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. 

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

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.

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 knowledge anywhere anytime with or without absence of 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.