Photo Stories--Stupeflix

I love making photo stories, I enjoy using Stupeflix. I feel like a movie director tonight, this is amazing. I use Stupeflix to make my own movie which shares my alternative spring break experience to New Orleans about two weeks ago.

Personally speaking,  Stupeflix is a great tool to make photo stories. It's easy to learn how to use it, and it also provides a couple of themes for you to choose. I will create my own photo stories for my students in the future. I think it can be an efficient way to raise the students' concentration and motivation for my class.  There's various way for me to use photo story, first of all, I can use it to creating movies for certain topics. For example, if I'm going to teach the diverse culture of China, I will create a photo story with pictures of different provinces of China, local music and tradition foods there to help the learners to understand the topic. At the same time, I can ask the students to make their own photo stories. I will ask them to make a photo story about one city she/he has visited before. In order to help them make a good photo story, I will introduce  Stupeflix to them first. I am plan to create a Voice Thread first,  showing then how to make their own story on this website step by step. Then I will ask them to insert text on each image, using correct grammar point. 

To conclude, photo story might be the most  exciting tool to use both by the teacher and students.  A video can provide more information that a book can not offer. Let's picking photo story into our teaching method basket!

Connect Your Classroom With Voice Thread

 As an efficient teaching tool, Voiced Thread can combine technology with our teaching goals.  Here, I think Erin Puntoriero's Voice Thread  is an excellent class. Definitely I will pick some of her ideas in this Voice Thread for my own teaching purpose in the future.  First of all, this is a totally integrated voice thread, Eric combines pictures, voice record, video and linked website in this slide. The topic here is 'Mexico', which help students to have a better understanding about this country as well as the culture. Before she asked the students to make comments, she first remind them several points about making a comment, this helps me a lot when I made my own record. Then Eric provides both audio and written instruction about how to make a comment, it should be very easy for students to follow. In addition she also provides students various sources to help them understand the culture about Mexico. For example, this is one of the linked website for the students:

In the last slide, she will remind the students again to make a correct comment. What surprised me most is that she even assigns points for each question, it will drive the students to be more focused when making their comments. I think students will have a clear understanding about Mexico culture after this Voice Thread.

I also enjoy Miao Gu's Voice Thread.  I think she picks a great topic for the ESL class.  All these three questions in her voice thread will help the teacher to get a better understanding about their students' backgrounds. Such a topic will also provide a great opportunity for the students to know each other. Besides, Miao also uses a completed PowerPoint to show her students how to make their ow comments, it is very useful for the students to understand how Voice Thread works.

Bookr, Digital Storytelling

 Flickr is definitely a great picture library, with Flickr Photos you can just type the key words to explore the pictures you need.  With such a powerful tool, teachers can do a lot of things. They can use it to create a story for any short stories or poems. I will use Flicker to create short story for my lesson. I can also use it for vocabulary teaching to help the students understand the meaning of the words. The pictures together with audio will help the students to understand the lesson more quickly. For example, in my short digital story-telling, Bookr-The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I try to help the students to understand what happened in the story ; the pictures combined with the words will leave a deep memory in their heads. So when use such a tool, the objective can be understanding the theme of the story based on the audio and pictures.

Teachers can also ask the students to create their own story. The story can be very short poems and simple stories about themselves. Each students can create a story to introduce themselves. They can choose the special pictures in them life and post any important things happened before.  Such a lesson can be  a great opportunity for teachers to know more about your students as well as  let the students be more familiar  each other faster. Most of all, it is a great experience for the students to practice their ability in using technology.

Flickr Digital storytelling

Tojásfestés, a photo by sikeri on Flickr.

Kids in today's classroom are different from the kids in the past century. They play computer games at home, they use Powerpoint at school, they even have their own iPADs , cell phones. So it is necessary to combine technology with story-telling.  According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling,  the digital story-telling is a kind of combination of the art of telling stories and a variety of multimedia, including graphs, audio, video and Web publishing.

However, it is a not an easy job to apply Digital Story-telling for teaching purposes.  First of all, teachers can create digital stories by themselves, to combine your teaching topic with a digital story is a great way to raise the students' interests and  concentration for your class.  Especially, when teachers have a difficult topic which is a challenge for your students to understand, digital story-telling is definitely a great choice.

Furthermore, digital story-telling can also be a powerful tool to encourage the students to create their own story.  Teachers can give the students several instruction classes about how to make a digital story by themselves. After the students have known how to create a digital story, it's time for them to practice.  Teachers can distribute the students as  a  couple of groups, and each of the group members has various role: collecting pictures, brainstorming, audio. This can be a great opportunity for the students to practice collaborative learning as well as a nice experience for technology practice.

Trace Effects--Serious Games in L2 class

According to the Wiki,  'Serious_Games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem. Although serious games can be entertaining, their main purpose is to train or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement. Serious game will sometimes deliberately sacrifice fun and entertainment in order to achieve a desired progress by the player. Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. This category includes some educational games and advergames, political games, or evangelical games. Serious games are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education'. Among all kinds of the serious games, I think Trace-Effects is a great video game for both foreign language learning and teaching.

Trace Effects is an online video game for learning American English and culture. It is produced by the US Department of State. It is geared toward young people, ages from 12 to 16. Trace Effects exposes users to American society and explores themes related to entrepreneurship, science and innovation, empowering women, community activism and conflict resolution. Since my future students are supposed to be middle school students, I think this game is beneficial for my students to improve their English proficiency especially in speaking and listening. It also provides a great opportunity for the learners to get to know more about American culture and the college school atmosphere. As a problem solving game, Trace Effects has seven main chapters, and the task from each chapter is related to the next chapter. In each of the chapter, the players are asked to finish tasks like finding some places of the campus or to find certain people. To fulfill the task players have to talk to people to gain the necessary information. I've played this game only one time, but it takes almost two hours to finish all these chapters.

The language learning objective for this game is to enable the learners to get familiar with the American society and themes related to the campus life. After playing the game several times the students will get sense of the basic facilities of the American campus, they should also know who and where they can go for asking help when they meet  problems in American colleges. There are three main  methods for me to assess my learning objective. First of all, I can exam their playing speed, usually the quicker they finish the game, the better they understand the game and the themes related to American Society. Secondly, I can ask the students to  pause the game when there is a conversation in the game, I will ask them to talk to me instead. In this way I can know whether they have learned how to talk about these topics exactly. Finally, I may ask my students to write an self-reflection, asking them to write down the useful topics from the game and how do they feel about American university. Maybe this task is challenging for the middle school students , but I will try to make it more easier for them.

Let's ' Escape the Kitchen' !

What is gamification? In my own words, I suppose gamification should be a great combination of game design and learning involvement. The Gamification Wiki definitions it as "the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics, and/or game style into anything. This definition is purposely broad to support the many uses of the word outside of the context of business". A few other definitions of gamification like incorporating game elements and mechanisms into non-gaming websites and software.

Using games for language learning can be a great adventure. First of all,  games can are always the best way to engage the learners. Rather than the traditional exercises, games can catch the learners' attention more effectively.  All of the players reward credit, the better you play, the more credits you are likely to win. Most of the cases, the credits and reward can motivate the players to boost their playing. However,teachers who choose to use games in the language learning classrooms should be careful of the design for the games. While a good design of the game can integrate learning and playing together, involving the teachers' teaching objectives into playing. An ineffective design might only worked as a way of classroom entertainment.

Escape the Kitchen is my favorite type of escape the room games, it is pretty interesting and involving. I've played for at least four times,  when  I played the first time, I had no idea what should I do, then I watched the walk through for the game, everything was definitely easy for me then. While I choose this game into my future class, the objective of this game is that: the students will able to learn 23 kitchen vocabulary. They are: kettle, cupboard,mixer, beater, radio, dial, batteries, fridge , freezer, power cord, bowl, parrot, feather, tickle, dog collar, sink, fill up, switch on, plug in, pour, knife, hammer and drill. During this game, students will work in pairs. One of them will watch the video and then replay it to their partner and make sure that she/he understand how to play the game. The other partner will focus on how to play this game, and she/he can ask any question about the instruction. After they make it the first time, they need to change their roles and replace to play the room again. The group who finish the game first will get a box of chocolate as reward. In addition, after this game, they are all required to write down the kitchen words related to this game as much as possible. The one who write down the most words will also get a box of chocolate as prize.

In this game, what I should do is the walk through to this game. First I will describe each of the pictures together with my students, picking out the words related to this game and focus on some key words. For some new words, I need to pre teach them to help them understand the game.Then I will  read  the clues to the students, clicking each of the buttons  until the end of this game and grading the language to suit the level of the classroom. Then I will give them the guideline for this game and ask them to start. As the teacher, I will also keep on noticing the comprehension by checking how the students moving on in this game.

There are several ways for assessing the learning objective. First of all, as I've mentioned at the end of this game, I will ask them to write down kitchen words from this game as much as possible. From their word lists I can see how many kitchen words they've learned from this game. Besides, I may also use images of these kitchen words,  and let the students write down the name of the images. I can also ask them to replay the game to check if they have understand the game.