." Some specific vocabulary and knowledge could be learnt from this activity. The topic is attractive. And the interactive tasks are helpful, as well as fun for learners. 

    This activity reminds me of some SLG or SIM games I have ever played. One kind of SLG games requires you to find certain items from a setting according to a list or according to some riddles. I have to look up the dictionary when I encounter a word that I am not familiar with. In order to play the games well, I learnt a lot of vocabulary. Some SIM games are very authentic. Though some settings were not real enough to me when I was in China, however, when I am in US, I find they are quite close to what is really like. I learnt vocabulary and chunks in specific settings from those games.

    I consider this a good way to enlarge vocabulary and knowledge, especially when tired about reading from textbooks.

EFL Classroom 2.0

    I visited EFL Classroom 2.0 and found this group worth to be added in my favorites. It consists of a number of badges, which includes newest posts, quick posts, latest activity, videos, forum, and etc. I like the KEEP THE IDES COMING… Though I am not sure how often will the topic be changed, it is always a good idea to get to know and to be familiar with new things. There are resources and suggestions for teachers to practice in their own classrooms. You can also post your opinions or photos, and the news of your action will appear in the latest activity. This group is a good choice if you would like to keep up with the upcoming new ideas. Help yourselves to check it out!~

Connetivism

The word "network" reminds me of the spider web. To me, learners are very like spiders, using webs to acquire information and knowledge. As it has been stated by Siemens (2005) in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, "The starting point of connectivism is the individual.” From this point of view, individual learners are at the center of the web, all the information and knowledge are to serve the individual learner and are chosen to be acquired or be neglected. However, the metaphor above is more suitable for learners in traditional learning ways. The learners of today are not as passive as in the past. They are connected with the information more directly and actively. They have become part of the web to capture information. And the information is to be shared by the whole web.

        Besides being more directly connected with information, the learners are forming a circulation which is good for transition of information. The learners create new ideas and pot them onto the net, they get new information or reflections about their posts from the network, and then they reply the reflections or generate new ideas from those. In this way, the learners are always connecting to the newest information in the fields they interested in, and their contribution to the network help to keep the fields fresh. “This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed (Siemens, 2005)." There are many ways for learners to keep updated to their field, but no other ways are as direct and rapid as network does.

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

THE NETWORK IS THE LEARNING

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

At first sight of the list, I was attracted by the word 'animate'. I thought it should be an interesting video clip, and I was right. The video uses animations to express ideas. It is really a fun to watch this video, because the animations are well drawn.

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

     However, finish watching this, I felt little sad about today's education, especially the part about ADHD across the country. Children with ADHD are forced to take pills in order to be concentrated on class. That sounds too pathetic.

     Are teachers making classes more and more boring? I tried to look back into my own education experience. Some parts were boring indeed, so boring that I don 't want to recall again. I could still remember, in a grammar class, after explaining a complex grammar point to us, the teacher apologized to us, 'sorry to make this class so boring, but I don't know how to make it intereting, and you'll be tested in the future exams on this point." Are we driven by rules and standards which require us to know 'what we should know as a blahblahblah'? That also sounds pathetic.

     I was surprised that when we were like 5 years old, 98% of us are genuis in divergent thinking. Sadly, as we grow up, we are more and more constrained by what we have gained from education. Instead of activate our thinking, 'we are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them.'

     I hope I could learn more technologies from this course to activate my future students instead of anaesthetizing them, and to make study more attractive to them. Maybe animation is a good way. I am considering practicing my drawing skills. O(∩_∩)O

Safe Blogging for Students

Using blogs is exciting, but don't haste to start posting. Here are some tips for safe blogging which are better to be kept in mind.

1. Keep your personal infromation out of your posts. You are not expect to post or give out your family name, password, username, e-mail address, home address, school name, city, country, or other infromation that could help someone locate or contact you in person. Your interests, ideas, and preferences are free to share.

2. Your username and password is your own secret. You are not expect to share them with others. And you should never log in using others' names.

3. You are expected to behave properly, treating blog spaces as classroom spaces. Consider whether your posts are appropriate for class before posting. You are encouraged to engage in debate and conversation with other bloggers. However, you should not forget you are also the manner representative of yourself.

4. You will receive comments on your posts, most of which are respectful or helpful messages. If you happen to receive any comment that make you uncomfortable, please contact your teacher, do not response to that comment.

5. Take care of your computer by not downloading or installing any software without permission, and not clicking on ads or competitions.

These are only some basic items to pay attention to. Here are some links to other useful sites for safety. View them as you like.

Safetyweb | SafetyWeb Blog

Connect Safely |Safety Tips & Advice

Using Blogs in Teaching

It is a great idea to introduce blogs into teaching. I would like to create a class blog.

     The blog can be used as an information collection. All the class activities will be recorded on the blog, probably with pictures and videos if possible. Some other useful information, like tips for learning, recommended readings, or message for coming activities, can also be published on the blog. Students can use the blog to track the class history or use it as a resource for learning. I try to correspond this to the communication standard 1.2: students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics.

   

     The blog can act as platform for students and me to communicate. Students are not only viewers of the blog. They can freely leave message to each other, as well as to me. They are welcomed to make comments about recent events, give suggestions to me, and share their thoughts about learning or about the class. This sees correlation with the communications standard 1.3: students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.

 

     I will also encourage students to create their own learning blogs. I will teach them how to use blogs. Thus they can post what they like or what they think are worth to share on their own blogs for their classmates to view.  This idea correlates with the connections standard 3.1: students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language.
   

    I'm considering a group blog that allows students to do groupwork by using blogs.