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.

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.