Podcast Learning

                     

I would like to use a podcast episode called ‘Chinese Grammar Summary’ from ‘Melnyks Chinese Podcast’ in my own teaching in the future. At first, I would like to say that I like ‘Melnyks’ Chinese Podcast’ very much, because a) This site offers theme-based, progressive lessons, so learners will be able to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese on the variety of topics; 2) Each lesson builds on the one before it, so it provides series of lessons that learners would follow for long-run learning; 3) There are also transcripts and worksheets provided, so learners would download them for future studying.

                     

 

Next, since my students are beginning level Chinese learners, so the learning objectives for them are as follow:

·        Students will be able to recognize and understand the meaning of targeted grammatical structures in spoken form;

·        Students will be able to use targeted grammatical structures meaningfully and appropriately in oral production.

Thus, I choose this specific ‘Chinese Grammar Summary’ to help me meet these learning objectives. This 7 minutes long podcast includes 5 important continuous tense phrases that being used most frequently in daily conversation, it provides very specific explanation of each single phrases, for example,

得

1.     Chinese pronunciation;

2.     English translation of this word;

3.     Chinese synonyms of this word;

4.     Example sentences;

5.     Example conversation within context.

So we can see that the explanation gives very detailed instruction of how to understand this word and how to use it in sentences under relevant context later, thus, with this step-by-step teaching method, when learners get to practice themselves, they will be able to target the phrases among sentences and also use them in appropriately context. This podcast is the best teaching tool I found so far, it’s very helpful and I call it ‘half the work with double results’, I’m so excited that I have so much more helpful Chinese teaching lessons to follow and hope with the help of it more and more people will be interested in learning Chinese!

Happy Giraffe~

I’m really impressed by the lovely story backgrounds of Storybird, so I did my comic strips with it. I can’t believe technology develops so fast that we have so many interesting sites to use for teaching demonstration, it’s not the time we only know Powerpoint anymore, we can create photo stories and comic strips by ourselves now, it’s so exciting! The comic strips I made today called Happy Giraffe, it is about how a little giraffe overcome all the difficulties and decide to pursue her dream, the story is in both English and Chinese, it is a Chinese lesson, but I also provided English translation in case learners are confused with some vocabulary. I hope my students are able to create lessons like this for me in the future, and the performance indicators my students could demonstrate by creating their own comic strips are as follow:

 

Performance Indicator – LOTE.ML.1.2.B.A: Students can read and comprehend materials written for native speakers when the topic and language are familiar.

 

Performance Indicator – LOTE.ML.1.2.B.B: Students can use cognates and contextual and visual cues to derive meaning from texts that contain unfamiliar words, expressions, and structures.

 

Performance Indicator – LOTE.ML.1.2.B.E: Students can write brief analyses of more complex content when gives the opportunity for organization and advance preparation, though errors may occur more frequently.

 

How I would assess their creations.

If I ask my students to create similar lessons like what I created, I will use these rules:

 

l  Whether the story follows a storyline or the plot is logic;

l  Use of the correct grammar and vocabulary

l  Whether they have quote from other articles or books, use quotation marks or not.

 

Overall, I like Storybird the most since students could create more elaborated work with applying it, and the pictures choices for making stories are ample, so it have a lot of space for users to think and create at the same time.

 

 

Learning with Animoto

This week, I explored a new educational technology called Animoto, which allows users to make photo stories with putting their photos or videos in an album-like place with playing them together one by one. It's a great way of introducing language learners vocabulary or phrases or expressions of target language in a visual way, so they have much more first-sight information stored in their memory than just seeing those words in textbooks. So for my photo story, I chose to do a fashion vocabulary lesson with 10 Chinese words that appeared the most frequently in a Chinese fashion magazine, they are all fundamental words, and all very easy to learn with the help of this photo show called Want to be a Be*You*Tiful girl? Learnthese words~~

 

Performance Indicators my students could demonstrate by creating their own photo shows

Performance Indicator – LOTE.ML. 1.2.A.A: Students can understand the main idea

and some details of simple informative materials written for native speakers.

 

PerformanceIndicator – LOTE. ML. 1.2.A.B: Students can compose short, informal notes and messages to exchange information with members of the target culture.

 

How will I assess my students?

For my students’ photo stories, I will assess them in following ways:

l  Use the correct measure words to the match nouns.

l  Use the correct Pinyins and tones to pronounce the words

l  Use the correct characters

l  Organizes material in a logical and coherent way.

l  Slides are fun to watch, interesting and informative.

l  Text is easy to read and view.

   Overall, I enjoy using Animoto very much and will keep to familiar myself for future teaching use, but I think people can use it for other purpose also, like wedding videos, birthday videos, my friend is getting married this month, I think I’ll suggest her to try this tech for the photo story that will be played before the wedding starts lol.

 

 

 

 

Master Oogway's wisdom

                   

For this week, I did a TEDed lesson called Master Oogway's Awesome Saying, it's a fun one, but also one worth deeper thinking about it. 

Language Learning Objectives:

Students will be able to:

·   Understand phrases and sentences within the conversation between Master Oogway and Po the panda.

·   Make use of contextual clues to infer meanings of unfamiliar words from context

·   Understand and discuss ideas delivered in this lesson.

·   Develop and ask questions appropriate about the listening context

·   Understand and respond appropriately to the discussion question by paraphrasing the ideas of the lesson and turn them into coherent and well developed stories of themselves.

The purpose of this lesson is to see if students could get the main idea of the wisdom quotes from Master Oogway at the end. This lesson is very short but very straightforward, it designed for advanced level Els in order to test their listening comprehension and critical thinking ability. It’s easy to test their listening comprehension by letting them do the multiple-choice questions, but how to get to know students’ critical thinking ability is tricky, for this lesson, I use my discussion question to make students think about how the lesson applies to them since it is a great way to create empathy and encourage learning by making it personal. With them telling stories of themselves I could evaluate how much they understand the lesson and by how they related it with their own experiences, and besides that, maybe they could even provide more wisdom saying or quotes to inspire us！

Hope you like the lesson, and, oh, here are some cute little ones~~

Flip my classroom for CLs

                     

When I’m already get used to traditional classroom, this flipped classroom approach surprises me with its creative idea of language teaching. Unlike the old classroom that ask students to do homework at home, flipped classroom does homework and activities during the class time instead, aims to improve students’ critical thinking ability with them interacting with peers and teachers. The two articles talk about flipped classroom approach mainly for ELs, but I think this approach works for other foreign language learning/teaching also, and I’ll definitely bring it to my Chinese teaching classroom in the future.

For Chinese teaching/learning, the most difficult part is the foundation, like 

Pinyin and radical, it’s hard to increase learners’ comprehension because it usually takes very long time of them to remember words’ pronunciation and tones, and how to write down radicles in right order, so if I teach these during my class time, it would take me hours and hours to give presentation based on my old experiences. However, flipped classroom helps me solve this problem easily by switching teaching and learning scenarios. I can make a teaching demonstration video and ask learners to watch them at home, so they would have enough time to either make charts or draw pictures or whatever methods they would like to use to help them remembering differences among Pinyins and radicals.

But I have a concern about the in-class part, since learners need to do activities collaboratively, then how do we teachers treat students with different reactiveness fairly? For instance, if the teacher ask students to do a fill-in-blank exercise as a group work, the students in fast reactiveness will finish the work really quick while students with slow reactiveness even don't have time to tell the difference between this and that, then can we say fast-react students are good learners but slow-react ones are not? I don’t think so, they need more time to think doesn’t mean their comprehension is low at all. Thus, I think we teachers really should take this into consider and so to design fit-for-everybody exercises in order to make fair and correct evaluation for every student. And only we put as much situation as we can into consideration while we are still exploring, can we really make flipped classroom a useful and helpful approach for language teaching/learning. 

Twitter Chat " French as a Second Language"

                    

I joined a Twitter chat called ‘French as a Second language’ an hour ago, it happens every Sunday at 9-10pm EST and today’s topic is about oral communication. This topic happened to be my interest because I have problem of improve my oral communication skill and also had a hard time teaching speaking in my own classroom, so my target is to look for teaching skills and leaning skills.

                   

It was such a diversity of people who joined the chat, and it was definitely an eye-opening experience for me! The pattern was basically like the moderator asked questions, other people answered questions, but the amazing part is the way people answering questions and how they interacting with the others twitters. People asked help for teaching/learning strategies, liked each other’s tweets/answers, @someone to talk about specific ideas, attached pictures to show the teaching experiences they had in classrooms, posted related articles, etc., before joining this chat I never got to know there is so much information get exchanged in such a small space! I like these ideas all! But what attracts me the most, is how the moderator and those experienced people tried to provide suggestions and recommendation for all kinds of problems that were mentioned, it’s such a great way for new twitters to get to know them and have this opportunity to follow them in the future.

However, I think the only part that could be improved is the tweet box, since people really can’t express much about their opinions with the limitation of words, and a couple sentences are really not enough for other people to get to know the whole idea. 

It's Twitter's turn now!

                    

Here is the Article 1 and Article 2 I read about for this week’s topic.

This week, we learned about Twitter, a social media that through which people can interact with each other and express views about specific interests. Some studies have showed that Twitter is a convenient tool for learning and has educational value, which means it has the potential to facilitate learners’ collaborative learning and experiential learning, and also, more researches have suggested that Twitter could enhance learners’ learning motivation.

In the Article 1, it says that Twitter allows real-time communication and engagement though tweets and what people following, I think it’s a good way to utilize it for small groups of language learners. For instance, I could encourage my students to interact on Twitter to collect more information and knowledge about Chinese learning through following each other’s “Like” or the people they followed for a while.

          

                                           

In addition, I found that Twitter Chats is very useful for networking and attending them allow people to learn new perspectives from people all over the world. Like I just attended a Twitter chat called French as a Second Language chat, people exchange ideas about oral communication, fluency, vocabulary and teaching strategy in classroom, etc., people in this chat give their answers about each micro topic and also ask questions, and I really like one of them who gave some suggestions about teaching pronunciation which is also my interest, so I followed him right away so I could learn more from him and maybe ask questions in some cases. Thus, as to my Chinese teaching plan, I could do things similar like these, ask my students to join Twitter chat about Chinese teaching/learning to know more people and maybe make some friends there who can help them to improve their Chinese learning skills.

The irresistible charisma of Twitter could be a medium for language learners to discuss anything about language learning, and here I’d like to mention that Twitter is new to Asians, many Chinese who are interested in teaching Chinese online have more opportunities to reach out to learner all over the world, so now it’s our turn, and it’s also Twitter’s turn.