Useful Podcast in ESL Classroom

The broadcast that I chose are  ESLPodcast 12 - Dining at a Restaurant I and ESLPodcast 13 - Dining at a Restaurant II from ESL Podcast Blog.

Those two broadcast are all about how to dining at a restaurant in the United States. Both episodes involve dining vocabularies, basic procedure of dining at restaurants, the rules of how to make order, etc.  

Language is a communicative tool that mostly used in people’s daily life. Dining at a restaurant is the most happened situation that L2 learners will face. In the United States, Some students may think that typical American foods are only hamburgers, hot dogs and French fries due to stereotypes, but in fact the American cuisine is much more international than that. Both episodes that I chose illustrate an Italian restaurant in a very nice part of Beverly Hills. By learning both episodes, It will be useful for L2 learners to get familiar with how to ordering in the USA, and what are the rules and talks in restaurants. For example, when people go out to eat in the United States, people will often need to wait to be seated. Sometimes a host or a hostess will put people’s name on a list if the restaurant is busy. Then after waiting some time, people’s name will be called, and people will be brought to a table.

There are also some cultural rules about how to ordering towards western culture such as the menu order: drinks, appetizers, main courses, and desserts. Teaching students about basic rules at restaurant in the US will help international student to know more about dining culture at a restaurant in the United States.

Besides getting familiar with the knowledge of western dining culture, the vocabularies from both episodes are useful for L2 learners to use in their real dining situation such as ‘treat’, ‘hostess’, ‘spot’, ‘check’, ‘split’,etc. All the vocabularies are explained clearly in the broadcast by illustrating sample sentences. Therefore, L2 learners will be taught about how to use those new vocabularies into practice.

The World Is Flat.

Epals is fun to explore. I love its idea of enabling student, parents and educators to communicate and collaborate in academic and cultural projects as well as establish international friendships from all around the world. The world is flat, global awareness is essential to students in terms of their development for building connections with other people and the whole world.  Epals can be the tool for students, parents, and teachers to increase their global awareness by interacting and communicating.

The section of search explorer is awesome. As the picture shown above, I typed teach oral English for 6 to 7 years old children and search for the information from China, tons of results came out that matches for the criteria.

From the result, ESL teachers and learners in China posted their information on Epals with their specific goals such as to seek language partners, to practice oral English and look for pen-pals,etc. I find this is good become I could use this into my classroom, let students post what they need in terms of second language learning. If they want to find a pen-pal and post their requires and information on Epals, they may get response from other peers who come from a totally different country with different cultural background, therefore they can collaborate and interact with each other in L2, enhance their L2 ability by making new friends and dismissing the distance barrier. Meanwhile, since Epals is a safe, educational online platform, I do not need to worry much about safe issue for my students’ usage.

great online tools!

Animoto is such a great online tool to produce digital story and video! It is simple to use, and easy to create digital story. When I was creating my video, it blew my mind! I was amazed how professional the video looks and I think it is a great idea to encourage students to sign up and give them chances to create their own digital stories. Students are always fond of digital stuff, I believe students will be engaged and involved in learning by using Animoto. 

The digital story that I made is Play in the snow! Since winter is here, snow is coming; setting up a class discussion about how students are going to play in the snow would be a good idea for ESL students. My goal is to encourage them to speak out and to share their idea about what do they do in the snow and how would they have fun in the snow.

I think Animoto can be used as a perfect tool to have conversation and class discussion. By uploading pictures and videos, students can actually make their own movies and clips. The topics can be about anything, they can make bizarre stories as they want, and share their thoughts with classmates.

For ESL beginners, writing is always difficult and hard to have active effect in classroom. Animoto also can be used in writing activity; vivid video attracts students’ attention and therefore lead them to write in second language. By creating and sharing their own digital story, students are also encouraged to comment on the videos in writing form.  

Bookr is FUN!!

Here is my Digital Story!
This story book is about Halloween Pumpkin Carving Party and the book is for Oral English class for 3 to 5 grades elementary students.

The object of my class is to encourage and enable students to talk about their own experience by creating a friendly environment.

The reason I choose this topic because it relates to students’ real life. Halloween is a big event in United States, and carving pumpkin always makes Halloween joyful and special. By introducing my story and the steps of how to carve my own pumpkin, students will be attracted by the topic since this relates to their own experience, and therefore leads further talk about their personal Halloween pumpkin carving experience.

After introducing the whole story, students are encouraged to speak out their personal experience in terms of pumpkin carving and Halloween; they can also draw pictures about what they used to carve or what they would like to carve for their pumpkins. They are allowed to share their pictures with others.

Tell a story, become a life-long learner

                                                            

                                      By dreamponderCreate

One of my teaching goals in terms of second language is that not only to teach the language to students, but also to facilitate them becoming life-long learners. Digital storytelling can be a wonderful teaching tool in the classroom, and it also can be used in students’ daily life that forest them to explore more outside the classroom. The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling illustrates that “ the topics that are used in Digital Storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.”  Therefore, telling and writing a digital story ignites a love of learning for others to share and enjoy. The process of learning a second or foreign language should not be dry.I believe that in ESL classroom, every student is a storyteller.  Students should be encouraged to have creative voice and their creative voice should be heard by others. Digital storytelling empowers students by letting their voices be heard and encourages them to learn and think creatively by enhancing technology-rich project learning. From my experience, if the teacher asks students which they would rather do between writing a traditional paper and creating a digital story that presents their research and learning, students will choose digital story telling without hesitation.

When I was reading sources about Digital Storytelling online, I had a brainstorm. Various Digital Storytelling projects that I can use for my future classroom are popped up. For example, Digital Storytelling of Autobiography can connect students with each other by telling a personal narrative. Students can share stories about themselves, and let classmates know their own personal background, hobbies, special moments in personal life, etc. 

Wouldn't it be cool by sharing such stories towards helping students become more proficient in English?  Telling Stories: Using Multimedia with ESL Students has some suggestions specific to digital storytelling projects in ESL classrooms that I think is useful for future ESL teachers.

 

a share of link from Twitter

I would love to share a speech How to learn? From Mistakes from Diana Laufenberg. I discovered this speech from an educator that I am following on Twitter: Buthaina Aiothman. She asked a question about ESL teaching that will the multiple-choice question tests bad for bilingual/ESL learners or not. By discussing this issue, she shared this video link from TED. In the video, Diana considers that there is no one right answer because mistakes and failure is instructional during learning process. The speech from Diana inspires me a lot in terms of how to value students’ potential ability in learning. Here, Twitter is doing a huge favor for me to observe more from other educators and to share with others :)

 

Let the students Tweet!

To be honest, I have never thought about to use Twitter in classroom before. One reason not to using Twitter is that I used to have this stereotype that Twitter is for people with too much time on their hands. However, after reading What About That Twitter Thing? and Building community on Twitter , I found out that I have dismissed a very important thing in terms of language learning: building learning community for students by using different social network software.

Step by step, I joined the Twitter and followed some educators for couple days, and I am amazed how Twitter can break down the wall of classroom. It offers such a good platform to connect and interact with people all around the world. Once I followed couple ESL teachers on Twitter, the system automatically recommended me more relative ESL teachers to follow; therefore more connections were built up! After couple days observing, I changed my stereotype and began to enjoy using Twitter and started to think how I should relate this social network to L2 classroom. Building community on Twitter offers some awesome advices on this issue such as encouraging students to build their own professional learning network and therefore building a learning community. Twitter is like a face to face conversation. 140 maximum words with others involve a mixture of small talk, relationship building, getting help and sharing. The easiest way to motivate students to join Twitter is to show them the facts that join Twitter is similar to join the conversation.

By providing chances for connections, communications and collaboration, Twitter is a place for unbounded conversation. I think it would be a good idea to show students that once you follow someone, you can pass others’ useful tweets and discover more in search, and also can discover people and their contribution in many ways other than following them. Meanwhile, Twitter can also enhance blogging. Students leave comments on blogs all the time, but it does not mean that they are able to interact with each other and have conversation by using blog all the time. If teacher relates Twitter to Blog, the conversation can happens on Twitter, and it allows easy sharing of links and quick ideas about other people’s blog.

Classroom 2.0

Since we all live in exponential times, technology is changing all the time, teachers need to try new things about technology, and keep on growing and learning in terms of teaching methodology. I am amazed by Classroom 2.0 which is a Ning community about how it integrates social media and learning in education. The website contains all kinds of different social media tools and services, including photos, RSS, videos, blogs, notes, slideshows, chat, groups, calendars, etc.

This social network is all about sharing and collaborating. The professional development tutorial is brought to everyone to share ideas, to reflect, to discuss, and to explore. People comprehends information differently, The Ning enables members to customize their pages and hence become personal learning network. I think this is great because through Classroom 2.0, teacher can connect with his or her colleagues. Every teacher gathers and comprehends information differently, Classroom 2.0 offers such a platform to provide and share all the resources and information.

I found the video Classroom 2.0 social network for teachers at Classroom 2.0 is very useful for teachers to join the whole social networking and to learn how to create his or her own social community with his or her students by using all kinds of social network software.  

Scaffolding a Language Learning Community

In my opinion, teacher is like a scaffolder. An ESL literacy class that I’m taking this semester explores Lev Vygotsky’s theory of socialcultural theory. In his theory, Vygotsky defined scaffolding instruction as the “role of teachers and others in supporting the learner’s development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level” (Raymond, 2000, p. 176). The article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens reminds me of this scaffolding instruction.

In the article, Siemens states that “Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.” From my understanding, by using social software in language classroom, teacher scaffolds a language learning community. The language learning process is shared between the teacher and students. The role of teacher is to build the development of a democratic advanced learning community in order to get every student involved in the social network.

The video The Network is the Learning also helps me to be more aware of how social software can be used in the classroom in order to build a learning community in social network. Just like what the video illustrates, in daily life, people use technology in order to find better ways to share with individual because they feel the knowledge changes extremely equipment. Through social means, people are able to share and connect with each other. The usages of Facebook, MySpace, blogger and twitter are the examples that people have ability to talk and to have conversation. “The ability to share information by using social software leads people to have conversation, this is important because our learning today is one a forming network with each other.” Most of people enjoy communication since we are social beings. When we have dialogue and communication, we grow our own understatement and our own idea, when we express our ideas, our knowledge increases. Being a scaffolder, teacher needs to know students’ abilities, and provide learners support what he or she needs in order to motivate learners to know that he or she is the center of learning process. Therefore, language teacher can be the scaffolder to help students to build this communicative learning community together, by using different social software, to provide numerous opportunities for them to talk whatever they want, to share their different ideas, and to learn from each other from dialogue and communication.

Raymond, E. (2000). Cognitive Characteristics.  Learners with Mild Disabilities (pp. 169-201). Needham Heights, MA:  Allyn & Bacon, A Pearson Education Company. 

Should teachers and students be “friends” on social networking sites?

or

The video Social Media Revolution that I watched last week illustrates how fast social networking sites grow. I believe that social networking sites can be the learning tool for L2 learners, and it can also create platforms that relate students and the teacher together to learn, to communicate and to share. For example, by encouraging L2 learners to join native speakers through groups on Facebook, talking with native language speaker on Skype or following native speakers on Twitter. However, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are the places where both teachers and students share the same forums to connect and keep in touch with their friends and families. Some students will send friend requests to the teacher in order to learn, to communicate and to keep in touch with the teacher. The thing is, networks will sassily blur the students-teacher relationship since all the personal information may be available on profiles. Is it appropriate to be “friend” with students on a social network? The blog The Digital Down Low from Matt Montagne discussed same topic: "Should teachers and students be 'friends' on social networking sites?”

In the Blog, the author illustrates his idea that it is necessary to set up social network policy if one is going to share his/her information with students. For example, the author has set up his own Facebook policy to state that he only accepts a friend request from past/present students and parents under the condition that everyone must use respectful language and keep their profile “clean”. By doing so, he gave positive feedback towards the topic, “ the experience of connecting with students in a variety of ways and spaces allows to talk intelligently to other adults about what students are doing with these powerful communication and collaboration platforms.”

When I was teaching at a language institution, my students used to ask me for my personal blog website, I refused to give to them because the blog is personal and private, and I think there needs to be a certain distance between teachers and students to maintain respect. But in terms of encouraging students to use social network to be a learning tool, I think it offers a new way for students to communicate with their teachers and could serve an important purpose such as ask questions online or get any assignments they missed. However, I do think that teacher should set up a separate Facebook account to interact with the students to separate from his/her private personal page. And setting up a Facebook policy like what Matt Montagne did is a great idea to clear up all the information for students.

I did some researches online about this topic and found out that Missouri State just passed Missouri Senate Bill 54 on August 28^th that any social networking is prohibited between teachers and students. I wonder how my classmates and the teacher think about this.

Here is another link that I found helpful for me to understand this issue.

Positively Media

Social Media Revolution

The video Social Media Revolution 2 impressed  me a  lot. It is amazing how fast the world of social media grows and how social media has been able to take over  in such a short time. The video states a lot of facts the social media revolution in our times, and how the internet and its wide accessibility change the society and interlink  people over the whole world in such a little time.  I still remember 5 years ago when I signed up for Facebook and RENREN(Chinese version of Facebook), the population of users just started to grow, and now it’s more than what I could ever imagined.  I love all the statistics that is shown in the video, it puts the whole thing into perspective and how much social media has become a part of people’s daily lives.

As an ESL teacher, I think the social media should be the learning tool for L2 learners. When I was learning English on my freshman year at collage, English version Facebook and YouTube were the websites that I browsed every day,  which is the place I interact with English native speakers. I think L2 learners will be intrigued by the opportunity to learn something of L2 and its culture via social medias.

Social media could be the platforms that facilitate L2 students to learn L2 effectively. Here are some thoughts that I would like to try in my future teaching:

Join native speakers through groups on Facebook:

Learning French

Finding native speakers on Twitter:

Teaching & Learning Spanish

Talking with native speakers on Skype:

Tech teacher Silvia Tolisano, speaking from Buenos Aires via Skype video calling, describes how her students have been going around the world via Skype.

Technology as a Mediation

“CMC provides a third platform where L2 students can transcend the spatial and temporal confines of the classroom via the internet.”(10) 

It reminds me of sociocultural theory which is brought up by Vygotsky. In Vygotsky’s theory, human being use mediation to  establish a relationship between ourselves and the world. For ESL teacher, technology is the tool as mediation  in second language learning, it helps students to build connection between students and the second language.  For example,  the chapter gives an example about how E-mail offers students the highest level of interactivity.   Warschauer (1997:475) points out that with reference to computer-mediated-communication, long distance exchanges with native speakers’ provides an excellent example of students through interaction with more capable peers.  Compare with classroom-based second language learning, CMC  gives rise to a different kind of discursive practice than normally occurs between people in face-to –face interaction.   For example, L2 learners  could chat with native speakers online, and through the interaction, L2 learners have opportunity  to learn something of new such second language culture.  For me, CMC definitely will help ESL teachers to build close relationship between students and L2 during  their second language learning process, but the question is, by using internet, the way people “talk” to each other electronically is different from the way they converse with each other in face-to-face encounters , can the  technology  such as the use of CMC  have an impact on the way face-to-face interaction?  And this is the question that I am still looking for the answer by using CMC in my classroom.

Warschauer, M. (997), Computer-mediated collaborative learning: theory and practice. The Modern Language Journal, 81, 470-481.

Going in the Internet is like going out on Halloween!

Dear all,

Thanks to the Internet, we can have more knowledge than ever before and can connect with people all around the world and able to access almost limitless information on demand! Indeed, the Internet offers some amazing abilities, (such as our class-blog J), BUT you have to realize sometimes internet can also cause harm towards you.

Ask yourself some questions and see if you have minds to protect yourself online:

• Would you give an online stranger your password to your Facebook or Twitter?
• Would you send your personal picture to someone you barely know in life?

You should aware that going in the Internet is like going out on Halloween because everyone’s face is hidden from the screen!

Therefore, seeping safe when you’re online!

1.       Be careful with your password. Just keep it secret!!

2.       Stranger Danger: Don’t give any information about yourself to any online strangers. Include: Your name

               Your telephone number

               Your birthday

               Your height and weight

               Your parent’s name

3.       Never send your picture or personal information to someone you only know online.

4.       Be mindful of logging out every time when you use computer.

5.       Do not open email from strangers, and never respond to emails with inappropriate materials.

6.       Do not arrange a face to face meeting with someone you met online.

Reference:

Know the Risks - Privacy Invasions

Three Ways to Teach :)

Using a blog makes learning more independent of time and place, peers have this chance to participate, share their own thoughts and teacher can teach anytime and anywhere. besides, it facilitates reflections and evaluations.

To teach second langauge to speakers of other languages, I think teacher should understand each student's cultural background. Students who come from different cultural backgrounds have different perspectives on learning style. In terms of using blog to integrate teaching and learning, teacher should know how to develop himself/herself as a facilitator with open mind by creating learning environment. It is necessary to facilitate students to understand each student's blog post by establishing truse, comfortable and safe environment in order to get everyone involved.

The article Supprting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education  really helps me to grasp an idea on how to set up activities and assignments towards diverse cultural learners.

Three Ways that I Would Like to Use:

1. Autobiographical writing:

Students use blog as a dairy to reflect their daily life. Students need as many opportunities as possible to interact in the target language instead of seating in in the traditional classroom.

Through autobiographical writing, culturally diverse learners show their diverse experience, culture, and personal life to their learning communities, “teachers and teacher educators must respect all learners and themselves as individuals with culturally defined identities.”( Supprting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education) Students need to understand and learn about others’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds and experiences. For example, Have second language learners read autobiographies of their age and then write their own stories, and compare and contrast their stories with the ones they read.

2. Peer Reviews and Comments: Blog as a tool to reflect students’ thoughts.

Students write their thoughts and responds to the teacher and the comments from each other. This is the opportunity for collective and collaborative learning since students have the opportunity to read their classmates’ blog and those of others. In this case, students are required to read and respond to classmates’’ posts. Ideally, students need to review the comments left by other classmates and leave their own responses.

3.Blogging Buddy:

When teacher does not have enough time to comment extensively on each student’s post, “blogging buddy”, which could be assigned by the teacher or be chosen from student as students’ editing partner, could take the responsibility to review and comment other’s post. When every student has their own blogging buddy, students will be motivated to post and to give their partner written feedback.

Each second language learner brings with his/her rich and varied language and cultural experiences. As NCTE mentions, “all too often, these experiences remain unrecognized or undervalued as dominant mainstream discourses suppress students’ cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1990)”, therefore teacher should actively acknowledge and incorporate funds of knowledge by understanding that second language learners normally have the fear of using non-native language to compose their ideas, and the needs to be encouraged to write in that language as often as possible.