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!