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.  

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.  

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.