Diigo VS. Pinterest

This is my ever first review on the modern online tools! I am nervous about what I'm going to say but still excited about the opportunity to say. Feel really evolved ;P! Here we go!

I would rate 5/5 stars to Diigo.

The first thing I like about is that Diigo works really well for doing online research. The bookmark function can be brought to a fuller use by its annotation feature. Thus, instead of spending tons of hours digging into the websites you saved into your bookmark, while using Diigo, you can start to narrow down your search to tags and then to the annotation you made in your earlier visit of the webpages. Once users get familiar with the annotation function in Diigo, their reading will be more focused and later search will be much easier and efficient. In this sense, Diigo is very helpful tool for professional and academic use. Also, Diigo seems have no problem access any websites. To be more concise, you can use Diigo anytime as long as you can open the webpage with Chrome once you add it to Chrome extension. The last comment I give Diigo is that it is very straightforwards and easy to use. All the features Diigo has make it a great bookmark tool but not limited to just bookmark. Personally, I will use it as a library where I keep my resources,  select information and build up my reading.

on the other hand, Pinterest is less professional and academic feel but rather casual.

The good things about Pinterest include enormous eye-catching and self-explanatory images, a wide range of topics/boards, and a lot of innovative ideas shared. Use Pinterest, you can always search for good tips, creative ways of doing and dealing with things. But this could also lead to a drawback. Compared to Diigo, Pinterest is not so straight forward and could be too much and distractive. I found that getting to the source articles or webpage could take more than one clicks or steps, which could be confusing at times. Never the less, it is still a great tool to searching for ideas, information and resource, even less on an academic level.

For our students, I would recommend both. Because I would never know which one would work better for them. It is also possible that what I see easy and useful may not be agreed by the students. Besides, it's better provide them more than one options and they can choose which one to use for their different tastes and different needs.

Teach in a Media Driven Generation

I still remember, the first cellphone I had when I was a first year undergraduate student. It was a time that every dorm in the university had a land phone, and we would always run to the phone when it rang and guess who would that call be for. Our cellphone had very limited free text, talk and data then and we would be much more anxious the second half of a month than the first. However, by the time I graduated from university, smart phones were out and popular. With bigger screen, a variety of apps easily downloaded and installed, and an affordable price, they were far beyond a portable phone but a necessity not only for reaching people but more importantly accessing to information and resource. Data service from every phone company jumped from 2G to 4G before half of the world could even tell what ‘G’ stands for and what the differences between the two. Now we are living in a technology and media driven generation, and we are wondering how we can keep up.

The past decade also saw great changes happen in classroom. Blackboard is no longer literally black but sometime really white, smart, board. Textbook is no longer the only ‘truth’, because Quora can give you “the best answer to any question”. Students may not even have to get a tutor for help but instead, learn from the apps, like Coursera or Dualingual, on their individual learning paces and styles whenever there is wifi or internet connection. As a point made in a Documentary of Future Learning, it would take years to change the old knowledge to the newest discovery in the textbooks but a few click will do so in the internet.  As a teacher, facing with the social media  what do we teach and how do we teach? 

I don't think there will be simple and quick answers to the question asked above. But our educational goals. are more  The Future of Learning, Networked Society - Ericsson video pointed a good direction for us: we want to help our students to become life long learners. One of important element of being a life long learner is self-motived. This bring me back to the example about how kids are activity making multiple tries to find solutions and to try the mistakes when they play video games. I found this is so inspiring for a teacher because this may help us to think deeply about the question asked above if we reflect upon it.  

Blog as a Social Interaction

Is that too assertive to say that in actual every one is a blogger? Maybe not so much if we believe blogging is sharing and communicating. We share pictures, thoughts and events with our readers/friends in all the social media networks, and we comment on their sharing and their posts, which forms communication between us and others. This broader sense of blogging leads me to a belief that blogs are the sites for people to negotiate their social identities through establishing their writer’s voice. If this belief is acceptable in a language learning classroom, how we, language teachers and educators, make full use of the sites and benefit our students’ learning is worth exploring.

First, I would encourage my students to start their own blogs which would have distinctive features representing their own personality, interest or pursuit. This may sound like cliché because everyone’s blogs are unique and distinctive, but, in fact, if the bloggers have to use a second language to present themselves and communicate with each other, things could be very different. With motivation for successful presentation of themselves, L2 bloggers would be more actively involved in their L2 learning and using. For example, writing will be one of the most crucial skills the learners need in their blog sharing and commenting. Thus to make their blogs interesting to the readers, the learners will thrive to apply what they have learned or to find out a better/proper way to make themselves clear and understandable. Actual learning happens when the learners use the language and when they use the resource they have to acquire new knowledge and apply the knowledge to actual use.

To encourage the students to present their personalities, their perspectives and their interest, to friends or new audiences, we also need to help the students to develop other strategies when the students don’t have enough language proficiency. For example, they can add photos, pictures or video clips as demonstrations of their ideas. They can be as creative as they can be to achieve the communication goals in their blogs. In this sense, the students will deploy both verbal and non-verbal resources to interact with the readers of their blogs, which is absolutely not unusual in the actual language use. Thus, helping our learners to develop and use such strategies to convey ideas in L2 is also building up the learners’ communication skills in a real social context(Standard– ESL.I.5-8.4).