ESL Pod: Enjoy Your English Acquisition

ESL Pod is a great tool for either teaching or learning English. It provides various resources to improve your English. Unlike most of the Podcasting, the way ESL Pod podcasts is slower, to ensure that every listener can understand the topic when they are listening.  It talks about various aspects about English and the environment behind it,  like the movies, history, culture, food, etc.  They use everyday expressions and phrase and also explaining the meaning and use of these expressions and phrase.  The way they talk can be either a conversation or a monologue. Most of the episodes last about half an hour , at the end they will also discuss some of the questions the listeners asked.  For instance, one of the episodes which is called English Cafe 393 talks about an American movie called The Thriller. This episode first give a brief introduction about this movie as well as the cultural background behind this movie. Then it  explains some key terms one by one in order to let the listeners totally understand the movie. For example, when it talks about The Thriller, it will spell it word by word, t-h-r-i-l-l-er, and then it explains its meaning. In this way, listeners can definitely understand the podcasting.


Definitely I will use ESL Pod in my future teaching. I plan to have a listening session every week. Here I suppose the level of students are intermediate. I will set one hour each week, listening to the ESL Pod together with my students. While listening, we will talks about the expression and phrase talked in the podcasting. Ask the students to sharing their opinions together in group. Since I can download the transcripts from ESL Podcast Blog, I will give them the transcript after class.Then I will ask them to write a self-reflection after watching each episode. I think this can be a great way to improve their listening as well as writing ability. Most of all, it provides a excellent opportunity to let the students know more about the culture background behind the language.

The Global Community -ePals

ePals is definitely a great place for collaborative learning, and ePals has provided a platform for collaborative learners, teachers and academic experts in 200 countries and territories.  It is also a safe and secure connection to students, classes, and school districts worldwide.  A lot of excellent projects are processing here.

World weather watcher is one of the featured programs on ePals. It is a multi - classroom collaborative  weather exchange project. Classrooms from global locations are encouraged to join in it.  Basically speaking it is a science class and  the ideal capacity is a three classrooms collaboration. Each group in this project will lead a observation by mapping the atmospheric pressure around their community and then collect and report the weather data to the whole group.  After each classroom has lead the project, all the participant will work together to create a kids weather watcher guide.  One integrated lesson plan is provided and users can also take advantage of the suggested resources by this project.  The objective of the world weather project is to help the kids develop their awareness about the diversity of the global weather system as well as enhancing their collaborative learning ability. 

Another very interesting project is called Class in New Jersey, USA Seeks Partners for Monster Writing Project. This project is looking to do projects  or write with schools in any part of the world.  In this collaborative venture, each student sketches and colors a picture of a monster. Then, students write descriptive narratives about the creatures and exchange them with their partners. Partners read the monster writings, without seeing the monster pictures, carefully picturing the descriptive words and phrases in their minds. After reading the stories, they attempt to recreate the monsters based on the description they received. Students view the original pictures made available on the Project Workspace to see how closely their drawings match the original. Winners are selected and their drawings are displayed. By doing this way, the kids might increase their creativity and interests in writing. 

As a future language teacher, the most exciting feature about ePals is that users can discover ready-to-use checklists, lesson plans, graphic organizers and more in Teaching Resources. I will use ePals as one of the resources to generate more interesting ideas for my class.  Besides, I may also create a classroom workspace to communicate with my classes, promoting cross-cultural collaborations such as foreign language learning. I may invite those native speakers of English from any part of the world to share about the culture, lifestyle or traditions behind this language. This should be an efficient way to help my students understanding the rest of the world.