Two Web Tools in Language Teaching

Nowadays, using technologies in the language teaching process has become a trend among teachers and students. With the development of the wire-less technology, youngsters have spent more time on their cell phones every day. They could meet friends, find restaurants and even book film tickets in a few minutes. In school, the digital resources are popular in class for their convenience of transfer. More and more students also prefer to read PDF files on their tablet.

In my mind, compared with the other study fields, learning a language is more likely to be learning a skill, but not knowledge, so, using language with higher frequency will help students to handle it faster. The combination of language learning and internet technology will be more attractive than the traditional teaching way for the young students. They might also pay more time on it. I intend to be a Chinese or English language teacher in the future. According to the National Standards for Foreign Language Education, it emphasized the importance of language skills learning and  the importance of learning the culture background of the target language was also mentioned. But in the traditional teaching process, the time limitation of the class lessens the learners’ time of exposure to the target language.

From the Will Richard’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcast and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, in its first three chapters, the importance of using weblog are described in details. In recent years, there was a boom is the amount of Weibo’s user both by using cell phones and personal computers. Weibo, in fact, is a kind of weblog with a limitation of 140 Chinese characters (similar with Twitter). With more functions in smartphones, people can also share their pictures, voices, the music they like, even the video or the game they like. Almost every cell phone user has registered in Weibo. I noticed that in Weibo world, not only the people, but also some organizations or companies also opened accounts to share some professional knowledge for their followers. With these functions, I think that a language teacher can also build a connection with his or her students by using Weibo. Teachers can give notifications, homework and some educational resource by texting a Weibo. Students will get them instantly and give responses to teacher easily.

Another technology I would like to use is the Collaborative Space. As mentioned above, the Weibo helps build the connection between teacher and students, the Collaborative Space will provide a place for students to help each other. From a language learners’ perspective, the discussions with peers are always have great efficiencies in understanding. The combination of the use of these two internet tools might provide a new way to help the students in language learning.