Pod Cast, it's useful technology for English learning!

There are a diversity of technologies that contribute to ESL teachers and students for effective teaching and learning!

A Podcast is a digital medium that consists of an episodic series of audio, video, digital radio, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed on-line to a computer or mobile device. The word is a neologism and portmanteau derived from "broadcast" and "pod" from the success of the iPod, as audio podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.mp3

    

 I think that English language podcasts are one of excellent ways to learn English efficiently. First of all, students can listen to them anytime anywhere they want! This allows them to save time and money, which is beneficial. Also, with a little dedication, English language podcasts will help learners quickly improve especially their listening skills and proficiency. Podcasts often provide transcripts so learners are able to listen and read at the same time, or look at the transcript if they miss or fail catching some part of the listening.

For example, there is an episode about having a picnic. By listening to the conversation between a man and a woman from the podcast, students will be asked to find the vocabulary related to picnic objects such as picnic blanket, sandwiches, basket, dishes and so on. I will check their answers and provide supplementary explanation some vocabulary and expressions that they might encounter the first time. As a pair activity, they will draw a picture to imaging the circumstance. After the activity, they will be asked to display their pictures and see other groups’ pictures to choose the best one. For the homework to assess their understanding, I will ask them to write the journey related to a picnic they had or they want in the future with using the vocabulary they have learned. I believe that this lesson will help students develop 4 skills effectively and they definitely enjoy learning English with this pod cast!

※ This episode of pod cast links is : Having a picnic by ESL Pod

※ Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast

                  https://www.commoncraft.com/video/podcasting

Use Comic Strips! It's FUN!!

   It was first time to create comic strips on the internet! I strongly believe that this type of tool encourages students to learn a language as well as teachers to prepare for their lessons because it’s fun and even I, as a future teacher, really enjoyed it!!! A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. (from Wikipedia) 

      For my future class with this tool, I will make students create short conversations including today’s topic, vocabulary, and expressions that they learned. Take my strips for example. My topic is about a restaurant conversation between a server and a customer to teach how to order in a restaurant in America. To be specific, I will show the strip I created first and ask them to read it and think about the topic, who two speakers are in the conversation, and so on. And then I will introduce expressions and explain American culture related to restaurant. After my explanation, I will ask them to create a comic strip in pairs including what they learned to practice. In doing so, they will be able to talk about the context and specific conversation that they would like to and, finally, they will be asked to do role-play based on their strip. I will assess their understanding through their comic strip and role-play at first and then, in the next class, I will give some quiz about a restaurant conversation (filling in blanks) or American culture related to a restaurant (multiple choice). This will lead students not only to acquire a language but also to have a chance to encounter American culture. 

▶ Performance Indicator-ESL.I.5-8.5.1.1:

Students demonstrate an understanding of cultural and language patterns and norms in American English, including different regional and social varieties of English.

▶ Link of my comic strip : Soup or salad?

※ Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip

It's Easy! Making a digital story as a learning tool

How convenient! Recently, I have tried to make a photo story on the website. Actually, at first, I felt overwhelming before trying it. There are a lot of photo story tools and I chose ‘Animoto’ to create a story because, simply, I liked the name. 

According to Wikipedia, Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows. Moreover, this sophisticated tool can be used in education for countless projects and presentations. Students can use the tool to present a concept. A teacher could use the video not only as an introduction to a lesson but also as the tool to teach a concept or the tool itself to other educators. I think this tool is very elaborate but user-friendly. It takes minutes to create the video. I just simply add pictures, text, and the music. That’s all!

In my future class, I will definitely introduce students this nice tool. As I crated, I will assign some contexts to students and ask them to create a short clip related to the topic. For example, if a student is assigned a travel agency, the student might create a clip to introduce some places for vacation or to introduce a travel schedule targeting clients or tour members. In my video, I introduced my school with some features targeting new students. Finally, they will be asked to present their video with explaining details such as target audiences, reasons, purpose, and so on. Also they will submit an essay to write the information of one peer’s presentation clearly. Through these two outputs, I can assess how appropriate they produce and convey the information based on the assigned topic as well as their clear understanding about their peer’s presentation.  

▶ Performance indicator – ESL.E.2-4.1.1.7:

   Students present information clearly in a variety of oral and written forms for different    audiences and purposes related to all academic content areas.

▶ Link of my photo story : My School, My UB

※ Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animoto

When TED: Technology, Entertainment and Design meets Education!

  TED-Ed provides creating lessons worth sharing. Within TED-Ed’s growing library of lessons, we might encounter carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can then distribute TED-Ed lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student. TED-Ed lesson can be created by any website visitor, and involves adding questions, discussion topics and other supplementary materials to any educational video on YouTube. These lessons are used regularly in classrooms and homes to introduce new topics to learners in an exciting, curiosity-inspiring way.

  The lesson I created is to introduce the tips of healthy life. This includes 2 multiple choices and 1 discussion question.

The objectives are:
1. Student will be able to find main 7 tips to keep healthy life by watching the video several times.
2. Student will be able to grasp the details of each tip from the video.
3. Student will be able to give an opinion about the most important tip with reasons as a group activity.
4. Student will be able to summarize the content of video and present the group discussion.

The class goes like:
With this lesson, I will start the class by asking the question like what the healthy life looks like to warm up. Students already watched the video with answering questions before coming to the class, so I will have them talk about main tips and details which they found to review the video. And then I will go through the questions with answers and make students share their ideas of the discussion question in a group. Finally, they will be asked to summarize the content and make a chart or table to determine the ranking about the tips in order importance from their opinions. I think that, while engaging in this group activity, students will be able to listen, take turns speaking, and learn from others' ideas.

The assessment will be:
Also, to assess their learning, I will make each group have an oral presentation to summarize what they learned from the video and report the result they got through the discussion with the chart(or the table) that they created.


My lesson in TedEd: Tips for starting a healthy lifestyle


※ Resources : http://ed.ted.com/about

Flip Your Classroom!

Flipping the classroom is interesting. While I attended the TESOL convention 2015 in Toronto, a woman, who stayed in a same accommodation, told me about flipping the classroom and that she attended the presentations focused on this topic. Although I did not have a chance to listen to the presentation about flipping the classroom, these two articles reminded me of having short talk with her. The flipped classroom is a reversal of traditional teaching where students gain first exposure to new material outside of class, usually via reading or lecture videos, and then class time is used to do the harder work of assimilation that knowledge through strategies such as problem-solving, discussion or debates. In my understanding, this has a kind of 3 steps like working at home, working in class and working after class, and, in addition, this type of learning allows students to have better comprehension of the material, interact with instructor and peers more, and develop the critical thinking skill as a natural part of the learning process. From these two articles, I learned that the technology with various online tools is the decisive and indispensable factor to facilitate the flipped classroom. Moreover I think that this strategy is not only an extension of learning, but also a way of developing a high quality of lesson so teachers will not be able to overlook acquiring the new technology to educate students effectively. 

Flipped Learning Cycle

※ References: 

Flipping Your EL Classroom: A Primer by John Graney  

THREE REASONS TO FLIP YOUR CLASSROOM by Helaine Marshall

Serious Games as language learning

   According to Wikipedia, serious games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem. Although serious games can be entertaining, their main purpose is to train or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement. Serious game will sometimes deliberately sacrifice fun and entertainment in order to achieve a desired progress by the player. Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. Serious games are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education. The game that I chose is ‘The Garbage Dreams Game’ which goes inside the world of Egypt’s Zaballeen(“garbage people”). This game invites players to take on the role of the Zaballeen, who impressively recycle 80% of the trash they collect. At beginning it starts with one neighborhood, one factory, and one hungry goat. Game users have 8 months to build their recycling empire and get Cairo’s total recycling as high as they can. The users have to put any garbage they can recycle into the correct processor by clicking and dragging. Send the rest to the landfill within limited time.

   I played three times to make the cities in Egypt clean by sorting the recycling items! Also I have learned a lot such as we cannot put coffee paper cups in paper recycling. I think this game is very educational as well as authentic and I would definitely choose it as a learning tool out of the classroom. This is because the game would allow students not only to get new information but also be exposed to different people in the world and the many different ways that they live. Moreover, considering language learning, they may have many chances to be exposed to the vocabulary or phrases related to recycling while doing the game. One more interesting thing is that, although it is not focused on language learning, students might have a chance to study management because they have to manage money that they earn from recycling and time to conduct the game more successfully. 
 In my lesson, I will introduce today's topic(recycling) to students and hand out KWLS chart in pairs so that each pair can writes down what they already know, what they want to know before conducting the activity with the serious game. And then I will provide some news or articles related to the topic before students play the game. This will lead students to think about the topic but, I won't take time too much for this reading part because they might get bored. After talking about what they have read, I will group them in pairs to participate in the game. Finally, students will have time to write the rest of KWLS chart and two pairs will be a group to share their ideas. 
 To assess what they learned, I will use two task types which are problem solving and telling a story. After sharing their ideas with the chart, each group would be asked to have a presentation to summarize their ideas and this can be a way to assess their understanding by listening to their oral production. Or, teachers can ask students to write their thought about recycling and then collect their writing to assess.

※Game: The Garbage Dreams Game

※Performance Indicator - ESL.I.5-8.1.1.16:
Students apply learning strategies to acquire information and make texts comprehensible and meaningful.

A Game in ESL Class

     I would like to introduce a game as a tool of ESL class. Pollekes Blue Room Escape is a click type room escape game created by Ruud for EscapeGames24. In this game, I was locked in a blue room and tried to escape the blue room by finding and using items. There were three spaces such as a living room with a sink, a front entrance and a computer room and I had to solve puzzles to escape. While playing the game, the game provided some instructions or hints. I played twice because the first time, it took long time and actually, I could not complete the task. So, I checked the walkthroughs before doing it the second time. 

  If I use this game in the class, I will teach some vocabulary provided by the game like a balloon, a fishnet, and so on and definitely it will be a good way for a speaking group work(three or four members).  Through this game, students would be able to be exposed to various vocabulary and some instructions from the game. Before starting the game, I will set the context to warm up the activity and introduce some vocabulary they might not be familiar. Also, I will provide a sheet of walkthroughs with a couple of sentences for the beginning part and have students complete their own walkthroughs with their members. This will allow students to practice speaking and writing to solve the task. During the game, I will walk around and monitor their performance to check their understanding and how they are doing the task. To motivate their participation more spontaneously, I will provide some rewards to the winner who escapes the room the first or I will limit the time to escape the room. After they finish the game, I will give the walkthroughs to compare their own walkthroughs and collect their walkthroughs to assess their performance. Also I can use walkthroughs as an assessment like filling in the blanks to check their learning.

Performance Indicator - ESL.E.2-4.4.1.8:
Students negotiate and manage interactions to accomplish social and classroom tasks.

Try this game! -> Polleke's Blue Room