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”.