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.