We need this for learning Real Culture

   I have learned about integrating content and language in our daily instruction, which means that content teachers and language teachers can work collaboratively. I like this teaching practice and I found podcasts is a perfect tool for this. Let’s talk back to the integration of language and content teaching: for instance, the art teacher’s course objective today is introducing British culture, while the language teacher can choose a similar topic at the same time. In this way, students would have some interest for language class and basic knowledge for art class. Podcasts is easy to target certain topics and incorporate more than one type of material: audio, video and images. I browsed a few links and attracted by BBC World News for Children. First, I like teaching children English in future and second, it is so detailed and comprehensive. Here is one image of its category.

As we can see from the image, it incorporates parts about news, sport, weather, autos, capitals, cultures and so on, which basically can satisfy what students interest and their subjects. And even its subcategories are also very organized, the following image is under culture category:

  I chose one episode Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Northern Soul to supplement the former example, which can nicely fit into a British culture class.  

  Even for teachers who do not collaborate with content teachers, it is still a impressive podcasts choice. From this Podcasts, student can learn the real culture. Language cannot be separated from culture and if so, it would be meaningless. Surely, there are more wonderful resources out there. Since we have podcasts, we do not need to worry about missing the critical part.

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.   

Third World Farmer: a game that improve students' ability and personality

       Third World Game is a serious game and it has a clearly story line about a family survive through many hardship. According to  A Comparison of Computer Game and Language-Learning Task Design Using Flow Theory, computer-mediated activities seem to offer clear advantages over conventional classroom lessons in providing on-task feedback. This is also one big advantage of this game: whenever you finish a turn, you will get a feedback immediately. I played 36 turns and I finally won.

        The success is really not that easy: they may encounter natural disaster, civil war and economic crisis and so on. Therefore, the family’s income is very unstable. Plus, I need to cure the family member’s health problem and life problem. It is just so hard to let the family live avoid suffering and live a happy life. However, it is not boring anyway. It not only has plantings like corn, wheat and nuts and so on. It also can make money through raising chicken, pigs or cattle. You can also use the farm appliance to explore the new farm. In a word, you never get bored of doing the same stuff. Through this procedure, students can learn large numbers of vocabulary, especially farm words like corn, wheat, pigs, cattle, chicken and peanuts… also the words like civil war, economic crisis or pig disease and so on. The students totally will enjoy the game outside the classroom without teachers’ guidance. Besides the acquiring the large vocabulary, the students can also learn about how hard to support a family in third world and how lucky they are and how wars can be harmful to a normal family. In a word, this game will enhance students’ description ability in an ESL classroom as well as broaden their vocabulary.I will assess the students by letting them write a reflection about their experience while using the vocabulary they acquired during the game.
       This game would be very useful in ESL classroom and  I would like to implement this game in my future teaching career.

Phantasy Quest: the Desire to Keep You Going on

Gamification is a brand new definition to me. As in what is gamification, It refers to the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. Adding game components to a course can result in several real benefits. Simulations can help students sharpen ability or work out a novel solution. But perhaps the most commonly cited benefit of gamification is that it fosters student engagement. Where it functions well, gamification facilitates the formation of learning communities, giving new opportunities online or during course discussions to socialize or work as teams. In this sense, gamification has the potential to help build connections among members of the academic community, drawing in shy students, supporting collaboration, and engendering interest in course content that students might not have otherwise explored.( 7 Things You Should Know About Gamification)

In this mod, I played the Phantasy Quest which is really engaging. I played the escape games several times before since I like the way it appealing people to keep going on. It activates the people’s curiosity and I enjoyed this game. Actually, I tried seven times and failed. I solved this by the walkthrough at last anyway. I think I can set the keywords (the objects) as the necessary vocabulary in this game. In this way, the students will pay attention to the vocabulary they need to learn. What’s more, students can learn how to describe a story or give the direction to others. Let’s take vocabulary object for example; the subject in this game needs to pick the coconut, rope, and lantern and so on. Then these necessary words will become the words the learners need to acquire. When the learners need these objects to complete the game, naturally they will pay attention to these words. The teachers should give the clues at the beginning since this is really a time-consuming game. The vocabulary need to be told ahead of the game. I will use the images in this game because it will surely impress the students’ memorization. After then finish the game, I would ask them to retell how they get through this game. In this way, I can tell if the students master the objective vocabulary.