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. 

                   

Magic ePals!

                       

ePals is a place that focuses on creating social learning networks where people from different background can get together and talk about their ideas based on similar topics, educators, students, parents can all be grouped here to express their idea about education and learning.

When I first started it, I really like the Filters part where I can choose the subjects that I’m interested in, like Art, Business, Dance, etc., and then there are several related programs pop put for me to choose, so by clicking the names of those programs, I can explore and read some general information about them. Besides, I can always go back to add subjects that I’m interested.

On the first page of the website, there are many little squares of people who are also in the same field with their introduction there that I can connect with, it aims to let users to know each other and by making connection with each other, people can make groups to express their opinions about teaching, learning, methods and technology, and so on.        

                     

What I like the most, is the left column that has several choices for users to choose from in order to shrink the search range, those are country, language, class size, interest, subject and specialization, with choose information in the drop-down part, I can make a customized search for people in the similar field that I’d like to make connection with, this feature is very useful for me to looking for teachers that also interested in teaching Chinese outside of Asian countries to communicate with, and actually I already found some of them and made connections!. 

Flipped Learning !

                       

I just joined a social networking group called Flipped Learning Network, such an interesting learning skill that arouse my interest. One of the parts that I like the most of this social networking group that I joined is the group section on the top of the website page. Once I clicked the “Group”, I found many interesting groups have different topics there, like Mathematics, Middle school, Mastery Learning, etc., I picked one called “First Time Flippers”, and I saw people’s posts in the forum and also others’ comment under them. The reason I picked “First Time Flipper” was I seldom had chance to really get to know about flipped learning, which a very interesting one, so watched some videos posted on it and also some people’s introduction or idea about flipped learning. Besides that feature, people can ask questions about flipped classroom, upload videos of related information, post new ideas to the forum, etc., so apparently this is a place that full of intensive information about its related topic. Like another topic I took a look at called World Language Teachers, which the whole world’s language teachers get together talk about lesson plan, course curriculum, flip conference, flip videos, and after a short surfing I already found some posting and videos that I would like to spend time to open. So as a new language teacher, who would like to create a professional blog about how to teach Chinese in the U.S., this social networking provides me a good guide to follow and also borrow skills from!

Here is the link of the social networking group I just joined, you can join it too if you are also interested! :) 

                       

The Network is the Learning

              

              

                      

A learner today is like a luxury car in an extra limited edition. Cars with advanced auto function run faster, provide bigger and more comfortable space for people and also avoid accidents with those detective sensors, so with these advanced functions, this car could be a more popular car among the other ones; same like learners today, the ones with the ability of keep themselves to stay current in the field could always learn more, learn faster and learn more broadly, so they can always be on top of their field.

After reading Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, I really agree what Driscoll(2000) defines learning as “ a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] much come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world”. This actually reminds me of the experience I had when I was an interpreter. As an interpreter, what I do is not only translate one language to another, what’s more, it’s more like an exchange of information, and I need to keep myself updated daily by searching information and knowledge online or listen to news in order to do so. Thus, by doing my own researches online and interact with my advisor and colleagues I gained information for the work that was coming. And not only for my interpreting career, but also when I was learning Spanish. I started to learn Spanish two years ago, and I decided to learn it by myself instead of join a Spanish program since I couldn’t afford it. So what I did was downloaded an app on my phone, and joined a Spanish learning forum online. To my surprises, there are plenty of Spanish learning sources in that forum and most of them are easy to follow and easy-understanding steps for beginners, which by applying them and interacting with the users also sign for it, I learned a new language and got to know more things than just language itself.

What I learned the most from the above two experiences was not the skill or language themselves, instead, it’s always connect to the others, or even, to the outside world to keep myself updated. So like The Network is the Learning video states “The way we are connect to other individuals is largely responsible for our ability to continue to stay current in the field”. 

Diigo and Pinterest

What Diigo and Pinterest both do:

1.       They both allow people to share different resources with different groups of people. Like in Diigo, people can set up different groups of topics if they teach more than one section; in Pinterest, people can set up as many boards as they want to share the topics they are interested.

2.      They both can have multiple tags for the resources I save in my accounts. I put multiple tags for the web pages I’m interested in under the links, and similarly, I can add multiple tags for the web pages I saved on Pinterest also, but in different boards.

3.      They both allow people to follow me or me to follow other users, but to Pinterest, users need to follow the boards of the people they want to follow.

The difference between Diigo and Pinterest

1.      I can highlight text on saved websites and also write comment or notes to explain it. While I can’t do the same on Pinterest, I can only save websites that have images in them.

2.      For Diigo, I can host a discussion with the groups I joined, bur for Pnterest, I can only comment other people’s boards.

3.      They both can save multiple websites, but to me, Diigo is more academic than Pinterest, I feel like Diigo is only used for teaching or professional purpose, while on Pinterest, I can save anything I’m interested not only limited to academic resources, I can also save topics like fashion, health living, or clothing, etc.

4.      For Diigo, it doesn't offer related articles, but Pinterest does so by showing a couple of pictures of related articles.

5. And also, I found that I can post comments on the people that I follow on Pinterest, while I don't know how to comment people's sites on Diigo, once I click the websites they saved, it open to public instead of this person I follow, so Pinterest is more convenient for this part, which it links to Facebook and Twitter also, so I can comment the articles in Facebook or Twitter account also. But Diigo have the ability to let me message the people I follow, while Pinterest doesn't, so Diigo can make the comment part through this way with messaging others. 
  

With have accounts for both bookmarking sites, I think they are both very powerful and useful for language teaching and classrooms. I like Pinterest more since it always related to pictures which give me deep impression of what I saved, so it’s really easy to remember and recall what I have in the account. It also allow me to link my Facebook and Twitter accounts so I can share my resources to public, it’s a good idea to socialize with people. But with Diigo, the highlight function and comment feature are also very impressive, so I think I’ll use Diigo for teaching and professional use, but Pinterest for social and fun.

5.        

Challenges and Opportunities. Nervous or Exciting?

The Future Starts Now reminds me of an American journalist called Thomas Friedman who wrote a book called "The World is Flat",

describing the ten world power, among them there is network, particularly the emergence of these new communication tools and learning tools like search engines, blogs, etc. I read that book a little bit before, but back then I didn’t realize technology was such a great skill that as a teacher I need to equip myself with it. Now I believe that this actually becomes a challenge in our life particularly in education, which is how to serve the teaching position in the future.

In the past, it was always teacher-centered, which was just listen to teachers, so independent personality and free of thought seldom excited. And it was always about remembering, students needed to spend a lot of time to remember what they learned from textbooks and also class notes. So since students wouldn’t get interesting knowledge from just remembering, then hard-working was very necessary. So it seemed everything teachers and students did was just for good grades and get into good schools without paying attention to students’ own interests.

But now, with the development of technology, networks and also Social Media Revolution, the memories of knowledge is not the main task of teaching any more. Things are changing now, even my removable hard disk can put entire library of text materials in my pocket. So if we still teach in the old ways then we will find our weakness right away when we face our students of new generations, because the younger people are, the faster they learn, so it’s not likely that we will learn faster than them in this technology age. Thus, we as teachers need to re-define our situation in order to keep our advantages in front of our students.

Thus, what we can do under this circumstances? I think the clue is to be creative. We need to know what knowledge and information we need first, and then how to find these knowledge and information, next, how to deal with them, how to use, in particular, how to create something new. We can get information online so easily with goggling or searching blogs, we then can match these information or add something new so we can use it for our own purpose. It is a process of learning and teaching at the same time, we keep ourselves updated with new technology and information, on the other side we use these technology to help use improve our teaching. And I think only in this way, can we take the opportunities to be better teachers and also not afraid of the upcoming challenges.

Teaching English while traveling

So like what I told you guys in the Podcast and also in the Discussion Board that I'm really not good at technology, I meant technology that not include Facebook and Instagram. I do use these two social media a lot everyday, check my friends' postings, new things going on in the world, etc., but more importantly, I used to use it to check my students' homework. 

Three years ago, I was still an ESL teacher that taught adults reading and writing online. And also, I used to travel a lot, especially to the U.S., so it was inevitable for me to teach during my trips. And once by accidentally, I came up an new idea that why not posting my travel pictures and journals in English on my Facebook page so I can ask students to leave comments for me there in order to let them practice their writing and reading skills, since I was in a English speaking country which I thought it was win-win situation( I don't need to prepare extra material that they might think boring and also let them see what a real English speaking country looks like through their teacher). Then I tried it, and their response was great! They all loved the idea and asked me to post more in the next following weeks. So that was a good experience.

As for answering professor's question, I would like to use this idea here. I'm really insterested in teaching Chinese in the future, and I enjoy online course a lot, so when if I have oppertunity to teach Chinese online in the future, I'd like to open a blog, write journals several times a week in Chinese, and then ask my students to check them first and then leave comments under it for me also in Chinese, so after that, I can respond them and make correction under their comments so the whole class can see it like the idea of our Disscussion Board. Besides this way of improve reading or writing skills, I'd like to ask the to post their own Chinese journals on their blogs that open to public, so I can comment under it and also other students. 

Also, I'd like to set a public blog area so once or twice a week we can talk about a set issue on it, everybody needs to give their own opinions on it, so it is pretty much like a Chinese learning club. 

And hope this type of blogging activity demonstrates learning standard performance indicators:

-LOTE.ML.1.2.C.A:
 Students can comprehend the content of most texts of interest to native  speakers
-LOTE.ML.1.2.C.C:
 Students can write multi-paragraphed essays, journals, personal and  business  letters, and creative texts in which their thoughts are  unified and presented in  an organized fashion; errors in form may  occur, particularly when the students  are writing about complex themes  or issues requiring the expression of opinions,  or when the topic is  outside their realm of experiences.

- LOTE.ML.1.2.C.D:
 Students can use culturally appropriate learned vocabulary and  structures  associated with a broad range of topics, and structures  such as simple and  complex sentences to communicate through the full  range of time frames.

And see the learning standard here.