In2Books ---- Epals

I have heard ePals before, but I have no idea about what is it. I never thought it was a global community where learners connect. What the most excited is this website is totally free! As the website introduced, the ePals Global Community™ is the world's largest network of K-12 classrooms, enabling students and teachers to safely connect and collaborate with classrooms in more than 200 countries and territories. Offered at no cost to classrooms, educators can access the community to find collaborative projects, join discussions in the community forums, and search thousands of classroom profiles to engage with others in authentic exchanges - all within in a safe, protected online environment. Isn’t it amazing? Now let’s exploring it!
First, watch a short presentation about EPals as communication Tool.

In this way, the ePals platform is a suite of logically, highly-interlaced communication and collaborative products and services that create focused interaction on specific issues with learners across the country or around the world: the ePalsLearningSpace; SchoolMail; the ePalsGlobalCommunity, and In2Books. The platform drives home founder Nina Zolt’s impassioned thesis that with proper design, social media and networking can, and will, play a profoundly transformative role in effective, authentic, and naturalistic globally based education. (cited from ePals: Effective Social Networking for Education )
As for me, I like to use In2Books in my future teaching. It brings the Common Core Standards to life with a safe motivating online curriculum that matches students with adult eMentors. Students get authentic experience purposefully reading books with eMentors and sharing ideas about important issues via online letters.

The reason I like In2Books are as follows.
1. Real learning, real dialogue, and real collaboration. In2Books, ePals' curriculum-based e-mentoring program for students in grades 3 through 5, matches students with adult pen pals, who read the same books, and exchange teacher-monitored, online letters about questions and issues raised by the text. The program provides standards-based professional development and professional learning communities and is facilitated by three resource-filled websites - one for students, another for pen pals, and a third for teachers.
2. The categories of the on-line books are fiction, biographies, social studies, traditional tales and science. The teacher chooses the topics, but children pick up their interested books, then teacher revises them. This can take ownership of children’s learning.
3. The book on-line is not like the paper book. It’s more colored and vivid. Children can see the outline and author’s information directly and can do the puzzles and interesting quits. It can arouse students interesting, but not just read.
4. In the Interbook writing center, penpals will find the great tools. It can provoke questions, key vocabulary and checklist and example letter. It'll help them to better comprehense the book and improve their writing skills.
5. The information is free and open to share between teachers and penpals. It's like both teacher and students are learned in this website.
In brief, it's a really open shared teahing platform with plenty resources, tools and information.

Animoto---A Potential Teaching Tool

What's Animoto? It's website for you to create stunning video slideshows.
How to use it? Turn your photos and music into stunning video slideshows. You provide the photos, you pick the song, and Animoto will add the magic.

 Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

I used to use similar tools for creating my electronics photo album. But this one is more easier and convenient. There are three advantages. First, the speed of Animoto is quick. Second, we can directly choose the music instead of uploading the one, and the website already offers enough choose. Third, it can be shared, download and posted.
When I first use it, I just think it saves me lots of  time and I get fun from making it. Meanwhile, I find it's a potential teaching tool. Nowadays, students learn English, especially in China, because they have to, but not for their on sake. What we must do is to change this embarrassed situation. How to stir the students' interesting become the primary task.
As for me, I'll let the students to use this tools in two ways in my future teaching.
On the one hand, we all know that nowadays students like to post their photos on the web to the public. I'll change the way they usually do, instead, let them to create Animoto with brief introduction and text in English. Meanwhile, leaving commands to other classmates. It's not a required work,but just let them to form a habit of noting everyday life in English.
On the other hand, I'll combined it with blog. Blog should not just be words and pictures. We should make more vivid and attractive. Everyone likes travel, no matter outside or on the Internet. Students should create their own travel Animoto and write diaries every week.
Don't wait, just give it a try — it's fast, free and shockingly easy.

How Microblogging --- Twitter Could be Used for Teaching?

First, we should know what is microblogging? From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, it says that microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links". It seems like everyone is using Twitter these days. You know, sharing little messages with each other on phones and computers. When I am in China, I use a microblogging named “Weibo” to write my feelings and record my journals. The function of it is the same of Twitter. However, I have no idea of using microblogging for teaching before.

                               

After I read some articles and videos from the books and the Internet which the teachers and students shared, there is a clear outline occurs in my brain about how to use microblogging for teaching. Let’s take Twitter for example.

First of all, what about this Twitter thing?This is an on-line PPT for you to know about the functions of Twitter.  And 28Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter will tell you there are 28 functions of Twitter you can use when you are teaching.

                                                      

After we know about how the Twitter can serve us, we’ll see how we use it in our language teaching. For teachers, Twitter can be a powerful tool for professional development via quick sharing with peers and colleagues whom you may or may not know face to face. Twitter can also be an effective way to communicate from your class to other classrooms around the globe. Moreover, it helped make all this connection and collaboration happen. It broke down the walls of our classroom and allowed students in classrooms across the country to interact and learn from each other.

                                                 

 As for me, I think to let teachers join in or create some educational Twitter chats is a good way of teaching language. Twitter chats are scheduled events or conversations that use a specific hashtag in an attempt to organize a conversation around a particular topic. To schedule your own educational Twitter chats calendar is a convenient and direct way to let your students understand your study schedule clearly.

 

Three Ways of Teaching Through Blogging

Blog now become a wide-used Internet tool for people daily communication and we can make good use of this potential tool to make our English teaching and learning lively and interesting.

As for me, there are three ways I could use blogs in my own teaching.

1.     Let the students open their own blog

I hope my students can learn the knowledge in an easiest and fun way. In this era, every student has his/her personality and they all have passion or aspiration to show their individuality. So blog is a very suitable way can reach their target. Let the students to open their own blogs, and combines it with the course may arouse their interesting.

We can get rid of e-mail and paper, but replace blogging. For example, students were always required to do a lot of paperwork or the reaction to a book or an article. If we let them post on the blog, the homework shows less boring and pressure. Not just teachers or TA to read your articles, but all of your classmates and the unknown audiences can read your thoughts and commends. It’s more like to share opinion with others than just hand in a task.

Let the students to open their own blogs has 3 positive reason:

a.     Blog is like a promoter. With many people can read your blog, especially your classmates, what your write is easy to compare with others. So under audience's attention, students will do the works seriously.

b.     Blog is like a chatting room. Students can leave message with each other and share individual standpoints.

c.      Blog is like a mirror. There’re many functions to dispose your blog, such as upload photo and pictures, cope a link or make an audio or video. All these show your personalities. 

(Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions and exchange opinions.)

(Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on variety of topics.)

2.     Build online filing cabinet

Online filing cabinet is a convenient tool for me to organize my students’ homework and also offers students an efficient and easy way to communicate with teacher and other students. There are 3 advantages of using online filing cabinet：

A.     Students just hand in their homework to the appointed online filing cabinet, and they never misplace the work.  Through this way, teacher saves much time on checking E-mail and download homework from each student or open every student’s link address.

B.     There are some great opportunities for student reflection through having all of their work organized in one place. After a period study, students can compare with the prior work and realize their progress. For it’s easy to search the former work, looking back teacher’s feedback and the opinion of other students also let the students see the growth they’ve accomplished.

C.     Work on a weblog can be shared with others who might be interested or invested in the students’ progress.

3.     Organized some activities

Teachers can make a vote or questionnaire through blog, and also can divided students into groups to make them to transfer some related information about courses. To organize some activities can make students work together and study in an active and harmonious phenomenon.

 

For more information, you can click here.