Teaching with Microblogs

    

    In this week, I read two articles: A must have guide on using twitter in yourclassroom and 6 best twitter tips every teacher should know about. Both of these two articles are about the using of the microblogs in language teaching class.

    In the former article, from five different perspectives: communication, organization, resources, writing skills and twitter exercises, the author showed us a lot of practical tips in microblogs using. For myself, I have been a microblog user for almost 3 years and I saw it changed our world with its special function: instant communication. No matter where you are, if your cellphone have signal, you will have chances to share the scene you see, the idea you think, even the video or the song you like. It certainly could be used in the language class, just as we know, the language learning process is based on the foundation of communication. The twitter could shorten the distance between the student and teacher. Just as mentioned in this article, ambient office hours, silencing blurters and attendance reminders and etc. these methods are all for the convenience of communication between teacher and students. And it also could be used as the bridge between student and students, teacher and students’ parents. It is a trend that everyone will be involved in social network in the future, we must accept it and use it as our tools.

    In another article, 6 best twitter tips every teacher should know about, the author showed us some advices of using twitter by a visual way. Based on the data collect from the twitter users, the author made a brief summary of the users’ using habit. Just as I mentioned above, in the future, the using of microblogs will become a common behavior in our life. The understanding of the using habit will also help the language teachers to use it effectively. I remembered that in China, the analysis of using microblogs become one of the most important issue for some famous enterprises and companies now. The deeper analysis of microblogs will help them know more about their customers’ preference. 

    All in all, as a language teacher, I will concentrate on the trend of the development of micoblogs and try to use it effectively in my class.

Social Networking Group: EFL Classroom 2.0

    EFL Classroom 2.0, this networking group is really useful for a EFL teacher. Over 27000 members are in this group and they are all EFL teachers from different places. The members could share the interesting or useful articles, videos in this group. And the searching function also makes the process of finding information become effective. For a language teacher, the teaching resource is a very important factor in teaching process. The creativeness is limited for one teacher, so we can hear the other's voice to find inspiration here.

Being a Smart Fish

    Today after read Siemens’s article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for theDigital Age, I find that nowadays, the learners are just like fish in river. The most important issue for them is not knowing how to eat small fish, but knowing where to find small fish to eat.

    In fact, many years before, when I was still in high school, I have thought about similar things. I was really interested in the language learning and reading literatures from different countries at that time and I planned to study in these fields in the future. But one thing that made me confused is why I have to deal with many difficulties in physics and chemistry every day. After passing the college entrance exam, I would not meet these things anymore in my whole life. Someone told me that the things in these fields might help me solve some problems in daily life. I disagreed because the things we learnt were not practical and one thing important is that I would rather learn how to find ways of solving problems effectively. With the development of the technology, we almost can find all the answers on Google.

    In Siemens’s article, several sentences impressed me, “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe”. Nowadays, with a laptop and Wi-Fi signal, we know everything in the world. It is much more important to know how to use those searching tools effectively than know the knowledge itself. Learners are like fish in a river. The necessary competence for living is not knowing how to eat and digest small fish, but where and how to find their food. Like the sentence in the video The Changing Nature ofKnowledge by George Siemens, “The network becomes learning.” This short sentence concludes the trend both in the Cyberworld and the teaching field. If we want to be a good teacher, we need to get start in the network using from now.

Teaching language through watching films

    It is not surprised for me to see that two of my friends have also created their posts which are written based on the same post with me. The name of the post on which I commented is on the blog named Film English, its name is Paperman. We have watched it together and all of us were moved by its story. Today, I have found that the post writer who is called Kieran created a lesson plan with using two short films and one of them is the Paperman.

    The teaching skills I have learnt from this post are unique and useful. In fact, several of my language teachers have also used the way of watching films in their class. But the following activities were always the discussion of the content or writing a summary of the story. The teachers would not pause during the process of playing. From this writer’s lesson plan, I have drawn my inspiration that using instructions to guide the students through the discussion to understanding of communication skills. Depend on different purposes of teaching, teachers could adjust their strategies. Like in this lesson plan, asking students to predict the story according to the characters’ body language and facial expression may be a good way to practice the students’ communication skills. Anyway, combining the elements of film watching and language teaching might be a good way for learners.

The Changing World

 

Several years before, a Chinese internet expert has made a prediction that the internet world will be much powerful in the future with three steps. The first step is related to the web portals, internet users can watch the things which was produced by the editor of the web portals, just like Yahoo in the world. And then, it comes to the second step which is belonged to the web search tools, like Google and Bing. People can find what they want to see in the result of searching.Social network websites will play an important role in the third period of time. We can see the things we want to see just by clicking into these websites. 

This prediction has became a truth today, the video posted on Youtube by Erik Qualman (Social Media Revolution 2011) showed us the stunned influence of the Social Network. It is 2013 now, the data in the video are still growing up everyday. Weibo and Wechat, two different tools of Social Network in China, both have over 300,000,000 users now. One thing interesting is that no one knows these two tools before 2009. The high speed of the growth of the amount of the users means an urgent need for users. The fact that we can communicate with all of our friends just by clicking several buttons is really cool!

The traditional idea of education was also challenged by this change, according to the video Educational Change Challenge (posted by Darren Cannell), we can find that joining into the social network and combining the traditional teaching method with the new elements has become challenges to educators.

Education is not as simple as teaching skills to others, it is also related to the society and culture. It is also relied on the communication between teachers and students. The world is changing, the educators also should change themselves in this trend.