5475blog

Final project

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:48:00 +0000

My final project is a Ning network at http://09springpracticum.ning.com/.
It will be an online site for reflection and exchange for student teachers of Chinese in the greater Twin Cities for the Spring 2009 semester.
The members of the network will be me and all the student teachers, and possibly guest visitors such as our program director. They will be invited to the network and asked to set up their member profile pages.
I set up a number of text boxes on the left of the front page which includes the university link to student teaching information and relevant resources related to Chinese language teaching. The list can be expanded as the semester goes on, new resources appear, or all members of the network contribute.
In the middle of the front page the discussion forum takes up the most important space. It will be the place where the student teachers post their reflective journals and give feedback to each other’s posts. My own feedback and comments will also appear under the posts.
In the Event section, the members and I will be posting all events related to Chinese language teaching, such as teacher’s conferences, professional workshops, events for students, Chinese arts and cultural performances, etc.
In the Video section, members can post youtube or other online videos related to Chinese language teaching or learning. More importantly, it will be the site for all student teachers to post their recording of one period of class, which is required of all student teachers. Students will post the videos together with their own reflection on their teaching as shown in the video in the video comment section. Then all students teachers will take time to view each other’s videos and provide comments.
In place of class discussion on the videos, we will use the Chat function and hold a synchronous discussion on the videos. Student teachers can communicate real time and ask each other questions and exchange ideas.
There is also a Photo section where teachers can post the class photos or other related pictures they see fit.
I’m excited about the project and look forward to putting it into use if possible next semester.

Feekback

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:18:00 +0000

In the blog I do with the student teachers this semester, the teachers give peer feedback by posting comments to each other’s post. My own feedback is also posted in the comment section, usually the last one and often responding also to the previous comments. Sometimes the discussion and suggestions are really good. I found the layout however not very conducive to exchanges because the comments are kind of hidden behind the posts and not easily visible, and one has to click under each post to see the respective comments.

So I’m thinking that the forum layout such as the one in the Ning is a better option, because they’re on the same page as the posts and therefore look much more important than a tiny link under the posts.

Another feature of the Ning is that one can easily post videos to share with the class. This would be really useful for the student teachers because they are required to video record their own classes and share with other teachers. With Ning this can be done online: the student teachers can share their videos and give peer feedback. Compared with one time classroom sharing this allows students to watch more closely at their own pace and in more than one sitting, and give comments later and after reflection.

It is also possible to use the chat function for the feedback: the group can come together after watching all the videos and discuss the videos one by one. This way each teacher can receive a fair amount of comments and will also have the chance to clarify some thoughts and practices and ask for comments and suggestions on a certain problem or issue.

A rubric for the self reflection on the videos:

Part One: Remembering
Part Two: Video Reaction
Part Three: Deeper Reflecion
Part Four: Reaction
8-10
Students’ behaviors and reactions and your reactions are described in rich detail before consulting the video.
You offer many insights about events. You describe and explain all disparities between the plan, reality, and memory.
You reflect carefully on the big picture of this lesson to understand your classroom behavior in terms of your beliefs and assumptions.
You explain well your insights from a variety of peer comments. You think of some strong ideas about how to use the comments.
5-7
Students’ behaviors and reactions and your reactions are described in some detail before consulting the video.
You offer a few insights about events. You describe and explain a few of the disparities between the plan, reality, and memory.
You reflect a little on the big picture of this lesson to understand your classroom behavior in terms of your beliefs and assumptions.
You explain a few of your insights from a few peer comments. You think of some okay ideas about how to use the comments.
0-4
Students’ behaviors and reactions and your reactions are described in little detail or not at all, or you consult the video for this portion.
You do not offer any insights about events. You do not describe or explain the disparities between the plan, reality, and memory.
You do not reflect on the big picture of this lesson to understand your classroom behavior in terms of your beliefs and assumptions.
You do not explain your insights from any peer comments. You do not think of ideas about how to use the comments.

video & slide presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:50:00 +0000

I enjoyed making the video by cutting the clips and changing the effects and transitions. I didn't do enough in changing the camera angles. Maybe more changes could make the video more interesting to watch. Also I wondered how to add captions for the words spoken but I didn't find out how to do it, otherwise it would be helpful for a foreign language video to have captions.

I made a video of an American learner speaking Chinese on a topic (introducing a cook book), so I guess this could be a useful tool for foreign language classes, and students can be asked to do a similar task of making a short video of themselves speaking the target language, on a given topic. They can also sing songs in the target language, or act out a short play or movie. The videos can be placed on google videos and students can view and provide comments to each other's videos. This can also serve as a language assessment, or part of students' language portfolio.

The slide show I made:

Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:19:00 +0000

on youtube:

Skype interview and gcast

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0000

The skype interview was enjoyable although we ran out of time and didn't go deeper into the discussion. Also I forgot to uncheck the video when saving the recording. But I can see this is such an interesting and engaging activity.
http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embedqt/20845

I really like Gcast becasue it looks so simple to use and the potential for language learning is great. A teacher can ask the students to use their cell phones to make daily recording of newly learned vocabulary, sentences, or texts. Students can also do pairwork to make conversations on related topics. Many language learning or teaching podcasts online use both the native language and the target langauge; similarly, the students can also use their native language to introduce the foreign language and culture, but always trying to bring in as much target language as possible. At the end of the semester every student's podcast will be a portfolio of daily spoken practices. The teacher can also make use of peer review and ask the students to listen to each other's podcasts in small groups. The fact that the teacher doesn't have to worry much about the technology or the online file storage is really helpful.

I guess the issue of voice is not so salient in foreign language speaking practice, since students are still at the stage of learning the words and sentence structures of the language. But students can be encouraged to do role play or even speak after the tapes and try to imitate the tones and voices.

Podcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:31:00 +0000

This is what Kate and I made with Skype:

Podcasting for language learners

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:27:00 +0000

I think for foreign languages classes, podcasting can be a motivating way to engage students in oral presentation. Instead of talking directly to the teacher or present in class, students can make podcasts of their interested and selected topics and if possible leave comments and feedback to each other. The only trouble would be the “casting” feature: does it have to be ongoing and a series to be podcasting? And how do teachers monitor the quality of so many products?

Pairwork or even group work is also possible with such oral practice, and students may engage in conversations around a favorite topic.

If Skype is available to the students a lot more possibilities will open up, because there are many language pals websites that connect people learning different foreign languages, including help learners find partners who want to practice each other’s language through Skype. It would be exciting for the students to connect with a target language speaking learner from another country, practice talking and make a podcast as a product of practice and also cultural communication. Although the technology involved can be overwhelming for classes in general.

About online roleplay

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:14:00 +0000

About online roleplay
I think online roleplay is very engaging with a topic of interest. In the role play on single sex classroom that we did though this week I played the role of a con parent. I was thinking that this should be an easier role to play because parents don't have to know the subject or even the way of argument very well. so I kind of thought my role was a stupid parent who didn't really know how to argue--which I didn't need to try very hard to be given my inexperience; in fact, as I quickly discovered that I lacked the membership resources of parenting and schooling here to even make appropriate stupid comments. This lead me to thinking about addressing the needs of bridging the cultural barriers in similiar activities in the second language classroom, and of helping individual students who might be experiencing the barriers.

I also wondered a little about the "play" element in roleplay. I thought the discussion and writing practice seem more effective when more extreme and dramatic situations are set up; people would have more to say and say it better when they're more passionate. I guess this is especially true for the case of second langauge classrooms, where students' language and writing proficiency tend not to be really high. More subtle topics and sophisticated positions might be intimidating to these students.

Videos and digital stories

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:53:00 +0000

This week I learned to create a video with Picasa, and I really liked the way that I can select and arrange pictures and texts from various search tools, and combine them with writing, and produce an end product in a video. Also there are so many interesting ideas in Chapter 5 of the course book. The postmodern ideas of appropriation/poaching/remixing are fascinating to explore. Viewed in this light it seems the old notion of writing and even literacy is rather out dated; and creativity also takes completely new directions.

In traditional foreign language classrooms it is very common to ask students to research and write on a certain topic related to the target language and culture, but multimodal features and hyperlinking possiblities are seldom explored. I believe teachers can design very engaging tasks involving using the target language and researching on the culture. The videos and digital stories can be the end products of bigger group projects. For example, students can create movie presentation on music, movies, famous cities, schools, daily life, food, etc., of the target culture. The texts used should involve the target language depending on the learners' levels. They should write a good portion of the texts because writing practice should be one of the main goals of the tasks. They can also explore hyperlinks to websites in the target language in their writing. For example, the teacher can ask them to write one paragraph containing various such links; careful links to relevant images, articles and websites in the target language, even if the students don't fully understand what they read, is an important cultural experience, and organizing them together is a useful practice in reading and writing.

However, I'm not sure the experimental nature of digital writing can be readily applied to the foreign language classrooms. Usually the learners are hardly familiar with the grammar patterns and expressions in the new language. Experiments and subversive use of it may be too much of a leap for them. And again, I wonder how the teachers address the language problems when students focus more on the content, format and multimodal features of the writing.

Video I created

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:44:00 +0000

A video I just created using Picasa.

Using wikis--some questions and my experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:43:00 +0000

I never quite knew how wikipedia works, but by going through the comments and discussion pages of some entries this week I got some better understanding of the system. The idea of everyone (probably from around the world, of all kinds of different backgrounds) co-editing a resource/information page is indeed amazing. Sometimes people argue about a definition, a phrasing, use/choice of a certain image, which can result in the so-called edit wars. There’re also rampant vandalism around high profile entries, resulting in partial protection of the pages, which in turn leads to argument whether this is against the spirit of public wikis. Anyway, the power of co-editing renders entirely new understanding toward the authority, possession of knowledge, or the meaning of knowledge itself.

When it comes to classroom wikis, I guess the problem is not so serious since it is confined to the small circle of a class. I have some questions though: Are students really going to edit each other’s writing, changing and deleting information that they judge inaccurate or inadequate? Does this cause collaboration or etiquette problems? But if they just post on top of each other, it wouldn’t be much different from a blog or web comments. I think wiki is more about getting a better end product, like a book; work that is not good enough is eliminated through the constraint of collective editing, just like in wikipedia. If implemented, is it fair to the “weaker” contributors, for educational purposes?

For my own wiki practice I went through the tutorials and managed to set up an account: http://aboutchinesefood.pbwiki.com/. It’s intended for Chinese as foreign language learners to learn about Chinese food as part of the culture. I set up five categories in the sidebar: Intro to Chinese food, recipes, images, cooking videos, and My experiences with Chinese food. I also searched and put in a couple of images and videos as examples. The intro part I think will involve more collaborative editing and the result will be a solid introduction. The next three parts are more about collective information gathering and sharing, and students will be encouraged to search through google, flickr, youtube and other websites. The last part will be students’ personal narratives and students will comment on each other’s writings. The resulting wiki book will be an interesting collection of facts, resources and experiences about Chinese food.

Images and voicethread

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:33:00 +0000

I finally created a voicethread video of the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis. I had some troubles because I found I could only import the flickr sets made up of my own uploads, but not the favorites that I collected. Since I don’t have any upload, I ended up copying the photo URLs one by one. And then, I couldn’t do voice comments because the recording didn’t work.

But I enjoyed searching for images and I’m very glad that I learned about this tool, and I enjoyed too watching some other video with comments on the voicethread site. It seems that people from all over the world can browse the video and leave their voice comments, so for a video about a 3-year-old girl narrating her haircut I heard very interesting comments from lots of people with different accents. This is something new to me maybe because I never use voice chat or voice tools. It just feels so different from the text comments—is it partly because voice carries so much more information?

I can easily see this used in foreign language teaching for speaking and writing practices. Students can choose their own favorite topics (preferably related to the language and culture being learned), and create a voicethread video with spoken and written comments in the target language. Then they can leave comments on each other’s videos. The multimodal nature of the task as well as the sharing feature will be very motivating to the language learners. Also students can work in groups and create a group video with multiple voices.

I’m not sure however how the instructor would provide feedback, other than as one of the comments, and it’s probably very hard to focus on language features and grammar in a short text in a bubble. So the main aim of the task would be learning about cultures and peoples of the target language, and should be combined with warm up practices on the language.

Stone arch bridge

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:34:00 +0000

Creating mind maps

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:06:00 +0000

I tried the two mind maps with bubblus. Maybe because I'm not used to it, I found it a bit hard to think on the screen, and dragging the bubbles around and changing my mind took more time than it should. The effect of the final result looks good and I think it is for me the most important advantage of using this tool. After all, a neat and colored map as product is useful and attractive, and I think this would be the same with students.

For language learning students I think they can use the tool to create their own brainstorming maps on various topics, for writing or other projects.

Another use would be to ask them to create maps of vocabulary sets. For example, a set for different colors, furniture, clothing, parts of body, verbs, etc. The positions and colors would help them memorize the words.

Comparison and contrast is a constant theme in language learning. Students can create concept maps comparing cultural practices in two different cultures. The way they organize the maps can show their understanding of the similarities and differences of the cultures.

Collecting information

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:58:00 +0000

I usually use google to search for information. “The answer to everything now is google it.” Sometimes it can be time consuming to experiment with different key words.

In terms of language learning or teaching, there are some additional use of google too. Google translate is a very helpful tool, where you can translate many languages, from words to whole webpages, to another language. A new way to test the use of a word or expression is to put the expression into google: if millions of pages come up than this is a correct and useful expression, otherwise it might be wrong. When you’re uncertain of the translation of the word you can do something similar: put both the word and the translation into google and see how many pages come up. Correct translation usually turns up millions of pages. For uncertain translation from English to Chinese you can put in the English and one of the characters of the Chinese and see what comes up.

I use google image to search for pictures. The advantage is that it’s very fast and easy. But sometimes I can’t get the pictures I want to search, and the qualities vary so much. I think Flickr is a great site. It usually turns up more relevant pictures and there are many very high quality ones. And the total number can be overwhelming! Images are also useful for understanding words. For example, if I don’t know the meaning of a noun I google image the word which can help me find out.

How do I determine the validity and credibility of the information? I think I only judge on a case basis. I usually look at what kind of website it is, does it have a lot of ads, who are the authors, whether they quote and cite, the quality of the writing, the tone, etc. Lots of times a term will lead to wikipedia and I usually take a quick browse and for unfamiliar terms it usually can give me a rough idea of what it is about. Clicking into several resulted site is also very helpful because by comparison it is easier to decide which information is confirmed and which is doubtful.

I tried blogline last week in class and I think it’ll be a very useful tool in getting information. However, I still don’t quite understand how the feeds are picked: it seems there are a whole bunch of recommended or pre-selected sites on the blogline website, but if I want to focus on, say, ESL or Chinese language learning, do I need to collect the sites first and then use blogline? So it is an organization tool but wouldn’t lessen the burden of coping with overwhelming number of related sites?

Maybe the tagging technique can help address this and I need to learn more about it. And for a group of students, the technique of sharing through De.licio.us and tagging seems very useful and engaging. It would be great for collective brainstorming and material collection. However it also can become more time consuming I guess, if too many links turn up.

The use of blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Yunli) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:40:00 +0000

I think a blog can be used in everyday lives to record your thoughts and activities. It’s different from traditional journals because it’s posted on the web and easy to share with others; the sense of community and expectation of audience make all the difference. Other major differences include its multimedia nature and the possibilities through hyperlinks. Also, the element of design and choice in setting up the templates and layouts can be attractive.

And to use it in second languages learning/education? I can see a lot of possiblities too. It can certanly be used to practice second langauge writing, with all the posting, sharing and feedback functions. It can also be used to keep track of the learning process, like new words, expressions or new cultural facts learned. It can have links to all the online dictionaries, translations, and discussion forums on the target langauge. This might do no less than changing the nature of classroom assignment or even the of learning—for example, a student might put a reading passage into translator and depending on the content, he might get up to 80% of the meaning… perhaps I’m digressing from blogging. Back to blogs, the students can employ all the multimedia materials and tools, like collecting and commenting on foreign langauge videos on youtube. They can record their visits of websites in the foreign langauge. They can produce podcasts in the foreign language or other creative stuff… With second and foreign languages, there is an advantage: you can do anything, I mean any topics of your interest in any forms, as long as you use the target langauge.

I believe blogging enhances communication, in a way.