collaborating on ePals

ePals is a k-12 online educational collaborating site. Many teachers use ePals to improve students writing or communication skills by apply accounts for the whole class and then collaborate with classes abroad, which is a great idea, some teachers encourage students to find a pen mate or “pen pal” at ePals so they have the opportunity to create a one to one learning and communicating relationships in improving their own skills. I would also encourage my students to do so.

What I like about the site is that it is not only opened for teachers and students all around the world, but also that it is opened to families as well, a user-friendly site for all learners. You can also choose projects to collaborate, there is even a search engine for you to choose your own preference of country and language.

As a teacher, I would want my students to collaborate with people from other countries, they are sure to learn more than their textbook. For the simplest thing, I can train their writings skills, for example, in English by forcing them to collaborate with students from other countries that don’t know their native language. I can also share and collaborate with other teachers to improve my own skills. ePals is really a great site for education and collaboration.

Digital storytelling with photos or pictures

 Animoto, Slideroll, or Stupeflix are good sites to make digital story videos, they are user friendly so they can be grasp even by those who are not familiar with film making; thus it can be a good way for students to get started to make their won films. I can assign them to make a digital story in my own field (please see to my old post Digital storytelling). This is a more advance step to start in making their own digital stories, and I would hope they can learn to combine academics and technologies well.

The subject of pictures I use are from a web comic called Axis Powers Hetalia, a controversial comic that “presents an allegorical interpretation of political and historic events, particularly of the World War II era, in which the various countries are represented by stereotyped anthropomorphic characters.” I choose this comic because I want them to think and debate about the short film I made. It can be a discussion about stereotypes, or about the history behind all the countries, or even about peace and war.

By using Stupeflix and other tool, I want them to see that a digital story videos is not as hard as many people thought and hook them up with technologies by using them. I also want them to brainstorm on their own favorites, whether it be their favorite hobbies or movies, or experiences they had and can be shared with others. Furthermore, I want to broad the use of the technologies into classes and make the lessons more colorful.

Bookr your own story!

I decided to use Harry Potter because it is my favorite series. Although there were not many pictures to choose from, I still tried to make the most of it. I will use my bookr story for an example for them to create their own digital story. Bookr is a good starting for creating a digital storytelling because it is easy to create. The example of my favorite novel is to show students that digital storytelling is not so difficult and motivate students to accept and create their own stories with their own photos and experiences.

With bookr, I wish to motivate students to learn more about the technologies and combine them with their lives and their academic studies.

Digital storytelling

 Photo by Ben Cooper

Digital storytelling is very common now a day, movies, pop singer, commercial advertising, politics and many others use this type of media to share information or experience with others. What is digital storytelling? In 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling, it explained as the practice of combining narrative with digital content including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component. Beginning with a script, the storyteller then assembles rich media to support the ideas and emotions in that script, including music or other audio effects, personal or public domain images, animations or video, and other electronic elements.

I would assign my students to try making digital story on some specific topics to keep them familiar with the multimedia and technologies. This not only teaches students that technologies can be combined in all fields, but also gives them a chance to present themselves and explore in other possibilities. Students will also be more motivated in the subject, and while they are searching more materials, they gain more insight of the topic they are researching..

I would use digital story telling in both individual and group project.  The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling mentioned that the storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between. Thus, students can

Individual work: I will assign students individual project before trying group project. I will assign them topics such like introducing their favorite movie star or pop singer, introduce their favorite or special hobby, tell a story about your most unforgettable experience or memory, a wonderful trip they took before or so on. I want every one of them to try their best to make their own stories and get more familiar with digital storytelling.

Group work: After everyone had made their own project and showed to the rest of the class, I will assign them a more difficult and longer storytelling with topics related to the course subjects. Topics will be like WWII, Gandhi, Pompeii, the great canyon and many others. Students in groups are required to gather information about the topic, including interviews, videos, songs or other manners they can find. The video must contain everyone’s work and the quality of the film must meet a certain standard.

Let’s tweet in class

Twitter kind of reminds me of msn and chat rooms which I am more familiar with, where people discuss and chat with others. But Twitter offers something different, something that can be formally used in classes and more importantly, allow more people and even for outsiders you do not know personally to join in the discussions.

Unlike the e-learning platform that takes time to response and wait for responses, Twitters allow people to communicate with each other immediately on topics. Although most of the Time more that 40% of the tweets are babbling nonsenses, the use of it on the academic use can be very beneficial. In the article,  How Twitter will revolutionize academic research and teaching, it tells us this kind of micro-blogging is a revolution in all fields, academic is not only printed books and articles, but also a window to “facilitate the development of specialized audiences. People read your articles, give feedbacks and even write about your articles and breach more ideas from them. The unidirectional  day are over, and the seminar room of communication had taken the place the auditorium of working alone.

But the biggest drawback of Twitter is that too many people are tweeting on the discussion board, and the tweets becomes very short-life and is “expired” about a week and a half and is getting shorter every day. The post may “disappear” in the huge amount of  tweets, and this is a serious problem that has to be solved if we are using it to discuss important class works and not some pointless chatting. Luckily,  in 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets and Teach with Twitter? Read This!, they teach us how to fish back the hashes that is needed. This basic function must be mastered before we can tweet and broad our subject and dive in the ocean of knowledge.

Web group for teachers

I have to say Classroom 2.0 really is an amazing web group. I have yet to read all the post or be familiar with all the functions, but I can already say that it is a great web filled with priceless treasures of experiences. More than sixty thousands of people from all fields and all over the world visit and contribute on this site and share their experiences, knowledge and engage in discussions with others. For a teacher, a student or a learner eager to immerse and explore new aspects and share their own experiences, what can be better than getting involved in such a great and organized web group?

I think this web group will be very useful for me because for a teacher, staying in a lab or studying theories is never the case. Especially for language teachers who require constant interactions with students. Teachers learn by a mass amount of experiences and communications of teaching, sharing, evaluating and reconstructing. For example, I can post my lesson plan, and activity I would like to do during class, videos filmed in classes, or a question I don’t understand on the board to ask for opinions and suggestions. I can also read through other posts and find new ideas or give my own opinion. Classroom 2.0 allows all these communication for teachers from all fields to stay updated and share information for improvement and suggestions.

Connecting and evolving

A teacher is becoming more like the internet in these days, especially a homeroom teacher. Asides from giving knowledge and being able to answer all kinds questions asked by the students, they are also being required to “stay updated” in their knowledge and being able to function all kinds of technologies so they are able to help him or herself and the students to stay in current.

Just like what George Siemens said in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age :“Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people”. The jobs of teachers are not only to teach them the knowledge on the textbooks, but also to give and share the experiences students couldn’t have as many as possible. They need to learn how to stay updated, to learn about the rapidly changing world and how to survive in it. What teachers can do is to feed them the experiences, knowledge and wisdom so they could learn, like an on-lined computer that has abundant of information to share and explore whenever students need them.

In The Changing Nature of Knowledge, George Siemens said that “another important thing is to have a strong emphases on the manner of which knowledge is rapidly evolving. So it’s not just what we know today is important, it’s our ability to continue to stay current as knowledge changes.” The internet is one the most rapidly updated and changing nature of things. Just like the internet, teachers are asked to stay in current of their knowledge and constantly add or change their teaching style according to the temporary life.

Hence, I think teachers are like the ever growing internet the evolves with time and constantly connecting to others and absorbing new information.