ePals: global classroom

Generally, ePals is an online community of collaborative classrooms engaged in cross-cultural exchanges, project sharing and language learning. After exploring the website, I was impressed by the project: 2014 junior Folklorist Challenge. It is an activity that participants discover a tradition in their community and share the story with the world. There are four main steps in this project: research, document, interpret, present. Specifically, first of all, participants should identify a tradition, find a tradition bearer and develop your interview questions. Then, participants need interview and observe the tradition bearer and document the experience. Thirdly, they are supposed to review all of their notes, photos, video and audio, decide how to shape their story and share the tradition, and create and polish their presentation, like film a video, create a slideshow or record a podcast. The last step is to share their podcast, slide show or video with the world.

In my opinion, there are three key features of the project: practical ability, technology use, global communication. I think all of them are very important for today's students. What students need is not only book knowledge, but also hand-on skills, in other words, they need to transfer their knowledge to productivity. As a teacher, I should help my students to achieve this transition. Although this project, I can help my students open their minds to discover a tradition and use what they have learned to work on it, like designing their interviews and telling the stories. As for technology use, as far as we are concerned, our world and life are full of science and technology, so mastery of technical skills is critical for students. By joining in the project, they can know about some technical appliances and web tools, such as how to make videos and how to upload their presentation online. Last but not least, I think one of the highlights of the project is that it provides students around the world to communicate with each other. In this era of globalization, it's necessary to know about the world outside. Through sharing their own traditions, students can broaden their horizon.

Above are the features of the project
that I could use in my teaching. And there are many other interesting and meaningful projects on the site. I hope I can explore them with my students in future.

GoAnimate

GoAnimate is a interesting website which allows users to create their own comic. In this website, there are a lot of themes, like business, comedy world, wildlife, etc. You can choose characters according to your theme. Then, after you choose your characters, you should type their conversations that you make. After these two steps, your own comic is finished. It's really easy and funny. I made my own comic Relatives or friends . I think the comic can help beginning-level English learners learn some basic conversations like "what is your name", "nice to meet you" and some easy vocabularies like Zebra and Giraffe. In addition, the comic is really cute and the conversation is easy and interesting, so I think children will like it. Therefore, teachers can use this tool for their teaching. Specifically, we can make comics according to our teaching contents, in other words, we turn or add teaching contents to conversations, and choose relevant scenes and characters.

Although it may be not suitable for teaching complex and sophisticated knowledge, for beginning learners or intermediate learners, it's interesting and useful. Students can be easily attracted, so it's better than just telling them boring grammar or vocabularies. Even for advanced learners, it's still a good method to learn and relax.

My photo story

My photo story is about A little angel. She is a very cute Japanese girl, the photos are from her Instagram. After I finished the video, I was surprised by the outcome. What I did was just adding several pictures from my computer, and then chose a song as the background music. However, the video is so fancy and lovely. Here, we can see, Animoto is really a used-friendly and useful tool. So what if I use it for my teaching? I think I can make use of it in two main ways. Firstly, I can make my teaching contents a beautiful video with pictures, videos, music, therefore, students will be attracted and pay their attention to it, at the same time, they can learn something. In addition, I can ask my students make their own photo stories by using Animoto. However, they have to use some English vocabularies, make some English sentences, anyway, just make their own English stories. I think they will enjoy the process and learn some English.

Digital Storytelling?

Storytelling is one of the most common activities we carry out in class, but how about Digital storytelling? It might be unfamiliar for most of us. According to Wikipedia, Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. So how can we apply digital storytelling into education?

According to The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, digital storytelling as its most basic core is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded narration, video clips and/or music. As far as we are concerned, our world is filled with science and technology. In our teaching and learning, we use multimedia, internet these technology to achieve our goals better and efficiently. Likewise, we can use digital storytelling in our classroom to facilitate students' learning.

Firstly, according to Penny, Ur(2009), interest is an essential feature of successful practice. Through incorporate digital storytelling into curriculum, it can help teachers generate students' interest, attention and motivation. For example, teachers can let students use digital storytelling as a presentation tool, in this way, students may feel interested because they can talk about their own experiences and they can all many colorful contents to their story like pictures, video and music.

In addition, teachers can introduce digital storytelling in combination with social networking to increase students' global participation, collaboration and communication skills. Teachers and students can use small handheld devices like iPad,  to create short digital stories without the need for expensive editing software. Therefore, people can view and critique each other's stories, which allows us communicate with people around the world, so we can get more feedback and advice.

Above are two aspects that teachers can use digital storytelling, but I believe there are many other ways we can use digital story to enrich our teaching.