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.