Podcast

I studied Top 50 Podcasts for Learning a Foreign Language for learning Chinese, and I like the podcast episode “Let me do it, myself”. It is a 12 minute podcast lesson to teach shopping conversation, which includes two grammar points, four sentences, and one common shopping situation in Chinese grocery stores. The conversation in the podcast lesson targets beginners of Chinese learning such as elementary school students. The goal is to understand words and sentences and use the conversations in typical shopping situation. In the lesson, the instructors repeat each sentence five times.

I feel that by taking this Podcast lesson, students will be able to use one Chinese grammar sentence to ask price and figure out the price and count out the money. Students will be able to say money units in Chinese and apply the knowledge and skills in other similar shopping situations. Also, students will be able to ask for a shopping bag and pack the shopping bag by themselves. I think I can use this podcast lesson model to teach students some other conversations in shopping. For example, how to inquire or ask for help in stores such as “Can I have … please?”, “Excuse me, have you got any …?”. By using drill questions and providing students shopping lists in Chinese, I will be able to teach and practice more shopping conversations with the students in some speaking/conversation activities.  

Storybird

This week, I introduced one online tool Storybird to my third and fourth graders and taught them to write stories and create digital stories with artwork provided by the 
websites. Storybird is a visual storytelling community and it can help improve students reading, writing, and visual art abilities of all ages.  I think this online tool is very valuable to my teaching second language, and my students really enjoyed using the online tool. I connected my laptop to the classroom whiteboard to introduce the Storybird. I created an example and gave the students a storytelling assignment to introduce themselves and their family. I created an assessment by using rubric and questions to introduce the students themselves and their families. There are six questions based on the topic “Me and My Family” including “How many people are there in your family?”, “Who are they?”, “Introduce yourself and your favorite things to do?”, “Do you have any brothers or sisters? Talk about them.”, “How do your parents earn a living? (What are their jobs) talk about it.” “How many grandparents have you got? How often do you see them?”, and “Who do the housework in your family? (e.g. cooking, cleaning, and washing)”.

I really like the picture illustrating strategy in the Storybird and I will use this tool which allows me to design homework assignments and allows my students to design story books. Storybird can help students retain concepts and visualize what they are learning. I can use this tool to attract and motivate students to learn second language. I feel that giving them a right tool or platform, students can develop their own art creativity with the writing format from examples.

Response and short answer assessment: Students write responses based on the questions list provided (5 points)

Performance assessment:  Speaking by using the target language, reading aloud with fluency, and creating pictures based on the content. (5 points)

Animoto sideshows

I like Animoto sideshows which is an online website that allows teachers and students to create photo slideshows by using one of the sleek video styles and adding song.  A unique feature of Animoto is that one can use and type different language words/characters and there are over 50 different video styles to choose.One can also choose songs in the built-in music library and add them to photos and video clip trimmer. Students can try and make their own videos based on their knowledge and present by a targeted language.

In my classroom, I guided my students to create a Halloween poster in Chinese, in which students selected their favorite pictures based on commonly used Halloween vocabularies and sentences. The students selected different Halloween pictures, video styles, songs and wrote the corresponding Chinese characters and sentences based on the pictures. Students were really excited and enjoyed making the Chinese Halloween posters. I was happy to see that students participated and shared their efforts in the second language learning. By creating the Halloween video stories, I can check students’ vocabulary and grammar writing, and evaluate their understanding of the main theme of Halloween. I use two ways to assess students’ creations about the Halloween poster in Chinese. One is written format assessment which requires students to construct a Chinese writing format based on their selected Halloween pictures. The other assessment is to create pictures and add music based on the content topic. I feel that this is an effective approach to assess students’ understanding and learning a second language. 

TED Lesson

In this TED lesson, I would like to introduce the Chinese Zodiac. It is an interesting and representative perspective in Chinese culture. The Chinese Zodiac is a 12-year cycle in which every year is assigned an animal according to a repeating pattern: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. Each animal has a different personality and different characteristics. In Chinese culture, people believe that a person is born in a specific year and the corresponding animal to be the main factor in a person's life that gives traits, success and happiness in life.  

In this TED lesson, I target beginner-level students. I selected a video with a Chinese girl talking/teaching to other kids in natural way, which is to match my students with ages from 4 to 9 years old. When I prepared my Ted lesson, I selected materials and designed questions/exercises to achieve lesson goals like what students should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of the lesson?

In this TED lesson, the language learning objective is to introduce Chinese Zodiac animals and different culture understanding by using the video and articles, including “Know what the Chinese Zodiac is?”, “Know 12 animals’ names in Chinese”, and “Know their own signs within the Chinese zodiac.” Students view the short video lectures at home before the class session, and this direct learning is performed at home based on selected video. I intend to allocate more class time to practice conversations and carry out in-class activities. I think my TED lesson meets my learning objectives. I created 3 thinking multiple-choice questions based on the video. The questions allow me to check and evaluate the students’ listening and comprehension. In classroom discussion and conversation, I will use the explicit teaching method “I do, you do and we do” practice the animal names in Chinese. During the discussion, students will have opportunity to explore their understanding about the Chinese Zodiac. Each student will practice and collaborate with other students, in which students in different levels have positive attitude towards doing the discussion.

The Flipped Classroom

After I read the two articles: “Flipping Your EL Classroom” and “Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom”, I have better understanding about the flipped classroom. I like the flipped classroom as it creates engaging learning experiences for our students. Flipped classroom is a broad concept including creating instructional videos, introducing the flipped concept, and practical ideas of different ways to use class time. It is interesting to know that the flipped classroom is not just for the regular school classroom schedule, it goes beyond the classroom teaching. It includes three parts: work at home, work in class, and work after class. The main procedure of the flipped classroom is to emphasize that students need to view the short video lectures at home before the class session, and in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. The video lecture is the key ingredient in the flipped classroom approach, and a teacher may create the video lectures or select from online resources.  

In the Flipped classroom approach, students access course content on their own outside of class and then interact in class with their teachers and peers as they engage in activities directly related to what they have viewed. To implement effective flipped learning for learners follows a learning cycle: (1) instructional videos; (2) in-class collaboration; and (3) observation-feedback-assessment. Each element needs to be undertaken with supports. The flipped classroom approach is beneficial to students as it is able to increase comprehension of the material, increase interaction with instructor and peers, and increase critical thinking as a natural part of the learning process.

By learning the flipped classroom approach, I am thinking how to implement it in my teaching second language. The articles introduced the flipped classroom targeting English Learners. I think the flipped classroom approach can be useful in teaching any subject. The approach may need to be modified for a specific subject. I am planning to modify the flipped classroom specifically for my teaching Chinese language and culture. I may allocate more in-class time to engage students in conversation practices and classroom collaboration. 

How can we use Twitter for teaching and learning

This is my first time to use Twitter. Twitter is a quick, easy, and free alternative tool just like the microblogging platform networking. After I used it for a while and read some articles regarding using Twitter for professional development, I feel that Twitter can be useful for teachers to communicate with students. It can also be a useful tool for the entire class to communicate and receive announcement/news quickly. I like Twitter chats (tweet chars) which are live events where people go online to discuss topics of interest to the participants. I think Tweet chars is a great resource for professional development and for expanding our personal learning network as the microblogging platform.

I selected two articles to study this week: one is “How Twitter Can Be Used As a Powerful Education Tool” and the other is “Using Twitter for Professional development”. Both articles discuss how tools like Twitter can allow a learner to share what is learned with the world, tap the knowledge of others to help even stronger with the material, and even provide students with real word problems at a moment’s notice. Particularly I like the article “How Twitter Can Be Used As a Powerful Education Tool”. One example from the article is very convincing to me why we need to use Twitter. In the example, Mrs. Caviness was a new Twitter user who had attended a workshop of the Deduction Conference. Upon getting back to school, she told her geometry students that she just got a Twitter account. After jokingly welcoming her to the 21st century, students immediately began taking out their cell phones and following her. Then, a few nights later at a Texas Rangers baseball game, she was reminded of a problem from class a few weeks earlier. She decided to tweet the following, and within minutes, she had several replies from her students. Days later, at yet another game, Mrs. Caviness decided to dig a bit deeper into students’ thinking. She tweeted a new picture and asked students to develop related problems. Again, students jumped on this opportunity immediately. What Mrs. Caviness found most exciting was the fact that students dropped everything they were doing at home so that they could connect with her around these short math blasts. Now, Mrs. Caviness sees many applications for using this tool to strengthen what students do at school each day and to build a library of material that she and her students can use in a flipped classroom environment. If you would like to read more about her class and their uses of Twitter. You might also choose to follow Mrs. Caviness on Twitter. I really like Mrs. Caviness involving students outside the school with classwork and concepts. In this way, the students are more interested in joining the discussion, so learning process is created and connected to real life situation and problems. As Twitter is a powerful tool to involve everyone in one place to express their thoughts about a concept, this can be used to connect students to discuss some homework problems outside of the school. I also plan to use Twitter inside my classroom discussion board as Twitter allows all students to share and look for information, creative and socialize in foreign languages in a forum.  

Twitterchat

During this week, I tried Twitter and followed mainly the area #Language Matters, Teaching Language. The area targets all things related to teaching World Language: from events, to intriguing articles, written quotes, and daily updates. I followed Twitterchat at “American Councils” with some topics such as “Make World Language Apart of Every School Day” and “New China”. I followed a Twitterchat from Ms. Mary Risner from University of Florida, about finding innovative ways to teach and learn language and culture, and area studies to prepare students for the global workplace. Ms. Risner tweets 6330, following 1731 and 1279 followers. I really like one Tweetchat: Take this quick easy quiz and if you are living in the right state. There are several teachers posting questions to the chat like “Which U.S State should you be living in? Why?” “What state do you actually belong in?”, “Which of these is your favorite food chain?” I think the questions/answers and some related materials can be used to design student activities in my classroom.

After following the Twitterchat, I think Twitterchat can be helpful for me on professional development to improve teaching second language. Twitterchat allows me to follow some discussions even without participation. I can get some good ideas from the discussions about teaching second language. If I want, I also can jump into Twitterchat to share my thoughts. So, I feel that Twitterchat is a great place to connect and collaborate with other educators to get new ideas and find useful resources for second language teaching and learning.