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.

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.

Classroom2.0

         When searching for the most useful social networking group, I found that the Classroom 2.0 is a great tool for my career development. The Classroom 2.0 is designed for those who are interested in web2.0, social media and participative technology in the classroom. It has more than 70,000members from 188 countries all over the world!



     Classroom 2.0 is a free, community-supported network. It is used  to connect teachers around their own interests and passions for different aspect of teaching. Here teachers from different types sharing ideas and experiences about teaching with technology, poetry round tables, writing portfolios, and more. It's is a cooperative place,  e.g, as a teacher, if you have any problem you can leave your question on the forum page if the website, those experienced teachers will leave advice or suggestions here for you. Furthermore, you can also share anything useful for teaching here, so people can learn from you as well.

    The website also have a list of different groups.  You can do a great deal from a classroom perspective in different groups.Since I'm planing to teaching middle school students after I'm graduate, I also found a very interesting and helpful group called A Crazy Place Called Middle School. In this group all the middle teachers sharing their experience about efficient teaching technologies or teaching games or other tool that can be used for middle school students. Although I am not the member of the group now, I think I'll always keep checking this group, especially when I begin my teaching in the future.

A Learner is Like an Evaluator

People all learn for different purposes. Some of the learners are learning for more personal storage of knowledge; some may learn for a better future job; people may also  learn just for self-entertainment. While it is important for people to evaluate what they are learning for, it is also crucial for learners to choose how to learn and which types of learning tools to assist their learning. In order to become a good learner, people all need to be good evaluator to making the right decision while they are keep learning.

Since the 21 century is an informative century, the creative technological tools enable information changing become more and more quickly. In Siemens's article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, the author writes that "The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months according to the American Society of Training and Documentation (ASTD)."  While people in the past can keep a job as a life long career, people in the new century have to keep learning to keep pace with the development of the new technique and skills they need to fulfill their work. However, the large amount of new information and technology urge the learner to be a evaluator. While people need to keep breast to the new knowledge, they also need to recognize which is the important and unimportant information for them. According to Siemens"The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical." Although the decision you make today is the right, it may be meaningless tomorrow. Therefore, all learner need to be their own evaluator to set their own learning purposes and to choose the most efficient tools and information for their self-development.

Based on the video What is Connectivism, connectivism comes from" our needs to socialize and negotiate around knowledge." The different types of medias can be used for different purposes. Each learner needs to evaluate the various types of media tools to promote their own learning process. It is impossible to adopt all the technological tools into the learners' learning process, the right choice of media tools can make learning more efficient. Even if people are surrounded by Facebook, Twitter or Blogging, they need to make their self-evaluation to find the most useful mediation tool to socialize and negotiate around knowledge. 

To conclude,  all though the analogy that a learner is like a evaluator may not be the perfect one, it is obvious that learner need to keep evaluating the changing information and technology to keep pace with their acquisition. 

Don't Trap Technology In Your Classroom

The name of the post on which I commented is Teachers Embrace Digital Learning Strategies, in the blog named Mind shift.I am interested in this post because the author lead me into deep thinking of how to choose the technology in the teaching and how to adopt it in to the real classroom. In fact this post was posted on February 6, according to the blogger this was the second annual Digital Learning Day, which is designated to bring attention to the benefits of technology for learning. In order to discuss the influence of technology and learning, the author first talked about seven golden rules of using technology in schools. It claimed that  technology was worthless without professional development; the most important thing is not the time and money spent on by those educators, but the ways to integrate technology creatively into educators' daily teaching practice in meaningful ways. Besides, the author mentioned that "teaching tools are not just a passing fad". Teachers should take the risks to exploring and experiencing the efficient teaching tools and try to keep learning on technology, being a lifelong learner.

Also the author linked a survey by PBS learning media, it is a survey about the teachers' ideas and suggestions about technology in the classroom. From the survey, it is clear that most of the teachers( almost 74% think that technology is a good teaching tool,  especially for those teachers in low-income schools.

The post also provides case studies of how teachers using technology to support learning.  Here some of the teacher use technology to playing the game with the students.  My favorite one is that a teacher using texts message  with the students.  Before each of the class,  the teacher ask the student to send him a message about one challenging question of the class.  The student who send the message first will get a chocolate as a prize. I think this is a great way to enhance the students' learning motivation.

I think all these tips are very helpful for my future class plan. It provides several efficient ways to improve both learning and teaching process. I may keep this blog in my teaching life as a good planing resource.