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.

Connectivism

By reading the article “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age” by George Siemens and watching the listed videos, I gain deeper understanding about learning, especially some new observations of learning in the digital age. With technologies nowadays, there is abundant information available in the internet, and a learner may search information and learn through Google, YouTube, or some social networks. I like the viewpoint in the article and the videos that learning is a process of connecting a learner with information sources. I feel that a learner is like a tree root system: a learner searches and acquires information through on-line digital world just likes tree roots growing and expanding deep in the soil to obtain water and nutrients. Finding useful information from the internet, one may have to search from website to website and eventually get the right information, so the connection between a leaner and the information source may not be direct and it can be zigzag. This is similar to that tree roots may expand in all directions and zigzag to reach water and nutrients.    

Dr. Siemens also explained how internet technologies have created new opportunities for people to learn and share information across the world. He pointed out that “New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital, and the ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.” I agree that a key feature of connectivism is that much learning can happen across peer networks that take place online. In connectivist learning, a teacher can guide students to information and answer key questions as needed, in order to support students learning and sharing on their own. Students are also encouraged to seek out information on their own online and express what they find. Teachers should be facilitators to help guide students through the learning process. It would be great that students can make more connections and reflect on the process of learning. As emphasized by Dr. Siemens that learners successfully acquire greater profile will be more successful at acquiring additional connections.

I like the video “What is Connectivism” which uses simple language to explain the concept of connectivism in learning. Dr. Siemens explained that “knowledge is networked and distributed, the experience of learning is one of forming new neural, conceptual and external networks”. Learning and connecting learners with information sources are increasingly aided by new technologies especially on-line social networks. To better help students learning in the new digital age, we need to better understand the fundamental of learning, we need to better understanding how and why connections form between learners and information sources. With new and better understanding of learning, we are able to better design our classrooms, better create our curriculum, better teach subjects, and better connect students with knowledge.

Connectivism Through Social Network

In the video “AlanLevine-New Media Consortium”, Mr. Alan Levine addressed the importance of establishing networks through colleagues, experimenting and trying new things with technology in teaching. It is really important and beneficial for a teacher to participate and learn through social networking and build connection with other teachers and students.

I joined a social network called Classroom 2.0, which is a useful social networking platform to provide information sources and technologies for teaching and learning in classrooms. Classroom 2.0 allows teachers and students to participate in the discussion forums, receive event notifications, find and connect with other colleagues. Classroom 2.0 have more than 80,000 members from about 200 countries. Anyone can register at the social network, once a membership application is approved, one can use search box or topic list to find some related topics. You can go to the introductory forum to introduce yourself, then other users can see your profile and may make connection with you. You can also see profiles of other users and connect with them if you are interested. Classroom 2.0 provides BlackboardCollaborate, weekly Saturday “Classroom 2.0 LIVE”, and monthly “Featured Teacher”. In the weekly sessions, a specific classroom teaching topic will be discussed with a special guest presenter. In the monthly sessions, a special guest will share ways of using technology to support learning in classrooms. I like the social network with the weekly and monthly live events, as this is a good opportunity to connect with other members of the community in real time events with audio, chat, sharing, and video. If you miss a live event, you can click on the “Archives and Resources” to find a saved recording. I like this social networking platform as it emphasizes the future of education series, and it has been a pioneer in the use by educators and students of open source, software, social networking and massive online peer-to-peer conference and teacher conference. From Classroom 2.0, I found that many successful educators use various technologies to connect and collaborate with their colleagues and create lessons and enhance student learning. I am going to continue using Classroom 2.0 to improve my teaching and learning.

Global Collaboration

Nowadays technologies allow schools and students to access information and resources from across the world. It is a great way to have global-collaboration projects that connect classrooms across schools, communities and counties, and bring knowledge and diverse cultures to our students. I really like the social network called Taking It Global (TIGed). TIGed is a great online social network for young people learning about, engaging with, and working towards tackling global challenges. TIGed focuses on youth around the world to actively engage, connect and prepare students for the world by utilizing technology to engage them as active learners and world citizens. TIGed helps teachers to foster deep learning competencies through real-world problem solving. There are five categories in TIGed including Community, Action Tool, Resources, Youth Media, and Global Issues. I like to use Youth Media and Community in my teaching. Under the Youth Media, a resource library called conversations on models change provides youth movement and learning from community in different countries and story telling. By using the Youth Media, my students will know communities in different countries and compare different cultures. As a second language teacher, it is important for me to introduce different cultures including target language, history, identity, and so on. With the connect Youth media, my students will learn more and better understand different cultures. By using the feature of telling stories, my students will get more opportunities to talk target language and interact with students and peers from different countries. Under the Resources of the platform, I can use the community function to find and learn different projects and then to create and implant my projects. By bringing together youth engagement, different cultures and project based practice, my students will be more interested to participate and engage critical thinking in my second language

classroom.

My Thoughts of Using Diigo and Pinterest

My Thoughts of Using Diigo and Pinterest

This is my first time using Diigo and Pinterest, and I feel both of them are powerful tools to collect, organize and share knowledge. Diigo allows users to bookmark and tag webpages. More importantly, it allows users to save websites and access them on any computer. Users can highlight any part of a webpage and add notes if needed. The notes can be kept private, shared or forwarded to someone within a Diigo user group. Pinterest is another tool to store and save information in one organized place. Pinterest uses a visual pin board to save websites that have an image associated with the page. On Pinterest, users are able to set up different boards for the same use. I feel that Diigo is more useful in academic study and research. I like to use this tool to save some websites that are useful and important to my teaching and categorize the websites into different topics as my teaching resources. Before knowing Diigo, when I needed to find some information for my teaching from different websites, I will put them in my favorite links in my laptop. One challenge is that I collected so many favorite links in my laptop and it is very hard to find one when I try to find some reference. The problem is that the favorite links are computer-dependent, if I use another computer, I have no way to find my favorite links to those websites. This problem does not exist by using Diigo. After I learn how to use Diigo, I can build my own online teaching library, and I can save pictures, notes and websites to organize my thoughts. I also like one feature of Diigo as it can highlight any part of the webpage and attach notes when needed. It helps me collect material to prepare an organized presentation. Both Diigo and Pinterest are free on-line tools for users to save and organize favorite websites, online articles, blog posts, images and other online materials. I feel Pinterest is more useful in classroom teaching as it has more visual effects. With Pinterest users can interact by commenting on other user’s pins or to follow their board. As I teach a second language, I prefer using Pinterest in my classroom for its immediate visual presentation of images. It is helpful to use Pinterest to create various educative pin boards and tell my students to follow my pins. In this way, I can pin educative images related to the topic subject I would like to teach, and my students will find it easy to relate to these images. I feel that it is more natural to use Pinterest together with interactive smart white board in my classroom.

Labels: Diigo, Pinterest, Technology

Teaching and Learning with ICT

I watched the video “The Future Stats Now”, and I am interested in the benefits of using ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in teaching and learning. The video discusses necessary skills that are needed in the 21st century, as students must have a "range of functional and critical thinking skills related to information, media and technology" to succeed in a 21st century marketplace. It also discuss how to use ICT smartly to improve teaching and students’ learning. Teachers should be prepared to integrate latest information and communication technology into their teaching practices that better help students acquire knowledge and learn new technologies. 

By watching the video, I strongly agree that ICT can promote our teaching and learning and my primary interest is how to use ICT in my classroom. Just like an instructional tool, ICT can help teachers prepare teaching materials, deliver lessons, and evaluate students’ learning. More importantly, ICT can help attract students’ interest in learning a subject and engage them in the teaching and learning process. Also, ICT can help students develop their writing skills, spelling, grammar, punctuation, editing and self-learning. When I recall my teaching 20 years ago, I used only chalk and blackboard, and it was mainly a teacher-centre approach.  The only “technology” at that time was watching TV and available to students for watching news during lunch time. Right now, I use smart board in my classroom every day. I am glad to see that the students have more interest and engage more in my classrooms nowadays. Usually I spend hours to collect teaching materials through various websites, and research information related my topics then sort, reorganize and edit to my teaching. I really believe that teaching with ICT is a cool and effective way to prepare and carry out my curriculum.

By using ICT in the teaching and learning process, students can engage more in learning and involve more in tasks and group work. ICT promotes interaction between teachers and students, and it also promotes peer learning among students. ICT is very helpful in implementing student/learner-centre teaching and learning approach. Based on my teaching experience, I have observed that students can learn much better in a technology-enhanced setting than in a traditional classroom learning environment. 

Are You Ready As a 21st Century Teacher?

Are You Ready As a 21^st Century Teacher?

We are living in a technology-enhanced world. Nowadays, we have internet, smart phones, Google, Facebook, online media, blogging, interactive Whiteboard, and so on. Technologies have huge impact in teaching and learning process. As a teacher in the 21^st century, we have to learn, adapt and use the new technologies to teach students in a better way. We need to connect and communicate with students and create a rich learning environment by using interactive teaching technologies.

I recall that when I was a student in elementary/middle/high schools during 1980’s and 1990’s, teachers always used chalks and blackboards, and taught based on textbooks and workbooks. The main focus in the teaching and learning process at that time was that a teacher gave a lecture and students practiced, practiced and practiced more. Learning in the classroom was boring and it was easy to get lost from time to time in that kind of learning environment. By watching the video “A Vision of 21st Century Teachers”, I totally agree that technologies have changed our living styles nowadays and also have great impacts in teaching and acquiring knowledge. Using technologies like multimedia and blogging as tools in teaching, they are very helpful to attract students’ interest in learning a subject and engage them in the teaching and learning process. By using the Facetime and the internet, teachers and students from different countries may interact and cooperate in projects and can gain from face-to-face and online learning activates, so it easily gives students a sense of the global community. By using blogging, teachers and students can share their analysis of literature and create digital music mixes for presentation and discuss issues in their living and the world around them. Using digital cameras/camcorders to capture things in the real world is helpful to explain some complex concepts in classrooms, and visual learners can comprehend difficult concepts easier. It is interesting to observe that technologies can unleash the power that students may bring with them into the classroom in terms of creative thinking and productivity.

  

After I watched the video, I have some thoughts about a 21st century classroom looks like. I think a 21^st century class should have a strong foundation in every subjects, and exploring curriculum topics by using technologies and using various projects to help students learning and acquiring knowledge. Students can have better connected and engaged in the learning environment. As an elementary school teacher, I try to use technologies like multimedia and blogging to motivate students’ interest in learning Chinese and make them feel fun to learn in my classroom. I will use combine art tools with text editing, clip art, blog and voice recording that provide students with tools to communicate ideas and demonstrate understanding. As a 21^st century teacher, I think my classroom should be a place for students that get excited in learning and acquiring new knowledge. 

Blogging for second language learning has been a topic of discussion for many second-language teachers. After I read the two articles “7 Reasons teachers should blogs” and “Learning Connections”, I have better understanding the reasons why implementing blogging in the L2 classroom. As I teach elementary school students, I was thinking how to use blogging to teach elementary school students.

By reading the articles, I learn that blogging can be used for a variety of purposes in second language learning, including developing fluency in second-language writing, communications and motivation through dialogues with authentic audience. Blogging can also promote more reading and writing skills. Bloggers can comment on news stories, and share pictures on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Students can read, and write in a target language for information and understanding. I totally understand the value of using blogging in second language learning, and plan to incorporate blogging in my teaching. I am going to use blogging in learning activities, for example, some activities based on the topics “Foods”, “Community Roles and Places”, “Holidays”, and so on. For example, for the topic “Chinese Foods”, students can blogging anything that they know about Chinese foods, such as “how many Chinese foods they can tell”, “what is their favorite Chinese foods”, and so on. By doing this way, it fits to the New York State (NYS) Standards Language Other Than English (LOTE). This blogging activity meets the NYS Standard LOTE. ML.1.2. B.D. which indicates that students can exhibit more comprehensive knowledge of cultural traits and patterns. By using blogging, I can also discuss food cultural comparison, as students will be able to understand cultural differences between Chinese foods and American foods.

An interesting idea is that blogs as a genre technology can encourage students to express and reflect as much as they can. Some researches show that blogging can also cause students to reflect and be more creative. By using blogging technology, our students may learn without really realizing that they are learning. They soak things up while having fun, then gradually developing understanding and fluency in the second language. Using blogging can help my students better understand and express their understanding, feeling and exchange opinions. I would like to implement the idea of posting classroom weekly news, favorite music, stories, homework questions and fun activities, and so on. I will borrow Ms. Lucia’s idea that each student needs to respond to two posts. From the blogging activities, the students will have more opportunity to participate in learning the second language. This bogging activities fit NYS Standard LOTE. ML.1.2 B.F. which emphasize that students can produce written narratives and expressions of opinion about radio, television, newspaper, article, and stories, songs, and literature of the target language. Using blogging can help my students better engage themselves in learning and express their understanding of what they learn.