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.