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!

ESL Teachers

For people who is working or planning to work with English as Second language learners, ESL Teachers is a great social networking community to join in. From ESL Teachers, anyone, who is interested, can access to various resources of teaching materials, classroom activities, games and small but useful tricks to make ESL classroom more interactive. Except for the resources available to every community member, this Google community also provide opportunities for its members to comment, discuss on the prompts shared in the group. Job posting can also be found within the group.  

I joined the group because the great resources, posts and ideas shared in the community will broaden my horizon and thus benefit a lot to my own professional development from other community members. In addition, the dialogue and communication in the community will be inspiring and thought-provoking in one way or another since everyone, no matter how smart he/she is, needs a different perspective. 

Learning Network from Printing Press to Digital World

Education did not change much before massive network of social media available to at least half of the world we live in. The ways of learning have been conceived as individual and internal. Traditionally, classrooms, serving as a center to share knowledge, were the primary learning resource for the students, and thus were believe to be where learning was occurring. Teachers were a mediator for the connection between knowledge and the learners, and learners were, in most of the cases, the end of the connection with teachers on the other end. Outside the classroom, learners were able to be connected to other forms of knowledge in some way through printing press, such as books, articles, newspaper, etc., but the connection and scope of network were so limited that their impact on learners’ learning outside the classroom and outside the individuals could not change the ways of learning and the sites of learning.  In a word, learners in the past were connected to the knowledge in the classrooms, by teachers and textbooks, but rather isolated to the outside world and outside resource.

On the contrary, learners in today’s digital world can be connected to the knowledge anywhere, with or without a teacher, through the network and in the network, even when they are isolated in their own rooms! Today’s learner is like a node in a massive and multidirectional network. Formal education, which was acquired primarily in a classroom, is no longer the majority of our learning resources because learning now is occurring in a numerous ways and at any places one can think of.  

As George Siemens pointed out in A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, “Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge.” Thus the network learners are involved in and the network they build in their learning become the sites of learning.  In this sense, knowledge itself has also changed in nature. In his short video clip, The Changing Nature of Knowledge, Siemens, from a Connectivism perspective, took knowledge as “the distribution that occurs across the entire  network”.

In another video, What is Connectivism, he presented in more details both the internal and external components of network learning: learning network is internal, neural and conceptual in nature, but learning network can be “external and social, which is a function of how we are related to and connected to other individuals and sources of information”. 

Taking this stance, as I mentioned earlier, a learner is like trader in a the global market.Every learner connected to the network learning is first a consumer of information and resources. The learning network is like a global market, where the consumer can find anything they need and they are interested once they are linked to it. Since every consumer would probably need more than just one product, so they are connected to different traders through the network in differer locations.

The connection could also be expanded in one way or another. For example, one customer wants to find a dress for a birthday party. Once she gets connected to different sellers of dresses and decides on which one to buy, she will probably need to by a necklace to match the dress.  The seller of the dress may link the customer to a few different accessory stores by sharing information or putting the accessory stores next to the dresses they sell. Also, every consumer in this trade network is also a producer, seller, and contributor. They are free to offer their products to other consumers in the network, and connect other customers to other different sellers and stores, which eventually would be part of the expansion of the global market network. 

In one word, in this progression of networks, learners are not the end of the connections with knowledge as in traditional classroom, but can be the starting point of the connection with the knowledge. To be more specific, in the digital world, learners are in multi-directional connections with others and the learning networks.  They are not only the information receivers, but also information contributors, and the multi-directional connections every learner has with other individual and ultimately the digital world make every individual a life-long learner.