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.

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.

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!