Bring Podcasts to the Classroom

Using podcast in a language learning classroom has multiple folds of benefits to both teachers and learners. On that benefit list, the basic items would be being helpful for the learners to be exposed to authentic language and culture contexts, while on a higher level of benefits, the concept of using podcasts enables our learners to explore the world related to the target language in their own way and at their comfortable pace. For teachers, language teaching will be beyond textbook and classroom and can be stretched to more dimensions. Take some of the popular podcasts as an example.  I checked out National Public Radio podcasts to get started with the idea of using podcast in the classroom. I The featured Society and Culture StoryCorps was especially interesting to me because I believed that it would be a great resource for advanced learners to know more about American culture, society and values. Here are what I found and what can be used in a English learning classroom.

Let’s take the episode of “Gift from Your Parents” for example.  It is about 20 minutes’ long podcast, with shared life stories from people across the country. Those stories are very touching and inspiring, which will engage the students in thinking of what gifts they have gotten from their parents. The episode can be used for an example of story sharing in a flipped classroom and I can set up a new thread and invite everybody in the class to share their story after listening to the “Gift from Your Parents” podcast. I can also use this episode to prompt students’ reflecting upon their family values, family traditions and family impact on them. What will be more interesting is I can also use this episode in a lesson for target culture. Since all the stories shared in the podcast were real life story from all walks of life, it is a good opportunity for the students make connections with American culture and have sympathy to ordinary American people they have never met and known.

Putting all together, we can do various activities with even just one episode of podcasts. Let alone, students can explore much more with their own interests, learning goals and learning pace. So we are giving our students a hand tool for learning instead of a textbook, no matter how wonderful the textbook could be. 

Use Comic Strip Generator in the Classroom

Creating a comic strip gives the student great opportunity to work with creativity in a format of free writing. Except of thinking and writing, such activity also involves reading – student write their own comics and read others’ comics. Therefore, incorporate creating comic strips into classroom is a comprehensive practice for the students to plot and compose the stories and to understand other’s stories. With online tool like Storybird and Stripe Generator, where students can find hundreds and thousands of comic images to make their stories, students are able to access more resource and be more inspired to write interesting stories. They are also able to give feedback to their peers and get feedback from teachers and classmate. Since the products of a comic stripe will be more or less related to writing, how clear the students’ writings are should be taken into consideration. The followings are how I would assess their comic stories:

• The clarity of the writing;
• Grammar accuracy will be focused on the understandability;
•  Relevancy of the images to the texts and to the story;
•  How interesting your classmate rate for your story;

While creating my own comic strip in Storybird, I found myself not as creative as I expected myself to be, so I would put pressure on my students that their stories have to be funny, creative and impressive. They can start with a comic with clear story line, even if it is very simply. Nevertheless, I would not expect them to be grammatical error free in their comic stripes as long as there won’t be confusion for the readers caused by grammar errors. What the peer evaluation would also matter because students can get a sense of what a good story can be like and what a not so good story should be avoid through reading others’ stories. I am not saying that we can’t use comic stripes to improve students’ grammar accuracy, but I, personally, will use it to encourage and motivate students to think and to write, as well as enjoy and evaluate their peers’ stories.  

Animoto, Share the Story by Photos!

It is not new to use photos and images in the classroom. Earlier generations of teachers brought images into their classroom by projectors, and later ones used computers to show the related photos in a PowerPoint presentation. Now, with the advanced technologies, we can use photos we took or the students took to tell a story, to talk about a topic, or we simply give our students an assignment. With online tools, like Animoto, we can integrate digital photographs in our classrooms in so many ways.

I would encourage my students to share their stories in life with a video they make out of the pictures they have taken. It is motivating if the students have the opportunity to the happy and great part of their life to the teacher and the other students. Their interest, hobbies, someone they feel proud of, or even just their plants and gardens would always good themes to encourage them to be more engaged.

I would also use tools like Animoto to cultivate students’ organizational skills and presentational skills. For example, if the students are asked to express their opinions through photo show videos and text, they have to learn how to utilize the photos and how to organize them to be more expressive. They probably will also be thinking of their audience while making the videos. So using and organizing photos for the purpose of delivering thoughts, building up arguments, or simply just describing an event will provide the students to better organize their thinking, as well as utilizing verbal and nonverbal resources to speak to their audience.

The lesson I created in Animoto is a vocabulary lesson on animals in the sea. I used a few photos I took in a trip to Miami and Key West in 2013. It was surprising that the pictures go well with the template layout although I could have add more texts to make the whole video more engaging and interesting. In a real classroom use, it definitely needs to be more interactive. 

Story of Mulan

From Most of Students are Learning to All of students are Learning

What is a flipped classroom really flipping over? A simple answer to this question is the that teacher’s instruction and students’ homework. To be more specific, students take teacher’s instruction at home while doing their homework in class at home. A teacher from a traditional classroom might be asking: then, what does the teacher do in class? The answer is providing help and feedback for the students while assessing their learning. Altogether, in a flipped classroom, successful learning and teaching are achieved through interactions.

According to Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom, students in flipped classroom spend almost all their class time interacting with others, while in fact the interaction starts from home. The moment the students start to watch the video integrated to the lesson by their teacher, their interactions with the learning content, the topic and lesson materials are active, productive and even proactive. Once students gain the control over their learning, at their own pace, and to the depth of their interest, they are more motivated and engaging. Besides interacting with learning materials and available resources for learning, students also interact with their peers through collaboration both inside and outside of classroom. For example, students will bring in their questions and study problems from home to classes, and a group discussion or collaboration in class homework tasks will enable students peer teaching, to fill in the gap, re-evaluate their own learning, and collaborative learning. Learning in this process is natural, on-going, and effective.

Ultimately, students in a flipped classroom will put high value on their active interactions with the learning material, learning resources, peers, and teacher, which motivate them to be more active and engaged. That most of students are learning in a traditional classroom is moving toward all of the students are learning in a flipped classroom.

Such active interaction seems save teacher a lot of work while actually not. Flipped classroom definitely put more professional demands on teachers. As John Sowash put it, preparing a lesson needs more time than you think! Not only teachers need to find or create appropriate videos for the lessons, most importantly, they need to be able to direct the students to stay on track while motivate them to dig deep. They also need tailor students’ needs at any time.  For example, what lesson design for the specific content will engage the students the most while the students’ exploration on the topic will still be focused? What questions are to be used in the instructions will lead students to the appropriate thinking? Since students are the center of learning in a flipped classroom, teachers’ assessment on individual and group learning is on-going and dynamic. So as the feedback given to the students. Thus a teacher in the flipped classroom has to be ready to answer questions, give helpful individual feedbacks, open to adjustments, direct more capable students to more resources and encourage less capable students to keep trying. In a word, teachers in flipped classrooms have to be prepared for challenges but students’ growth worth every trying.

Two Important Things That I Will Keep in Mind When Use Twitter in the Future Classroom

Twitter as a microblogging tool has been widely recognized for its potentials to transform learning. Language learning through social network services like Twitter and Facebook is considered to be authentic, interactive and motivative. Twitter, obviously, connects the language learners worldwide to their learning resources, their ‘teachers outside the classroom’, throughout the world by tweets with hashtags and links. It provides a favorable environment to increase language learners’ authentic input and output, and to enable them actively negotiate meaning and participate in the community of learning. With great interest in the learning potentials of Twitter, I, as a L2 speaker and future educator, did some review on how teachers have integrate Twitter into their classroom and how students perceive their language learning through social network in Twitter. My goal of reading these research articles is to gain some thoughts in what the most important starting point to stand on when integrate social media like Twitter into classroom to make learning effective and efficient.

            

              The first thought is that when bring Twitter into lesson design or incorporate Twitter into classroom teaching, I would start with clear instructions to the students. In the article Twitter as a LearningCommunity in Higher Education, the initial phase of student working with Twitter showed by low number of tweets, lack of interaction, limited resources and comparatively great technical difficulties.

Connecting what was found in the study to my own experience in our LAI 590 course (where Dr. Lucia gives very specific and detailed instructions), clear instructions from the teacher, with explanations, images, and even expected problems students may encounter, are undoubtedly crucial for students’ successful engaging in the learning activities in the social network. Walking through some technical procedures or completing some modeling tasks hand in hand with students, especially at the initial phase of using tools like Twitter, will also benefit students’ successful and efficient later exploration of the tool and online resources.  Some people may argue that too specific or too much detailed instructions will be more than likely to compromise learners’ creativity. However, I believe that clear instructions would deliver solid learning objectives to the students, so the students would know the expected learning outcomes before they set out digging into the online resources or coming up with their own plans and strategies for learning. Rather than compromising students’ creativity, clear instructions would guide the students to focus their innovation on the learning goals, which ensures the learning process to be meaningful yet engaging to the students.

 

             Another thought I would always keep in mind is how to assess students actual learning from social network services. Despite the strong relationship between Twitter usage and students’ engagement, found in Twitter for teaching: Can social media be used to enhance the process of learning?, students’ actual learning through the tool is hard to track and thus stays mostly unknown. To some extent, the nature of social network learning probably would make it more difficult to assess students online learning outcomes. Without the knowledge of what the students have learned or have not yet accomplished in learning, instructional decisions we make in the future may not be tailored to the students’ needs, either the feedback we provide to them. However, assessing students actual learning does not have to be always question-and-answer, multiple choices or true-or-false statements. An activity designed with specific language learning objectives would be a good indication of the students’ utilization of the resource they can get their hands on and the application of their language skills. An in-class discussion with a tweet prompt would probably well inform students’ individual learning stage if I could keep a phrasal summary file for each student on his or her performance and participation during the discussion. A journal entry from students or a mind map they have during working with Twitter and other online resources would also speak a lot about their gains and pains. Utilizing multiple resources, as well as available online tools, to acquire what the students have or have not successfully accomplished, to assess how comfortable the students are when use the language they learn, and to what knowledge and skills that have gained from the social networking learning are or can be incorporated into classroom learning by the students themselves would make my teaching meaningful and effective and thus the students’ learning productive and fruitful.

A Peek into ESL

Following Tweets from Busy Teacher Twitter account i was an eye-opening experience for me. Although I have seen and encountered some Tweets before but Twitter have never came to me as a useful tool to learn and great resource to teach. Busy Teacher briefly describe itself as  "Free printable worksheet for busy English teachers", but I found much more than that. 

Since I worked as an English teacher in China before, my mindset for English teaching was more or less limited to EFL (English as Foreign Language) context and thus it has been somewhat difficult for me to think outside the box. teaching English in ESL context could be so different than teaching English in an EFL context that I could not imagine how to handle a class in which students don't have shared first language with each other and with me, especially a class with lower English proficiency. However, Busy Teacher give a language teacher as me an opportunity to peek into ESL context with various free and shared resources. There are a good number of worksheets posted or linked to for learners in different levels. Those worksheets, for example, gave me a taste of lesson planning and class activities in a ESL classroom. The differences between ESL teaching and EFL teaching very obvious to me were that ESL teachers have much more tricks in their teaching regarding learning activities. They also tend to use more pictures, images, and other non-verbal cues to enhance the communication between teacher and students, or, I would say the interaction between learners and the language itself. The diversity of the contents of the worksheets meets the need for viewers with different age groups, L1 backgrounds and teaching objectives. So it is not only limited to ESL teaching, but rather great resource for English teaching with different purposes or in different contexts. 

Above, I just took the worksheet resource as a specific example for how useful this Twitter account is to me, what I could learn from it and what I can use the the resource for in the future. In fact, worksheets are one of the many resources I could find from Busy Teacher. There are many learning activities and tips in English teaching constantly posted and shared. Most of them are very creative, and teachers can always make changes to the games and learning activities according to their classroom dynamics and students learning needs. 

Exploring Experience in ePals

One of the greatest things about massive social media network is along with the information explosion, the world actually is getting smaller in a lot ways. Take language learning as a great example, two decades ago, most foreign language learners were still learning a language primarily from a text book and over half of the world were still using tapes and cassettes as a resource of authentic foreign language. Today, the internet and social media network enable learners to access to any language anywhere and anytime. Learners can register a foreign language course online with affordable price and get connected to a native speaker of the language as long as have internet access. Language learning expanded from form to meaning, and eventually to the foreign cultures. ePals is one of such websites that connect teachers and learners all over the world, with countless resources for both.  
Among all the features it has, I was especially interested in the project of "Poster Power" under "Exploring Experience" section. This particular project aims to enable students to explore how powerful the different elements, such as text, color, and image, and the combination of different elements in posters can have in communicating and delivering message and ideas to the audiences. 10 sessions of discussion with different prompts and 1 final reflection session are designed for this experience exploration. Learners will first get to know each other, who may be from very different communities and cultural backgrounds. Then they will explore the techniques behind a message in a poster, exchange images of posters from their own culture, and eventually design their own posters. I found the activity is extremely interesting because it connects the students to their real life experience, enhances learners' understanding of the power of multi-modality in communication, and most importantly, provides learners with great opportunity to experience difference in terms of thinking and culture. As a language teacher, I found this project also help actual learning, taking English idioms as an example. I could use this project as great English idiom learning experience for my students when they could explore idioms used in the posters in the US!