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