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!

The Future depends on it: Learning through Technology!

As we live in the technological century, we use high-tech tools as smart phones and computers almost everyday.  Have you ever thought about using these tools in schools? Exactly how technologies improve education smartly?

This video The Future Starts Now - 2012 edition talks about how to improve education better by introducing ICT, information and communication technology, to schools. It takes Norway as an example. Norway is a country that relies on oil which is said to be gone by 2030 after which people would be living off knowledge. However students can hardly be motivated to study just by the thought of rescuing the nation. While ICT can make school more relevant and motivating to students, there will be less dropping out of school and naturally creating a knowledge-base community. ICT provides students with multiple ways of study. Instead of reading a book, seeing an animate picture like a DNA molecule will actually help students visualize the knowledge and understand what they are learning.

This video gets me thinking how we can improve education better by using high technology. Teacher is the one that stay closest to students. Though ICT has become the 5th basic skill in school curriculums, more support is still in need, for example teachers' push. What we do in class will make a huge difference. We as teachers have the responsibility to improve the students' motivation.

One interesting thing about this video is that there are drawings appear synchronously with narration which makes it more understandable and entertaining as well as attractive.

There is another video A Vision of 21st Century Teachers 2010 that provides us many possibilities that students can have with the help of 21st century teachers. By using new technologies, study becomes more effective. Students can access to the knowledge with more resources and get involved in a global community. Multimedia bring in different learning styles.

Find out more about how technology change future learning!