Create your own book -- Bookr

Story: I'm a panda from China

Bookr is really an interesting tool, by using it, I created my first "book" in my life.

It encourages people to use abundant pictures, consequently, it's much appropriate for young learners to learn vocabulary and perfect to help them with their memory, since young learners are much sensitive with visual issues.

So I would like my students to create their own stories with the new vocabulary. It not only provides them an opportunity to involve their own ideas but also makes them feel like they are not always a follower but a leader, and their enthusiasm could be motivated at the same time.In addition, they could use it to communicate with their peers in order to reinforce their perception of the meaning of the vocabulary.

Digital storytelling

Students may have difficulties to understand or memorize something new, particularly for L2 learning. Nonetheless, it might become easier for them if the knowledge could be memorized through telling a story. And the new way to tell a story which I want to introduce here is called “digital storytelling”.

In the article “7Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling”, the author gave a description of it like this,“Digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digi­tal content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component.”

According to the above, "digital storytelling" offers students an opportunity of creating a tailor-made tool for themselves. Meanwhile, the author also stated in the article that " The process of creating a digital story forces storytellers to choose a topic that can be appropriately conveyed to a particular audience, with electronic elements, in the time available."

In addition, as it is said in The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling,  "As the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music."  Students could apply abundant ways to express their ideas, simultaneously; they could be motivated by doing this kind of creation as well. Furthermore, teachers could use it to give instructions to make the content more interesting and easy to be accepted.

To sum up, "digital storytelling" benefits both teachers and students in a creative and comfortable way.

  by  yewenyi 

To be a fashion teacher

In the article How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom, the author introduced how Rankin, a history professor apply Twitter to her class. Usually, it's difficult for large size class to be learner-centered. But fortunately, Twitter helps to involve more students to participate into the class discussion or activity. Since they don't have to worry about being shy to speak in front of 200 people, also, instructor doesn't have to consider about using too much time to collect students' opinions. It’s truly a paradigm shaking technology platform which lets the interaction between students and teachers much more effective. I'm really exciting for applying it to my future teaching, therefore, I could get the responses from students immediately. Simultaneously, they would get my comments at the same time. It's a popular microblog among young generation; consequently, the students will unconsciously be involved to the classroom activities.

Meanwhile, another article called Nine Reasons to Twitter in Schools introduced several reasons why educators should apply Twitter to their classroom, as the author cited in the article, it's an effective tool for students to get the latest information from all over the world. In my opinion, keeping pace with the time is a significant portion of our education. In addition, Twitter offers a platform for all the students to communicate at the same time; it is also possible for them to give comments to each other. Last but not least, it's really simple to be used. I like simple but effective ways to teach my future students, and Twitter seems a perfect one to help me.