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.

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!