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.

 

 

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! :)