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.