What is ePals for us?

In today's globalized world, people are connected to each other in every aspects. Americans are eating Chinese food; Chinese are watching English movies. We imported Japanese cars and export our products to every corner of the world. However, it is not only the concrete products. All things around us convey their unique culture and thoughts to us. we are in a time that listening to different voices from all around the world. Here, I am going to talk about an education online media,  ePals, which is allowed students and teachers from long distance. Major purposes of this site are to provide quality digital content and facilitate collaboration for effective learning.

     ePals has amazing projects. Teachers can design their own projects and students who are interested in can participate. Almost all the projects are authentic, meaningful and can be finished in teamwork. For instance, a teacher can initiate a project and incorporate students from India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China to explore ancient cultures of those countries. In the end, the project can be present in the form of Powerpoint.
                                                              

      "On My Plate" is listed on their website currently. I like this project because of its topic is interesting. It is encouraging students to discuss what is "on their plates", and read what is on the plates of kids around the world. I think most people will agree that we love food! In this way, people will like to share their opinion across the different culture.

     Moreover, you can join in whatever you like in ePals through the searching engine. You can type in you preferred language, region, project and so forth.

As a future ESL teacher, I suggest ePals a effective technology tool that help students to know a more comprehensive world outside of their small own community. This is no doubt will be a good way to convey authentic culture rather that receive the second hand resources that already biased in some way. Plus, teachers can explore rich experiences of other wonderful teachers. Especially for new teachers, this is a wonderful place to learn how to manage a good class.

GoAnimate

GoAnimate is a tool that you are going to love. I have been admire those people who can make their own cartoons and regard them as genius. Well, GoAnimate will make anyone of us become one of them in a pretty easy way. Even the teachers will be motivated to show a work in front of the students, not speak of the students! Instead of asking a student to write a dialogue and hand in, we can ask students to record their won voice using GoAnimate. It possess more fun and practice students from more aspects: speaking, listening and collaborative with others. Feared of being same with others? No, no. no. It has many characters and environments there. Everyone can create their own roles in any context.

In this Mod, I made a short cartoon named “no zuo no die”. It is amazing convenient and time-effective. I guess it is more vividly than a standing teacher explaining a phrase there. Students will love this and get a impressive of what was taught. Practicing dialogue and listening and writing a story will never get boring anymore, I guess.  

Animoto

I chose to use Animoto to create a video to practice "Many Thanks"  to express my feelings about this course. It is going to the end of the semester now and I am really appreciate Dr. Burgos`s detailed guidance and other classmates` help.

 I think it is a powerful internet tool that can serve an important function in a modern ESL classroom.  I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to make something interesting and aesthetically pleasing.  There are a couple ways that short videos can be used for ESL purposes.
 It can be used to reinforce students` memorization of different knowledge points: reading, writing and listening. Teachers can either create videos or have the students create their own videos.  It will be cool to master a foreign tool and follow the English directions to complete a task. I am sure this tool will increase students` interest and motivation.

Digital Story Telling: A Cool Tool for Your Projects

Meeting Digital Story Telling is an amazing surprise in my academic career. Who does not want to present a fresh and stunning project in his/her class? Digital Story Telling will satisfy your multiple requests for an interesting and comprehensive presentation. According to 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, 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. Well, basically, Digital storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. From the scenario that provided by this article, we can see that David incorporated many sophisticated multimedia components- audio clips, narration of himself, as well as his family`s private photographs, which is very impressive to his classmates and let his classmates see another David.

 One of the earliest large-scale digital storytelling projects is sponsored by the BBC to capture and share stories from around the United Kingdom that reflect different local histories and cultures. Today the use of digital storytelling is being practiced in neighborhood community centers, schools, libraries and businesses, by novice technology users to those with advanced skills. The oral tradition of knowledge transfer and exchange has served as the basis for education and digital stories also build on this model by incorporating rich, dynamic media. “This dynamic creates an opportunity to reflect on life and find deep connections with the subject matter of a course or with an out -of-class experience, such as a trip abroad.”(7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling) It will be much more fun to be an editor who organized his own experience than just being a speaker in front of the classroom.

 From the website The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, you can see many amazing examples made by others. And I believe you will be glad to have a try after you watched those interesting works. Technology is no longer a tangential part of education and actually, I can`t wait to applying Digital Storytelling in my next presentation now. I believe it will not disappoint us.