Learning with computers

Learning with computers is one of the Yahoo Groups which concentrate on the aspect of language teaching.As a foriegn language teacher to be, this is exactly the group for me to learn from other experienced teachers and share informations with them.The most attractive section of the group is we could ask questions and get diverse answers or suggestions from all angles of view which offer us a fantastic approach to solve the problem we may have. Also, we could go throught the group to see their posts, there might be something we never thought about but could be very useful and effective to our teaching. One more significant benefit of it is, it will save a lot of time and is possible no matter where we are.

A learner is like a ...

In my point of view, a learner is like a tourist.

 

It does not merely show the view in the picture which is taken by the tourist, the more significant issue is the story behind the camera.Meanwhile, the reason why s/he takes picture is that s/he wants to remember the view in front of his/her eys and then goes on with his/her trip to see the view at next stop.As Siemens states in his article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, "The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today." 


Also, like George Siemens mentioned in the video The Changing Nature of Knowledge, that "It's not what we know today is important; it's our ability to continue to stay current as knowledge changes." Every time a tourist starts his/her journey, s/he is accumulating the ability to discover new landscape and experience new adventure.As a teacher to be, our responsibility is not to give the fish to students, but to teach them how to fish. In addition, in this digital world, it's significant to master the ability of discovering people we can learn from, in another word, having the awareness of establishing a network is dramatically crucial.

Meet the interest of student to motivate them in L2 learning

I commented on a post named Blue Bird in the blog Film-english. It interested me a lot as the reason of I myself don't like the way of learning a language just to do exercise of the 4 aspect of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.Since it's boring and  However, I do love watching movies of talk-shows in the target language. The auther shared a great idea which has very detailed procedures of how we teachers could address this method to our lesson plan in the future,it will be very helpful for students to create something by themselves after imitating from the film. Also, it could be used in group activities which engage students to practice speaking at the same time.

This idea applied all of the four elements of language learning at the same time without making it complicated to students. The most significant benefit is, it combined input and output of language perfectly and enhanced the students' motivation.

I would love to address this method into my future teaching. 

Education Needs Change

Educational Change Challenge 

As a student for 18 years, I seldom thought that sitting in a class room and listening to the teachers over 8 hours a day is not something we must do to be educated. Since everybody is doing the samething as above.

However, by watching this video, I realize that we do have another option along with the time changes.As an instructor, teachers should have the perspective of how do the students want to be educated instead of considering the pedagogy all the time, and try to find out a best way for students to gain knowledge in an effective way. The most significant consideration is the knowledge students need is changing all the time, therefore,education is challenged at the same time.

Teacher is not a leader, but a helper and friend of students to help them figuring out how to use the knowledge they learn at school.