Podcast in teaching

I will use VOA Special English http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/ as a teaching and learning tool in my class. VOA stands for Voice of America, the website is very famous and popular for efficiently practicing and improving American English. The spoken speed of all the programs there are slow, clear, and easy to understand, which is exactly suitable for my ESL and EFL students, especially for low to intermediate students. There are three factors make Special English quite suitable and unique that I could either encourage my students to use it at home or I use it in my classroom. The first is its simple core vocabulary. Most words describe objects, actions and emotions of daily life. The second is its short, simple sentences and active voice; the third is the slow pace of broadcasting, about two-thirds the speed of standard English.
With the help of VOA Special English, I could use the first 10 minutes of my class time to play a short piece of news on Mon, a scientific report on Tue., and a story about American people’s life on Wed., and so on. And when students listen to the MP3 files, they can also read the text online at http://www.manythings.org/voa/rss/. In my class, students could practice their listening and speaking skills as well as learn about American culture and world news. I might also require students to use it for extensive listening at home and they could select any program they are interested in to watch and listen. When they come to the class, I might set group discussion time and they could share what they’ve learned with each other.

Global cooperation (Part 2)

Among those tools we discussed in last mod, I will use BigThink to explore my project. BigThink is one of the asynchronous tools we explored in our WIKI group, and the great merit of BigThink is that it can facilitate global cooperation in ways of offering learners and teachers great freedom to express ideas through uploading videotapes made by our own, from which not only could we get to know other people’s thoughts but also hear their voice. Besides posting our videos, we can also reply with plain text to have a conversation with the public intellectuals in various fields.
If I had the chance, I will use BigThink to conduct a Weather project. And I will search and contact another classroom on ePals who is making the same project as us. The objectives of this project are to intensify students’ cooperation ability and let them learn how weather works. After this cooperation project, students will learn the components of weather like air pressure, humidity; and how weather affect their daily lives and the choices they make about clothing, food, transportation, and mood, etc.. They will discuss essential questions like what factors make the weather change, in what ways does weather control our lives and what methods should we use for predicting the weather? And post their thoughts and ideas as videos on BigThink. In exchanging ideas through BigThink, students will gain more than the fact from reading: they could make friends with people from other culture backgrounds, learn from each other, and see how similarly and differently their opinions are towards the same question, and improve their 2 skills (listening, speaking) and computer skills as well.
Doing global cooperation project is a good way to elicit students’ learning interests. Students will benefit a lot when they engage in this.

iEARN VS ePals

I choose ePals and iEARN as two sites of global cooperation internet tools.
ePals is a collaborative learning experience, it provides learners and teachers around the world opportunities for sharing and exchanges thoughts, skills and experiences with their peers about anything related to education such as study, books, life, etc.. As it is said on its official website, ePals is the “internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms. It is connecting over 125,718 registered classrooms, more than 7 million students and educators, in 191 countries.” Through ePals, a home of global collaboration, learners and teachers could establish international friendships by making pen pals all around the world, sending protected SchoolMail, maintaining secure classrooms blogs, connecting with other classrooms for collaborating projects, and practicing language and literacy skills.
iEARN, the short name for International Education and Resource Network, is another global network community for teachers and students in more than 115 countries to collaborate together in education field. All the 150 projects in iEARN are designed by teachers and students to fit their curriculum and classroom needs and schedules. With participating in the same project, students and teachers can connect with those who are working on the same project around the world.

To compare iEARN and ePals, the common thing of them is they are both online learning websites which offer learners and teachers around the world chances to work on common projects and collaborate with each other. The major different thing is that ePals offers fewer projects while iEARN has more options of projects which is 150. However, besides collaborating projects, ePals has various functions such as email sending, classroom blogs, In2Books, etc, which is different from iEARN focusing on operating projects only. And using ePals is safer than using iEARN. I personally prefer ePals to iEARN because ePals has more powerful functions such as Classroom Match, SchoolMail, etc., and all the files created and operated there are safely guaranteed since ePals blocks SPAM, pornography, and curse words. However, I find there is a tiny drawback in using ePals, sometimes logging in is slow and not easy.

If I had the chance to apply these global cooperation sites in my future teaching, I will use ePals in connecting teachers and students around the world, because it is more functional and convenient. The join steps are easy and fast, the matching and searching provides me much convenience. I will try to use the tools of Classroom Match and In2Books to facilitate my teaching. With the use of the ePals Classroom Match, I could lead my students to join the classroom projects they are interested in through matching the classroom ---I could find any classroom and learning project worldwide by typing in keywords or brief description, such as global warming, maps, natural disasters, etc. and share and exchange emails or blogs broadly. At the same time, I may use In2Books to help students find their own penpal since it is a good platform for learners making global penpals under teachers’ supervision. And I believe a good language learner should have a language partner to practice, and making pen pals is a very good way to improve language proficiency especially under the supervision of teachers.

second post:"Twitter tweet for higher education”

http://web20teach.blogspot.com/2007/08/twitter-tweets-for-higher-education.html

“Twitter”, one of the newly invented popular mircoblogs, is brand new to me but greatly attracts me. I love this chattering tool because it has the advantage of immediacy and convenience and we could update our personal life and current status frequently and keep our friends get to know us easily. When talking about these microblogs, I can only think of those message e-boards offer us great convenience to communicate in life but never think of they could also be used in classrooms, because how could a chatter tool of sending brief posts help education?
However, reading this post “Twitter tweet for higher education” brightens my mind that “Twitter” is a good helper to facilitate our teaching and learning. The author talks about his experience of using “Twitter” introduces the main functions of twitter as well as how to use it well to facilitate teaching in higher education. As it mentioned in the post, “Twitter” could be ideal for reminding students about homework, also a good drill to practice students’ ability of condense and economical expression writing, and be convenient for students to follow others’ links to learn events and other announcement, etc. For instance, teachers could use it as an e-board to make announcements, discuss content of lessons and events happened in the class, collecting students’ feedback and so on. As far as we are able to see, “Twitter” is not only a way to communicate with friends, but also ways for teachers communicating with students.
It is quite interesting and attractive to use “Twitter” as a teaching tool. As I begin to explore and learn more, I hope I can come up with some sparkling ideas about how to make the best use of twitter to help teaching.

Twitter & Pownce

I like both of the two tools “twitter” and “pownce”, they are very popular microblogs in our high tech life. The literal meaning of twitter is “give a call consisting of repeated light tremulous sounds”, which has the implied meaning of how it has been used now as a instant question “what are you doing?” for updating your personal status. Pownce is another instant status tool which is very similar to “twitter”.
The common things of “twitter” and “pownce” are that they have the advantage of immediacy and convenience. They are both convenient internet tools for us to send brief posts and update our personal life frequently to keep touch in with our friends.
However, “twitter” and “pownce” are not exactly the same since there are some differences between them. In “twitter”, we can only send text message within the maximum of 140 words through email, internet message, or cellphone. While “pownce” has no limitation in words, beside sending text message, we can also send files, links, and events to friends. And the files includes any kinds, such as photo, songs or even video.
There is another difference in “reply”: Pownce has the function of replying to others easily and directly, we could reply with clicking the button under each post. But “twitter” can only reply in the form of typing “@username”, that is why sometimes we may not see others replied message immediately if the message board updates too fast.
The last minor difference between the two is that “twitter” has more options to change the theme, since users can choose the picture from our own laptop. While “pownce” has very limited options of theme for users to choose. To most of the users, the one with more options is always more popular.
Above all, this is my temporary comparison of “twitter” and “pownce” so far after using it for a short time. I prefer “pownce” to “twitter” because it is more functional and convenient. I think later on, I may find more interesting points on both of them.

How microblogging can be used in education?

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-microblogging-can-help-you/

Microblogging is a new developed internet tool of communication in social network of the global community. According to wiki, “Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.” In another word, microblogging is the practice of sending brief posts on a Web site, such as Twitter. It has the advantage of immediacy and convenience since we could update our personal life and current status frequently enough to keep our friends get to know us easily.
This article is “How Microblogging Can Help You”, although it is not directly related with how it could be used in education but I am still elicited after reading it. Like the many benefits the author presents in the article, such as “practice the art of economical expression”, or “develop the skill of writing now, worrying later”, all of them are ways related with facilitating education as long as the microblogging is used properly and correctly. For example, mircroblogging is all about brevity, since there is no need getting into a heartfelt discussion with someone. From the aspect of education, microblogging is a very good drill to practice students’ ability of condense and economical expression writing. Since it is designed to provide users answer very simple questions as “what” and “where”. Such as Twitter’s asks, "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?"
Also, as the author points out, “mircoblogging allows readers to get to know you better”. We teachers could also encourage students to use it properly in order to facilitate teaching. For example, with using the Twitter, students could exchange information frequently because it enables them to quickly share messages, links and files. What’s more, for a new class, mircoblogging is a very good platform for new classmates to get to know each other well, so as for teachers to get to know their students.
As a whole, there are many ways microblogging helps us in life. People use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information which greatly brings convenience. Besides, it is also a good helper in the education field since technology enhance learning and teaching. Now, I can’t wait to start using it in my future teaching.

RSS-- Comment of the Post

The name of the blog is “So You Want To Teach?”
http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/why-i-hated-teaching-during-my-first-two-years/
I would like to share this post with you --- “Why I hated teaching during my first two years?” I was attracted by the title at the first sight. Unlike most of the posts sharing the positive sides of teaching, this post describes how a teacher grows up from the unsuccessful teaching experience in his early years. There are many difficulties and tough situations like how to control the class, how to get help from others, etc., all of which are very common problems that many teachers may have, especially for new hands in teaching. The author writes this post not only for sharing his experience with others, but also for remembering the pains and gaining from the past.
I think it is a very good post to show how a new teacher grows from the pains and how he changed his views of teaching from hateness to likeness. I like this post a lot, it greatly arouses my curiosity and confidence in teaching, meanwhile, I benefit a lot from reading it.

Social Networking Group

I would recommend an international network which will benefit the educational bloggers all of the world: http://edubloggerworld.ning.com/. It is a wonderful place for teachers and learners, especially for teachers who just start using blogs in teaching, since it contains many good information and tips for how to use the internet in the classroom. I love this website not only because it will help me improving teaching, but also because the operation is simple, fast and easy, any participants who use this site need not be technology gurus. Since I am a new hand in using blog for teaching, I hope with my joining of the discussion on many educational topics, I can make greater progress.

Learners of today

Reading the seminal article on Connectivism by George Siemens makes me think that the learner of today is like a treasure hunter. As we all known, treasure hunters are toward the purposes of finding treasures. Their ability to search for treasures is the key to success. When the hunter had to choose one thing between a treasure map and a box of jewels, he needs to decide which one is more valuable and helpful for searching more treasures: the jewels case makes him rich, however, the treasure map may help him find more treasure though it looks trivial. Similarly, like learners, are with the purpose of learning knowledge. We should plug into the sources we need and take a long term view whenever we made some achievement. Just like George Siemens said, “access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses”.
To think about another situation, if the hunter get lost in a forest on his way to the final destination where is brimming with full mountain of gold, silver and jewelry, what can he do? He could probably give up, or, find out the directions and continue exploring. Let’s just keep in mind that “The ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important…” Likewise, to the hunter, the ability to find direction instead of giving up satisfying with his present is more crucial to success. Without compass in hand, he could judge the direction through observing the Big Dipper of constellation.
As a learner, we couldn’t get lost in the digital era which is flooded with information. Don’t confine by what we had today, always plug into the sources we need and keep the learning ability are significant.

Using weblogs in teaching

Blog is so popular that has become part of our life, it has been broadly used for exchanging and updating personal information. For me, I usually use blogs to contract with my friends. But as an English teacher, I seldom think to real use the blog as a teaching tool, which is very challengeable, since the common way of teaching and learning to me is blackboard and classroom. After reading Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I found using blog is indeed a great way to improve teaching quality, I would like to try this tool in my future teaching.
1. Good platform for brainstorming and contributing ideas.
I will use the blog as a public place for my students to contribute their ideas and useful suggestions. For example, if there are a large amount of selections for choosing a topic or deciding an activity, which couldn’t be made within the class time, I will use blog as a wisdom pool to have students freely brainstorming and exchanging ideas and thoughts. They can contribute their thoughts and join this group work to discuss at any time at any place whenever they had one. Compared to teaching in the classroom, using blogs breaks the limitation of time and location, which is very convenient and high efficiency.
2. I will provide online resources, interesting reading materials and links to assist language learning.
There are lots of resources in the internet for language learning, and a good teacher cannot leave the help of internet. Like reading materials, videos, pictures, even songs or movies, as long as they are helpful for language learning. Whenever I find any useful and interesting information, I will share all my resources with students on the blog. On the other side, using blogs also benefits the teacher because I will encourage students to share their information with me. They can also write comments or give me suggestions on blogs to improve my teaching.
3. Distant teaching and learning.
Like this internet course LAI 684, I hope someday I have chance to try distant teaching of oral English, with my students living in other cities or even other countries. I will compile my own electronic book as my teaching material and post it on the blog. In the e-book, there will be series of units, and each lesson has a topic, such as sports, weather, country, etc.. I will communicate with my students from the image device, and blog plays a role as text book. That would be having great fun!
As a whole, using blog is brand new to me in real teaching, I think I will have more inspiration when I set my hands to do it. With the development of high tech, using internet tools in language teaching will be more and more universal and popular. Hope we teachers could gain and have fun with this high tech way of teaching.

Welcome！

Hi everyone, welcome to my space!This is Rong's learning classroom, I am happy to introduce my new home to you. It is my first time to make an online learning classroom, I am so excited. Welcome you guys contributing any ideas, comments and suggestions to make my new home sweeter and warmer!