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.

 

 

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.