Folklorist Challenge: Discover From Near

The first project is 2014 Junior Folklorist Challenge. It is a project that encourages students to discover traditions in their own culture and share to the world. In order to complete this task kids can use the following four general steps. 

1. Research: a. identify a tradition; b. find a tradition bearer; c. develop your interview questions. 
2. Document: interview the tradition bearer and document the experience. 
3. Interpret: a. review all of your notes, audio, video and photos. Decide how you shape your story to share the tradition. b. create and polish your presentation as a video, a slide show or a podcast. 
4. Presentation: share on the ePals website. 

In my opinion, this project is good in many ways. 

First, it can help kids know the ways of discovering new things from every aspect of society. The first step, discover the tradition, gives lots of aspects for students to consider when they try to find a tradition to work. It can make kids more sensitive to culture features in society and lead them think more about that. 

Second, it can promote the speaking ability of students in their own language and extend their ability of language using. Because what kids do in school is mostly receptive and this project can let kids be the seeker of information. In this way, kids becomes initiator of their own knowledge and they try to find out better ways to get the information they need for their project. 

Third, the project is about history. It can not only help them understand the culture they're investigating, but also by comparison and contrast, they can understand the other cultures better. 

Fourth, students are not  alone in completing their projects. They can work with their parents, neighbors, communities, etc. They can also find useful information on the website and also get help from the teacher. Also, they can learn a lot from their peers worldwide. 

For classroom use of this project, I think it can be a 4-week project. Each week bears one step and students can communicate with their classmates during class and raise questions to their teachers. For ESL/EFL students, this may be an investigation to their own culture and prevention in English. To lower the difficulty, ESL/EFL students can be worked as groups of 2 or 3 people. It can help ESL/EFL students in many ways. The most important is to organize their language when communicating. Second, students have lots of topics to choose and these are open and easy to find in their own culture. Third, reviewing others' project can help enhance their reading and comprehensive ability. 

All in all, this online community can be good in sharing and learning and collaborating. It is helpful and fills the gaps of school and society.

Comic Strip Generators: Picture-to-Text Exchanges

GoAnimate is a great site. I created one dialogue in a living room situation but I cannot save it. It seems that I used some features that needs to be purchased. So I tried again it works finally. 

Here is my video Don't Worry About Your Lessons. I used text-to-voice to make it sound and saves me lots of trouble. 

Comic strip generators are ideal tool for students watch and do some quizzes or answer some questions after watching it. It is good for listening practice. Also, it is good for students to process language from the listening to understanding. It is also good idea to give students this assignment. By giving them dialogue texts, teacher can let students do one animation by themselves. This two-way practice can help students greatly and give them more chance to practice their language abilities. 

Comic strips are both good for practicing listening and writing skills. Also, it can help check students' understanding of certain texts and situations. 

Photo Stories: Share Cooking Experiences

Photo stories can be an experience sharing tool for ESL/EFL students. It is a vivid and interesting way to associate sociocultural experience with linguistic performance. By simply tell stories, students can make videos and can learn to describe pictures using their own words.

For me, I like cooking in my spare time. I make my video of How to Make Kung Pao Chicken. In order to make this video, I reviewed some cooking words and also some techniques to say procedures. 

Photo stories can be a wonderful tool for teaching ESL/EFL students. For example, teachers can give students assignments to make their own photo story and design the captions. Also, a set of pictures can be given to students to let them do a description writing task. 

Digital Storytelling: Tell Your Story with Aids and Amplifiers

According to 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, 'digital storytelling is the combination of narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component'. 

If you want make a digital story, first there should be a story. You need to write what you want to tell, think of topics or themes. The story should be your own experience (good or bad), your ways of mind changing, decision making, etc. Also, your story should have some pictures or clear ways of changing. Thirdly, adding some music or soundtracks can be good for your storytelling. These can help the story more vivid and complete. 

Digital storytelling can make students aware of resources that can help with their story telling. It is a way that can make students more involved even in their leisure time. 

A Serious Game: The Garbage Game

The Garbage Game is another garbage game that arranged in narrative and certain situation that can help students practice many language abilities in an interesting way.

I played the game twice and it was quite easy to play and direct in choice. At first time, I chose what I do regularly and the results are not that good. At second time, I chose the greener way to do with the garbage and it comes better. This game is not as  interesting as the Third World Farmer but it involves more reading and more accessible for those who don't like games. 

In terms of language learning objectives. This game can make students read more and read repeatedly. Also it can let students compare several choices and make their own choice for better result.

Assessment of the objectives may lie on the understanding of passages and making proper decisions upon given information. For example, reading a paragraph and then do multiple choices can be used to test the understanding ability of students in this case. 

Gamification: Finding a Way out...

Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motive or influence behavior. Game here is including 'a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation' according to the game designer Jane McGonigal. It can be used in classrooms to motivate students and get students more involved. 

According to the passage A Comparison of Computer Game and Language-Learning Task Design Using Flow Theory, gamification can create an interesting task-based task for students. It can make the activity either too rigid or too easy. 

I've played Phantasy Quest twice and it's really hard for me. I don't play games because I think the games are waste of time. After trying again and again, I felt frustrated. This game is not easy and players need to find tiny distinctions and make multiple connections with those objects  and how them works. I failed many times and I had to refer to the walkthrough. Finally, with the help of the walk through I finally got the girl back. 

For language skills that this game may achieve, I think first is the reading ability. For example, when I tried to get on the boat, I almost clicked every part of the picture and I found some words that I didn't know like 'mask' and I checked the dictionary to find out it's meaning. Thus, this game can enhance the ability of understanding rules and directions. Secondly, this game can also enhance writing and speaking ability. Teacher can let students write or talk about how they play the game. Also, teacher can teach ways of describing activities first and let students write or talk about their own walkthroughs. 

Regarding activities, students can be assigned in groups to solve this problem. These groups can including different roles and students can collaborates with each other on either play the game or write the walkthrough. Also, students can communicate with each other on the activities they made in the game. 

The teacher may provide some scaffolding like how to describe the directions, how to use proper verbs to describe activities and also some unfamiliar words. Also, the teacher can assign different roles within groups and make teamwork runs smoothly.

I would use both ways. By using walk through, higher proficiency level students may benefit a lot but when play with some lower proficiency level students I would first provide the text and then the images.

In terms of assessing the objectives, I would assign another similar game and let the students write or speak the procedures that they use to complete the game. 

Twitter for Professional Development and Future Teaching

Before this module, I never thought twitter can be a good tool for teaching and learning. Twitter for me is just for teenagers to follow stars like Justin Bieber. It's really a surprise for me that I can find so many resources and have conversations with so many my fellow teachers and sometimes some big shots in this field. 

As for professional development, twitter provides a platform for teachers to share their ideas, webpages, videos, articles, and almost everything we can see online. Also, teachers can gather together with some like-minded colleagues all around the world in a certain time and post topics and articles and other resources they like. This we could also find in google groups. 

As for future teaching, a teacher can use twitter as a virtual dashboard and keep all the students involved. Also, students can learn from each other and communicate with each other. Like in the article The Teacher's Guide to Twitter, ' Using Twitter is a two part process. The first part is as a consumer, where you follow people, read their tweets, and learn from them. A lot of people stop there, which is easy to understand since that is the easy part. But the real magic happens when you share, too.' Twitter is like other technology tools that can enhance communication, both input and output.  

However, in China, we don't have proper access to twitter.com, I need to find an alternative for this wonderful website and also hope the situation may change someday. 

In a word, the technologies are changing the education forms, we need to keep up with the trend and enhance the communicative nature of language education by using these technology tools.