Be a teacher found of learning

     

       The two blogs I read were A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom and BLOGS & MICROBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM. The formal one reads like a instruction of microblogs which is twitter's potential education usage. The later one is written from the author's personal experience to show how to use microblogs in teaching.

      I like the categories of effects of twitter that A Must Have Guide on Using Twitter in Your Classroom shows to readers. Even though I did not agree every piece of advantage of twitter in this article, I still learned a lot from it. This article classifies twitter's functions into five categories. They are separately communication, organization, resources, writing skills, and twitter exercises. My favorite function which will definitely benefit my future teaching career is resources. As I mentioned in my previous blogs, in the information era, teachers are obligated to deliver useful and helpful learning resources or tools to their students, which is better being delivered in relatively fashionable and up-to-date ways. At the same time of sharing, teachers themselves are playing the role of sponges to absorb new information all the time. For example, as mentioned in the article, teachers can ask for recommended books, teaching tools, and ideals of lessons, crowdsourcing resources for the classroom. 

      I believe even the very experienced teacher also needs to contact with  new educational information all the time. Twitter is definitely a great online public forum for teachers to learn, to follow up-to-date information. When teachers expect that students have a great attitude of learning, we should have it first.  After that, students will be affected by this attitude not from teachers' repeatedly advice but from teachers' behavior. And it is true that more and more public departments and experts are running their own twitter or microblogs. Through twitter, teachers can grab newest information from the most official statements. Or teachers can consult with experts some difficult questions even we do not have chances to meet them personally.

      The first article did not convince me of twitter's function in the field of writing skills. I remembered that I debated the topic--Can Weibo Improve Chinese Writing Level? (Weibo is like Chinese style Twitter) when I was a sophomore. I supported CAN but I lost the debate. However, in the second article BLOGS & MICROBLOGS IN THE CLASSROOM, I found the real answer. In this article, Maggie suggested that when improve writing skills, writers could use microblogs to character figure's development, gather evidence for and idea, debate an idea, and give feedback to other writers. But what I can think about year ago was that how to use 140 characters to write a fabulous passage. Now I know that I employed a wrong perspective. The key is not writing itself but information. Writing is an academic activity needs large amount of information. And twitter is great place to obtain information effectively. Once I am enlightened the way to use twitter in improving writing skills, I can teach myself with more confidence.

A Good Tool -- Classroom 2.0

      I went Through all the websites and I think Classroom 2.0 is the most useful one for me.
      In this website, I have the chance to access to different teachers blogs and know events happening in the field of L2 teaching. I can also join groups I interested in and discuss with other teachers in the forum.

      On the homepage of Classroom 2.0, I can see the latest statement in the forum. Some teachers ask some questions. If I know the answer, I can post it. If I do not know, I think go through others' answers is a kind of learning. There are also some good recommendations such as useful books, related websites and interesting apps. It is definitely a good resource for teachers to build up their own teaching exchequers. It is a information era and technology tools alter the traditional teaching modality. Teachers, especially teacher like me will teach another language in non-native-speaking countries, can not just rely on prescriptive textbooks. When I have digital tools which are very helpful for me, I can recommend them to my students to facilitate their English learning in multiple aspects. I also hope I can use some advanced tools to open their horizons to let them know that English can be learned in this way.

      Go back to Classroom 2.0, I also appreciate the latest activities apart. I find a lot of activities I am interested in. Maybe taking apart in these activities is a good opportunity for me know friends and experience something new.
      

A learner is like an iCloud

      A learner is an iCloud. But what is iCloud? ICloud is firstly used, as far as I know, in apple products such as iphone, ipad, ipod and macbook. As a courtesy for users to share any information such as photos, apps, digital notepad, music within all their apple products without the inconvenience of inputting everything to separate products again and again, iCloud has the function to store all the information in the user's personal digital cloud. If users open the cloud, they will find that a picture taken by their iphones shows up in their macbook and ipad. And it is the same route for other information I mentioned above.

      According to George Siemens wrote in A Learning Theory of the Digital Age: Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months.Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Faced to such a huge amount of updated information, learners definitely will learn to select and classify information and try to store what they consider is  useful or interesting. Learners' brain are more likely colorful clouds floating around upon the information era. These clouds can have different shapes and different size. What in common is that they stand for the outcome of individual's occupied information. Or to be more accurate, iCloud is not only a form of outcome but also the process of cognizing and constructing information.

      But iCould is not a static object. The amazing place of iCloud is that it construct a networld for your abiotic digital products. In terms of iCloud, they can share information just like people do. And in such an information era, sharing information is of great significant just like The Network is Learning. However, only focusing on sharing will lead to chaos. The difference between apple's iCloud and learns' iCloud is that human beings have the ability of self-organization. Like George Siemens quoted in A Learning Theory of the Digital Age: self-organization is the spontaneous formation of well organized structures, patterns, or behaviors, from random initial conditions. He also mentioned that self-organization on a personal level is a micro-process of the larger self-organizing knowledge constructs created within corporate or institutional environments. Thus, learners' iCould is intelligent.

Learn from comparison

    I read the post Paperman from blog Film-English.

   












    I watched the short film several times before and I enjoyed it very much.  I do not why. But I always like the cartoon much more than real show. Maybe it dues to the magical element in cartoon show which remains me of  my childhood fantasy dreams. I also like the way that the blogger employs paperpman in his teaching plan, especially the narration of predictive story.

    Based on such an interesting story, students will have a lot imaginary stories to fill in. The smart spot of the lesson plan is that the teachers gives students guidance via ask students to discuss several questions such as How does the young man feel? What does he feel about his job? What do you think he is going to do now? How is he going to try to communicate with the young woman? These questions will clarify the mood of this short film. Students can make up new stories with the mood.

    When students finish the short film, the teacher asks students to write down information using specific categories such as locations, characters, music, story, actions, emotions and messages. At this time, the guidance is not the mood of the story but the indispensable features in a narrative story. After watching the romantic film, students will quite know locations, characters, music, story, actions, emotions and messages of the story. It is easy for them to translate what they saw into written words. Then they can compare their original make-up stories to final editions. The differences between casual writing and methodical writing will appeal automatically. Students can learn from their own writings to make improvement.

Teach us to think and create

A Vision of K-12 Students Today and Networked Student.

    Two videos above use very vivid pictures to show us the need of K-12 students today and what teachers can teach to fulfill students' needs.

    I thought that A Vision of K-12 Students Today may represent the need of K-12 Students today about how they need teachers to use technology tools to teach them. However, after watching the videos, I have been lost in thought. At the beginning of this video, different young students use numeral information to prove how they need technology in their daily life. For instance, "I game 3.5 hours a week","5.5 hours homework on computer", "I listened to 5 hours of Harry Potter on my ipod this week". That is the difference place of 21 century students. Every aspect of our life is more likely rely on technology, even the test modality transfers from PBT (Paper Based Test) to IBT (Internet Based Test). I thought this data mentioned by those students must lead to a topic of how to teach with technology tools. However, for the next turn, students start to represent a kind of unexpected appeals. For example, "We expect to be able to create", "We expect to share information with others", "76% of my teachers have never used blog", "63% of teachers have never asked me to create something new with technology". Then students start to posting questions about the teaching methodology such as "What kind of education would you want me to have?" At last, students ask teachers to teach them to think, to create, to analyze, to evaluate, to apply, to tell story digitally. They hope teachers can engage them with technology. But students' goal is far beyond using technology tools. What they want is to be creative learners via the use of digital tools. It impressed me a lot. It also reminds me again the learning outcome of this course. It is not just showing some interesting international tools. Through the study of this course, we should realize that we are talents who can jump out of the traditional teaching box and solve problems in new ways.

    The second video Networked Student gives brief introduction of several networked tools which are very useful for study. Such as what we have already learned--blog. The most interesting tool I learned from this video is the use of iTunes. I used to listen to music or watch movies through iTunes. But I do not know that I can download university courses by iTunes for free. Many of these open courses are conducted by top universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford. These courses cover multiple disciplines from sociology to scientific knowledge. Even you do not go to these universities, you can have a chance to listen to world best professors' courses. This is one of most amazing thing the internet can fulfill -- sharing. Maybe sharing information is the first step to teach students how to think and create.