Podcasting in classroom

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97511513
This is a podcast about a group of people commonly known as vegans have such a dilemma on Thanksgiving Day, other known as Turkey's Day. The report is interesting that on a special holiday that you supposed to eat special food to celebrate but due to your eating habit or moral awareness that eating animals are not acceptable, you cannot enjoy the holiday feast with your family. If you do plan to eat turkey on Thanksgiving, then you cannot call yourself as a vegan. Or cited from this report, partial vegan is flexitarian.
While I was digging from cites to cites of podcasts, I was trying to find ones that with learning value and are learnable to students. In other words, my judgements of whether a podcast is suitable to my classroom, are based on its practicality, authenticity, and the language proficiency of its target listeners. The reason why I post about this podcast are that comparing to most other ESL podcasts,

1. it has a script but not word by word print version of the podcasting. It is rather, to some extent, a paraphrase of the original podcasting.
2. its topic is culture-related, not only historically, but also contemporarily.
3. it is in a form of news report, which is authentic using of English: normal speed of talking, daily vocabulary and grammar.
4. it offers a downloadable mp3 file, which you can save it for later study.

Well, it is not practical to use podcasting in my classroom where I still think the traditional teaching and learning procedure should take place, instead of e-learning, which I suppose, should happen at home, office, or on bus, train, etc., where you have leisure time and passion to learn besides school time. Whereas, I totally agree with the idea of web2.0 classroom. "In the world of learning, what this[ubiquitous computing] means is having learning available no matter what you are doing." (E-learning 2.0By Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada, retrieve from http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1). Where and when the school and time that can be spend in school is not available or vacant, one can benefit from sharing information online as a member of intelligent crowds.

Voicethread for global cooperation

Voicethread is a great place for non-native speakers who are not prepared to talk in English but want to get natural language using input from native speakers and actually use the language when they are ready as well training their thinking in second language or foreign language at the same time. One value for global cooperation is that students can open their eyes and minds to see and hear other societies-- poor or rich, more equal or less, liberate or conservative, and other people's opinion-- what one has been going through in life bad or good, you'll always have somebody else share the same idea or don't. With these information and knowledge in mind, students not only will practice their language skills, improve communicative competence, but also they will learn how to be empathy, feeling for others, and think critically and creatively, all of which are essential qualities of being responsible residence on the earth. By sharing ideas, post pictures about people they've met and things they've been doing--things and people they are familiar with and thus have thoughts about, students will feel more confident and comfortable talking about it in languages other than their first language. Also, they have choice to post their comments either by typing or by recording--another reason that students will feel less burden to speak in another language.

ePals and iEARN

WHAT is EPals?

It is just like a place on line where you can find pen-pals around the world. But Epals offers more than pen-pals. This collaborative online community offers students, parents, teachers, and schools an opportunity to be connected in a safe, creative way. After your profile has been approved (students under 18 are not allowed to submit personal profile except they are under parents' monitor--parents need to submit their profiles instead), you can join in any classroom that fit your interest or learning objectives; or you can exchange ideas through Epals email system with your epals--either you find them or they find you by Epals searching tools; or join in forum discussion on teaching, parenting, or book-reading(again, if you are a student you can only post on students talk). What I really like here in Epals is that it claims that it reserves the right to edit messages, since "many of (our) users are non-native English speakers, ePals forums function as a method of learning and improving English language skills. For this reason, (we) encourage (our) members to model English language use when participating in our forums." Spelling is always one of my concern about internet using in classroom. A lot internet English spellings are in use today, such as lol (lots of laugh), r(are), u(you), cuz(because), ect.. With ePals I can involve my students in worldwide interaction without worrying they may hand in an essay with spelling like "r u sure?" on. Oh, and above all, It's all free!

iEARN

I like the name of this site, iEARN (International Education and Resource Network). It is also a non-profit organization. It has a bit longer history than ePals. It was founded based on a Foundation, linked 12 schools in Moscow and 12 in New York State in 1988. The project yielded some profound results, which lead to a further development of iEARN program. It is celebrating its 2oth anniversary. The major difference between ePals and iEARN is iEARN has physically centers in each country that work for iEARN. As an advantage for this, iEARN offers exchanging programs for schools and students who participate in its program. Another difference is that, some academic researches and studies have been implemented based on iEARN programs since 1995, as well as evaluations on its projects and conferences, which back up iEARN's further improvement and development. All projects on iEARN are designed by teachers and students. iEARN requires a final "output" of each project to make sure that learning is actually taking place and as an indication of what those participants have been achieved. Moreover, iEARN also cares about teachers--it has an online professional development workshop and course for teachers who want to improve their ability and possibility of assisting their classes, schools and communities to join internet based collaborative learning projects. Basically, iEARN is more like a governmental institute whereas iPals is a free public cyber space for virtual collaboration.

Twitter and Pownce

Platforms like Twitter and Pownce enable people share their thoughts in a literally public manner--you post a thought or a description of whatever you're doing, you'll never know who's going to jump in this conversation and what responses people will pop up with, as long as you post "publicly". Not only online, but also in real life in that microblogging system would send posts and direct messages to cellphones if the owner has connected his/her phone with the system. However similar in basic ideas behind, they do have differences which let each one of them stand out and survive in market competition.

Differences between Twitter and Pownce

• In Twitter, I can follow anyone that I'm interested in, then his/her updates will appear on my main page. I can send message to that person and I have choice of sending it publicly as default or privately as a @message. In Pownce, I am not allowed to send message to a person only if I add him/her in my friend list and he/her accept the application.
• In Twitter, I can only post as much as 140 characters; but Pownce allows me to post as much as I want.
• Twitter only offers 5 choice of importing friends from other network excluded within your email account contacts. However, Pownce allows importing friends from 4 networks and 4 email accounts, which totally add up to 8 choices.
• Twitter allows users to change the default color of preset themes. Moreover, one can upload any pictures to set up as background. General users of Pownce only have 12 choice of background pictures and cannot change the color. It requires money, $20 a year to be a pro-member to enable one to adjust his/her theme.
• Twitter only support posts in words; however, one can upload audio and visual files at Pownce within 100 MB max, and 250MB for pro-members.
• For personal profile, Twitter only offers one MORE-Info URL you can add into; with Pownce, one can link his/her other profiles including social networks and instant messengers as well as websites.

microblogging

http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
While I was exploring possible educational usages of Twitter, I found another microblogging tool, edumodo, which was established with educational purpose at the very beginning. On this post, Ways to use Twitter in academia were suggested to readers: 1)Class chatter 2)Classroom Community 3)Get a sense of the world 4)Track a word 5)Track a conference 6)Instant feedback 7)Follow a professional 8)Follow a famous person 9)Grammar 10)Rule based writing 11)Maximizing the teachable moment 12)Public notepad 13)Writing assignments. No.9 and 10 are innovative to me. Daily language use is notoriously lack of grammar accuration. However, the writer treats the inconsistant usage or abuse of grammar as a chance for students to aware and learn the rule of language underlining conversation: without rules/structures, say punctuation, language can be vague and not understandable. Those hindering rules can also be productive if you can take advantage by manipulating rules that you want your students to follow. No.4 is also interesting to me. Simply by tracking a word, you can build your own corpus lively seeing how other people in this world are using the language.

Comment

Well, well well...
I have to say that I really had a hard time to decide that which post I should write comment on, since I really spent a lot of time on reading posts which links with each other and lead me to an infinite reading work. Of course, I did benefit a lot from them, not only my reading rate in English on screen, but also my laptop, in the sense that my IE had been added a lot add-ins/plug-ins on. After all, I have to make a choice. How about this one: http://marianthacher.blogspot.com/.
This is an blog for adult education and technology. The reason why I share this is that we learn a lot on how to educate children but not adult in this program, but they do have differences in every aspect which make it necessary for teachers to know specifically those differences and what should teachers respond in order to bring about a satisfactory learning outcome in both parts.
I learned about TIMAC from one post in this blog. Here is some words from the homepage of TIMAC "Two years ago, I didn't see myself as a "mentor" and certainly not as a "techie." I have to admit that I have seen myself grow personally and professionally from this TIMAC experience. I've never thought of myself as a leader or "mentor," but in the last couple of years I've watched people follow my lead. I've had many teachers come to me with questions; some work-related, some not.
"I've accepted that I may not know all of the answers all of the time for all of the people, but sometimes I know just enough to help someone. I've become more confident in my use and knowledge of educational technology. I'm realistic about what I can do, and what my limitations are. I'm very happy with my growth and success and it encourages me to continue learning, teaching, and mentoring."
These two paragraphs enlightened me that I feel better about the teaching job. I'd like to share it with you.
Moreover, I dug a little further for more information and found the SCANS competences are really interesting and essential for adult learners as well as newly graduates from school await to get satisfactory job. For anyone who may interests in this, please refer to this site: http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS/

Image of My Analogy

Finally, I'm done with this image. Hope this will work.

Cube: Learner

Line: Learning

Point: Knowledge

The intra-person complexity is represented by a cube that has eight facets, which is only a numeric symbol of multidimensional human characteristic. The inter-person knowledge building is showed as lines between cubes. In this model, the learner in the center builds up knowledge relations with every other learners, which indicates that s/he benefits the most from this certain complexity community.

URL

http://school20.ning.com/

While I was reading Siemens' Article, a question kept on knocking my head: if learning, in the sense of connectivism, can be fully self-motivated, self-organized, and self-assessed with proper usage of websites and other computer based assistance, then, what is the role of teacher in this process of learning? Teacher's teaching approaches and personalities, as well as students' school time all play roles in the forming of learners' characteristics and acquisition of knowledge and skills which in some way indicate the percentage of future success in their life. However, what I see is a trend where teacher and school, traditionally speaking, seem trivial to a person's future success. I read a parent who home-educated his children successfully responded to a post named "web 2.0 is the future of education" (http://www.techlearning.com/blog/2008/03/web_20_is_the_future_of_educat_1.php)saying "By that time, the interactive technology will be even more advanced than it is now. Perhaps everybody with an eye for learning efficiency will be studying remotely by cell phone to their own individual requirements and the school classroom will have become the new 'alternative education'. Who knows?"I hate the implication that the profession of teacher is starting to fade away before I enter into this career.

Fortunately, I found answers and suggestions to my questions on this networking group. The group interprets itself as "School 2.0 goes beyond the practical discussion of applying the read/write and collaborative Web technologies in the classroom. It is, instead, a larger discussions of how education, learning, and our physical school spaces can (or should) change because of the changing nature of our social and economic lives brought on by these technologies." Only if you find your identity, esteem, and interest in this area, can you do better in further discovery and dedicate yourself to the career you love.

Analogy

It's hard for me to find an analogy that fit with my understanding of George Siemens's Connectivism Theory. However, I do find a way to concrete the abstract relation between learning, knowledge, and learner.

Let's say knowledge is a dot. Dots dispersively exist in one space. The route from one dot to another, which is a straight line, forms the process of learning. Lines intersect and cross each other, with which locate on the same surface compose the knowledge system of a learner. In other words, a flat surface is a learner defined by his/her unique web of lines of knowledge(relationship). Each learner is one surface. Two unparalleled surface consist of a space. Several spaces construct our 3 dimensional universe.

This is only a thought. A simplified version of human learning complexity. As Siemens states:"Learning...is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.", my analogy mainly focus on the connection of knowledge and try to map a theory. It is not flawless, but has some points.

My ways of using Edu Blogs in EFL classroom

Teaching:

I always hope that I can teach adults working during weekdays and taking my class at night or at weekends. They have basic knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar; and learning skills. They also have a well-established cognitive schema about the politics, economics, and other cultural aspects in this world. They learn English so as to seek a better accomplish in their career and life. All in all, they may have more motivation and autonomy, but less energy and time to study and finish my assignment. Their different jobs also add other diversity elements in this classroom. These diversities are vital to the success of teaching and learning that they should not be overlooked but hard for teacher to take into consider every of them.

However, with the help of Internet, I can easily manage the class anywhere and anytime. So do those students. Instead of going to a certain place in a certain time, working students may enjoy the ease and privacy learning at home or at work. Compare to the real classroom, students have way more choice of resources. Though posting blogs requires ones' writing skills, students can also benefit from reading others' blogs and listening and watching real-life videos and funny flash. As to speaking, I also found several sites about exchange language around the world. Students can also talk to each other or as a whole class on line through skype.

There are more sources and information I want to present in my class blog in the future. As I said in my first post, this is my first time that relate blog with learning and teaching. And, of course, I like it! and I think, other students also enjoy the adventure in the cyber space. Those link rolls in each site are like chains connect one and the other. If you have time and your eyes won't complain, you will spend a whole day in front of your laptop study, without feeling bored.

Wooooooooooooo.................

Though this is definitely not my first time blogging, this is indeed my first time starting a blog related with learning, which has nothing to do with interest and autonomy, at least in my opinion. I just want to get homework done, really fast. However, since I started to work on this week's homework at 4pm this afternoon, I've already spent almost 6 hours on this! And what's amazing is that I hardly realize it's already 10pm until my eyes feel dry and my head feels dizzy. I'm totally into this!

I haven't decided how I can use all these sources in my own teaching and learning yet, since there are too much information. Usually, when I am going to a grocery store I always have a hard time to decide which brand and flavor to buy. But, one role of teacher in his/her class is decision-maker, isn't it? I hate to make a choice when I can't. So, I'm still deciding.....

Coming soon*^-^*