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.