Podcasting in language learning

Podcasting is different from traditional broadcasting. It doesn't depend on satellites or radio towers. We don't need to wait for the exact time to watch the shows. All we need is to access to the internet. When new shows are created, they will come straightly to our terminals like computers, pads or cellphones. when we see the shows that we like, simply by subscribing them, then we can watch new episodes right after they come out. I subscribed the TEDTalk on my iPad, and I can watch the new episode whenever I want. It is very convenient for entertainment and personal life. Moreover it can also be very useful in language teaching and learning.

I tried the EdTechTalk. It usually talks about technology and education. I think it is very user-friendly. The webpage is clear and the description as well as the podcasts are salient.

We can watch the podcasts in the past. Also it allows everyone to participate in an ongoing one. Thus provide a great opportunity for language learners to not only listen, but also speak and really apply the language to discuss some serious topics. It is also well linked with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
For my future teaching, if I want to have my students listen or even participate in these shows and we will discuss that topic together in class. I think it is a good way to practice listening and speaking. Moreover, they can get access to many interesting topics.

I also tried Learn Japanese Pod. Since I'm a Japanese learner, I want to see how the podcasting works from a learner's perspective. I find it very useful.

First, I can subscribe it on iTunes, which is convenient. Then the topics are practical. They are all life related. Besides, there are transcripts. Thus can help learners better understand the meaning.

Comic Strip

Besides photo stories, comic strip is another interesting type of digital story. I tried the Dvolver, an online comic strip tool which provides ready-made characters who "speak" in text. It also allows you to choose background pictures and music.

Here is my comic.

I would like to use it in my future teaching since it will assist language learners to develop their language comprehensive abilities as well as their creativities. When creating their own dialogues, they need to consider the vocabulary, grammar and textual meaning. Moreover, creating dialogues can enhance the learners' pragmatical skills. I would like to have my students create the comic stories and do a presentation.

Performance Indicator

According to Performance Indicator-ESL.E.2-4.1.1, students convey and organize information, using facts, details, illustrative examples, and a variety of patterns and structures.
Moreover, students will demonstrate cross-culture knowledge and sensitivity in communicating with others of varied social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They will develop and use culturally appropriate behaviors, and a knowledge of local and U.S. cultures and practices, in their interaction with others in their new cultural environment.

Assessment  

To assess students' performance, I would like to involve peer assessment. Presenters show the videos and let peers comment on it and rank the favorite one. Thus can assess the creativity and language proficiency. 

If it is a multi-cultural classroom, making stories based on their own cultures will be more interesting and educating. I would like to have students from different cultures work together and comment on each other.

Photo Story

Nowadays, people like to use photos to record life. They are not satisfied with taking photos and printing them out. Instead, they like to share their stories with the world How to make photos more lively? One way is to create videos with the photos. With the technology development, many online tools can help making videos. They provide many styles and support editing. All we need to do is to add photos, music and texts.

I tried an online tool called Stupfilx. It provides free version. Here is my video 

Digital stories doesn't only create more fun in life, but also can be used in Language classroom. Teachers can use photo stories to teach. Moreover, they can have learners create their own photo stories and share with others. 

Performance Indicator

According to Performance Indicator-ESL.E.2-4.1.1, students learn English as a second language will use English to acquire, interpret, apply and transmit information for content area learning and personal use. They will develop and use skills and strategies appropriate to their level of English proficiency to collect data, facts, and ideas; discover relationships, concepts, and generalizations; and use knowledge generated from oral, written, and electronically produced texts.

Assessment

To assess students performance, I would like to have students to work in pairs and review each other's photo story. Then present to others the main idea and the purpose of the story they've reviewed. Last, have the author check if the partner have correctly understand the story.

My first TED lesson

This is not the first time for me to make a lesson with videos. However it is the first time creating a lesson on TED. I was surprised by it's convenience. It not only provides videos but also allows teachers to create following up questions to further instruct students with comprehension. Here is my TED lesson: Breaking the language barrier | Tim Doner.

The objectives of my lesson are that students will be able to :

1. comprehend the main idea of this video;
2. pay attention to the details;
3. identify the three main methods Tim used to overcome obstacles;
4. critique the arguments in the video in both oral and written form;
5. summarize information.

Assessment:

Video Part:

1. The first question following the video examines the students' comprehension. 
2. The second question focuses on one detail aspect.
3. The third question requires the students to identify the methods and briefly summarize them.
4. The question in discussion aims at fostering the ability of critical thinking.

In Class Part:

1. To further pay attention to the details, I want to have my students do more activities such as filling in blanks. 
2. Put the students into small groups to further discuss the connection between language and culture.
3. To assess the ability of critical thinking, have each group share their points of view.

A few things should be concerned are the authenticity of the video and the connection between the video and in class activity. This new way of teaching needs to be viewed under different cultural background. In the culture like Chinese where students prefer to learn new things by listening to the speeches from teachers instead of learning all by themselves, how to motivate students into self-learning is the first thing to do before introducing new methodologies.

Flipping Your Class

Traditionally, we spend a lot of time teaching new knowledge and having students do the review after class. Gradually we find out this might not be an effective way of teaching since students sometimes complain that they often forget what they have learnt in class when doing review. Thus we want to introduce a new way of teaching called Flipping Your Classroom.

In this method, students will need to learn the new knowledge by themselves before the class. They can watch instructional videos or other materials shared by the teacher. Thus allows students to have the basic background knowledge. When they come to the classroom, they are assigned with different kinds of activities relating to the content they learned ahead. By directly involving into discussions with peers, students can get to the problem solving effectively. At the same time, the teachers still play the role of leader, however instead standing in the front of the classroom, they stand beside the students getting ready to offer instructions to a smaller scale of groups. Another important procedure within this method is the giving feedback to students, which is to help students see their own performance and improve the drawbacks. The three main stages of the whole process are well connected as a cycle in the following picture.

There are many advantages introducing this method into classroom. First of all, it makes teaching more effective. It is time consuming to teach totally new content in classroom. This method push students to do the learning before the class and discuss deeply during it. Second, this method improves students' learning ability as well as critical thinking ability since it leaves more space for discussion. Last, using videos, especially the existing ones, as learning resources provides students with a native language environment. 

As for the selection of videos, we can find many educational videos on YouTube, TeacherTube or TED-Ed. If you are more interested in creating your own videos, you can find the tools you might need in this article 5 Free Screencasting Apps for Creating Video Tutorials.

A serious game outside the classroom

This week I tried the game called The Garbage Game. It requires players to design a garbage plan for New York City. It starts by questions about waste sorting.

 After making one choice, it will provide some statistics that relate to the decision.

After waste sorting, it also ask players to decide the way of transportations and how and where to recycle the garbage. 

I played the game twice and I got two different results. I only change one type of waste sorting and one way of transportation. The only difference is the reduce of CO2 emissions. 

I think this game helps language learners develop their reading and comprehensive ability. First, it provides a lot of instructions. To understand the game, learners need to read thoroughly. Then when making choices, it also gives learners comments. Then with the results based on the decisions made by the player, it actually shows the learners the relationships between the steps and results. 

Revised Part:

The learning objective of this game is to use meaning clues and language structure to expand vocabulary (pictures,background knowledge,context clues) (According to Michigan State Standards).

The learning objectives of this game are learning vocabularies and understanding the gist of the reading. To understand the game, learner might have to look up the vocabularies and make notes of every steps to figure out the best way to solve the problem. Thus I believe this game belongs to the problem solving according to Kyle Mawer's task types . Each step leads to a different consequence. In order to come out with the best solution, players need to analyze each step. It allows learners to improve comprehensive ability by reading and analyzing. 

I will try to adopt the game in my future classroom as a post class game when I want my students to learn and deeper understand vocabularies and the logic concerning garbage recycling and environment protection. In order to assess the game, I would have them report their plans orally to practice speaking or in written form to practice writing.

Revised Part:

I would use it as a pre-class activity to impress students with the vocabularies and then require my students to do the writing. For example, write a letter to the government to introduce your garbage plan.

Learning can be fun: playing games in ESL classroom

Playing games doesn't always mean wasting time. It can be entertaining as well as educational especially in learning languages. The purpose of using games in language learning is to put students into more practical environments. Larry Ferlazzo proposes that walkthroughs, instructions written by game players to help others to finish the task step by step, also plays an important role in the learning process.

I played a game called Anna Hospital Recovery. It is a game that helps students to learn surgery vocabularies. Anna is injured and the player needs to be the doctor and gives her treatment. 

There is a list of the steps you need to do. After finishing each step, there will be a check mark on the list. For example, I cleaned her wounds, the fourth step "Disinfect" was then checked.

     

I found this game very interesting. I played three times. The first time I actually didn't pay attention to the words carefully since I was attracted by the pictures and background sounds. I just followed the instruction given by the finger on the screen. The second time, I was aware of the words on the list and tried to make each step with the word. The last time, I made dialogues with Anna. Though seems crazy, it actually is a way of reviewing the words.

Revised Part:

The learning objective of this game is to use meaning clues and language structure to expand vocabulary (pictures,background knowledge,context clues) (According to Michigan State Standards). 

I believe this game helps students focus on vocabulary learning. It not only provides students the connection of physical items and abstract words, but also shows how the words can be applied in practical situations. Moreover, as the game uses the well-known character among children, it is more attractive to students. Teacher can develop more possibilities from this game. If I had a chance of using this game in my future class, I would request my students to make dialogues or tell a story of the steps. 

In this game, I think the walkthrough is embedded in the game. There is a finger pointing at the thing needed to finish this step. After it is completed, this step on the checklist would be marked. It's more direct than other games like treasure searching. It is suitable for lower level learners. 

To examine the extent to which the students actually learn, I can design other forms of assessment such as quizzes or matching questions. 

Why is Gamification? How to apply into language learning?

According to 7 Things You Should Know About Games and Learning, gamification refers to the dynamic games based on content of the courses that benefit future teaching and learning. The aims are to increase engagement, enhance learning and explore new models of education. Gamification means
In this article,  “Just” Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning , the author discusses the application of digital games in language learning. Digital games can not only overcome difficulties like intercultural competence and pragmatics, but also modify the learning and teaching process and influence many aspects of language acquisition. It mainly focuses on the goal, interaction, feedback, context and motivation. When involving games into classroom, we as teachers need to always keep in mind the purposes like what language point I want my students to practice. Interaction is very important. We need to make sure that students are engaged into the games. Thus we need to make the games challenging while attractive. To increase interaction, we can also have students work in groups so that they can be more confident and more willing to put effort. Another important thing for successfully conducting the digital games in learning is feedback. The digital games are very good and effective at giving feedbacks. Thus the learners can be aware of their abilities.
Also in the video Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain, the speaker also discusses some important aspects for successfully applying games into learning. The speaker mentions the importance of breaking learning process into pieces by establishing long and short-term aims. He also talks about how other people are important during this process. Since engagement is one thing that support learning and games are considered highly involved activities, learning through games definitely will improve learning compare to other traditional classroom activities.

Learning or playing: It's your choice!

Many people view Twitter as a waste of time including me. This bias may result from the fact that most people use Twitter to follow celebrities and interesting stories. However after reading articles concerning this bias together with my personal experience of using Twitter, I found out that Twitter can be a very useful tool in education especially language teaching and learning process.

First of all, to effectively use Twitter as a knowledge resource, we should use hashtags to filter the information needed. For example, if you want to search for language learning, simply putting language learning as keywords with # in the front, you can view how other people learn language and what solutions to the problems that are commonly encountered by learners.

Second, we can join in Twitter chat to make realtime chatting with others. We can ask questions or give answers to other persons' questions. Twitter creates multi-media environment in which pictures, videos and links to other useful websites are mixed together.

Last, by following other people in a particular field, we can observe a long term development. Tweets by other people offer the perspectives of how they view this field. Thus we can see changes in this field or in this person by browsing his or her tweets in a period of time.

In my future teaching, I might use Twitter in classroom when I want to discuss a topic with my students. Seeing other people's opinions especially from all around the world can broaden their views and stimulate their creative and cognitive thinkings. One more thing about using Twitter in classroom that inspired me is the idea of creating a class account as a platform to include the ideas and feelings shared by the students. That works like a profile of the class which can record the development of the students. I will definitely try it in my future classroom.

Twitterchat: An interesting Experience

This week I tried the twitter chat for the first time. I found it really interesting. Twitterchat is different from other communicative approaches that I had ever experienced. It is more open and more social. By using the hashtag, people who are interested in a same topic can discuss together.

I followed the #ntchat (new teacher chat) which discuss the importance and current place of social studies in the classroom. We mainly discussed four questions about the application of social studies. The questions are the following:

I replied those four questions with my own opinions.

During and after the chat, I realized how the social community provide resources that we can use in the future teaching. People would offer links to which they consider useful for this question or share personal experience about the certain topic. For example, some people suggested to use mysteryskype with the combination of textbook to better facilitate students with the understanding of social studies. I enjoyed this casual and informal way of communication. 

Global Learning

Students are living in the global village thanks to the internet. In addition to knowing others lives and cultures, learning together globally is also another important advantage that we can take from this network. Being in a same environment, you may share the same learning style and perspectives on many issues. However, seeing how people from other countries and cultures work on certain problems can broaden your horizon and make you more creative and critical on problem solving.

There are many websites that provides the platforms allowing students around the world to communicate to each other. Today I want to share my experience using one of them - ePals.

It provides many programs and activities concerning many topics within which students from around the world can share their own opinions, solutions and suggestions.

Take the first activities as an example. 

It encourages the students to share stories about protecting the environment and improving the world. Once a student submits a piece of work, they will turn the country on the map where the student comes from into green.

I just like the way it motivate the students. Besides, students can choose between individual activities and group activities which get the students more involved as a group. They can build up a team across countries. 

In my future teaching, I really want to introduce this website to my students. This is a place that can really have the students experience the importance and pleasure of global communication. Thus can motivate them to learn more about the language itself. With the better language ability, students may have more possibility to learn from others all around the world. Moreover, if I want to have my students work on a program and help them to compare their works with other students from other countries, I may even create that program by myself. It really is a great place to learn and communicate globally.

Broaden your community

With the fast development of technology, learning has been changed from interpersonal into interpersonal. What resources you can have is more important than what knowledge you can possess at a certain point. Building up a broader community certainly will help you keep up with the rapid changes happened everyday.
However some people may be intimidated by the new technological tools. There is a video Alan Levine-New Media Consortium which introduces how we can deal with the technology. The man Alan Levine first points out the importance of building up the community by establishing the network of colleagues in or beyond one field. Then he suggests that in order to make the first step and experience the advantage of technology, people should be more brave and be willing to try new things. Sometimes it might be even necessary to push ourselves out of the comfort zone and put aside things that we are very familiar with. With the courage of experiment, one can definitely figure out the advantages of networking.
I also tried to join in the English Language Teaching community - one of the Google+ communities. The best thing I like about the community is that it allows you to browse a huge amount of information in a very short time. I can choose whatever catches my eyes first and go deeper to figure out more information about it. Thus can save time and offer the chance to get access to things that I may never get a way to know.

Which is more important: How or What?

A learner is like a node in a railway system. A complete and integrated railway system makes a well connected country. With the railway system, the country as well as the people become a whole. People can go any places by trains quickly as long as they are inside the system.

Chinese Railway System

As for the learners in technological age, it is more important to build a network within which multiple kinds of information can be shared rather than just learning the knowledge it self. Just as it is said in the article Connectivism:
A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, A network can simply be defined as connections between entities. Computer networks, power grids, and social networks all function on the simple principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole. In this article, it introduced the concept of connectivism, which refers to the integration of multiple principles including network and other theories. There is one point, Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources that I strongly agree with. Nowadays, learning is not only happened inside one person. Sharing information makes the learning process more effective and integrated. When we as learners connecting with another node, more information resources would be poured into our own knowledge database and the system will be more integrated as a whole.

This point is also raised in the video The network is the learning. The concept is that the way we are connected to other individuals is largely responsible for our ability to continue to stay current in the field. Actually we have already use network to daily life such as keeping connected with families and friends. But how we can adopt this concept into learning is the main problem that needed to be paid more attention to. By building up a network, learners can get access to knowledge concerning to other fields easily. One point from the video that I like the best is that what we know today is not as important as our ability to continue to stay current. Because the knowledge change rapidly, we can not expect that what we have learnt can last forever. So how to learn is more helpful than what is learnt.

DIIGO vs Pinterest: Two useful websites for language learning

DIIGO is a website famous for it's function of social bookmarking. It allows users to keep track of their favorite websites by tagging which is an efficient function. By searching tags, we can narrow down to a  smaller scale to find the websites we want to look for. 

Tag List

 

My Library

Besides, it's more useful than traditional bookmark on the browser since it allows users to access their favorite websites from any computer. 

Pinterest is a website that offers a visual collection, sharing and storage tool. Boards can be created with items, images and videos being pinned to them. 

I want to compare these two websites through the following questions:

Questions	DIIGO	Pinterest
Can you highlight text in saved sites?	√	×
Can you use multiple tags?	√	√
Can you copy and paste from original article to appear in comments about site?	×	√
Can others post comments on your site?	×	√
Can you follow others?  Can they follow you?	√	√
Can you message people you follow?	√	×
Are you offered suggestions for related articles?	√	√
Would you continue to use either of these?  Which?  Why?	Yes! I like the way it creates a network. When I see other people's home pages, it's clearly presented what they have in the libraries. I can benefit others within my community and vice versa.	Yes! I like the visual collection of images and videos since it’s more direct and impressive than words.

Both websites provide the tagging function. For DIIGO, I do find this network useful since I can find what others like and learn from them just by searching their libraries. For Pinterest, I learnt a lot from it such as interesting classroom activities and new ideas about teaching. I feel like in this fast pace world, pictures are more favored by people than words since it's more direct and provide more evidence. Besides, images can offer the real situation rather than imagination from only word description. I find the Pinterest more like a social network like Instagram. However, it's more suitable for learning and sharing information as it provides links to the original resources. In addition, it separates the information by different topics. Thus allows the users to find more related information within one category.

Hope you find these tools useful and interesting. If you have experience of using any of them or other websites you think are useful, share with me!