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.

Enjoy Teaching, Enjoy you Twitter

I've never think that Twitter is so organized, when I put the hashtag for great educational microblogging,  I found a lot of educational Twitter. Although I have Chinese Twitter-WeiBo, but it has limited resources for either teaching or learning. Being a member of such a powerful social network citizens, I will pay more attention to exploring the microblogs for my own professional development and for my future teaching.

Since I am planning to teach young kids English when I back to my home country, I've got a large amount of great suggestions in the articleTeachers Guide to the Use of Twitter in the Classroom. The author has provided a lot of interesting ideas that I can used in my future class.

Based on the picture I think I will use Twitter as a tool to connect both my students and their parents with me.  For my students, I will set a tweet about the study or school life everyday as a motivational tool to encourage my students. I may also ask them to write a tweet after every class as a kind of self-reflection. In addition, I can use Twitter to leave instant message for the class. I think Twitter can also used for sharing any useful learning document, video or electronic books with my students. Besides, it's also a good place to leave questions for the students, and others can help the kids solve their problem as soon as possible. Furthermore, I think I will also use this network to connect the kids' parents with me, for example, if we have any program that need help or cooperation of the parents, I will invite them to follow our Twitter, assisting the kid's learning process.

However, as a young teacher, I feel that Twitter might also a efficient tool for my professional development. Since I've have my own Twitter account and I've following many creative educational microblggings, I will keep following them even when I go back to China. These educational microbloggings have extended my learning space; they allowing me to keep paced with the technology development in teaching all the time. Besides  I've read an online article which is named Great Twitter Tools for Your Professional Development, the article posted a list of awesome Twitter tools which can be used for my professional development, for example TwitTV, YouTwit, Tweet Topic Explorer.

Each of the different tools contains information about technology education, I can always find the updated videos or news about teaching and learning. I can also using the Tweet Topic Explorer to find the topics I'm interested in. I feel all of these tools have increased my learning and teaching resources, I will keep working on it. People always say that we can connected with friends we with Twitter, but I think it also enable me to connected to the great technology educators. The information they shared might influence the classroom effect and they may also boost my professional development.