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.