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.