Move towards the new world of teaching

Originated by laffy4k

I have been thinking hard of how to embed the media tools, online resources into my language teaching class, not just for the purpose of including the information technology in teaching, it is how to make the technology serve this mission: to create "meaningful learning where students construct enduring understanding by developing and applying knowledge, skills and attitudes."

-ISB definition of learning

(1) Since last school year, I have created my wiki page via wetpaint. Students at different levels can go to the webpage selecting the relevant learning materials, and do self-study. They can submit their compositions, comments, suggestions...to me as a way to gain their credit points for this subject; They can also simply look through those Chinese character videos to have deeper understanding of how Chinese characters were created; I am going to continue developing this wiki page, hope eventually it becomes good learning resources for my students;

(2) I have tried the tinychat room in my native class. I did not use it as a chatting room, instead, I used it as a platform where the students can share their works with each other; I asked my students to do the immediate translation in the chatting room after listening to the CD I played Or to do the summary writing in the chatting room after reading a paragraph of an article, then each student displayed his work to the public chatting room at the same time when I allowed them to submit it, and they can compare each other's work and see what mistakes they made and what are the better ways of doing the translation and writing the summary;

I have tried the podcasting in my Mandarin level 2 classes. ( see my blog post: podcasting Chinese song)

What do I hope to learn from this course:

I also have been constantly searching for images from online-google, flickr, creativecommons...to make the teaching of Mandarin understood easily, to simplify the complicated language items, to visualise the abstract learning activities via showing students the suitable images, videos...; During this process, I found it hard to get the pics or videos that exactly serve my teaching purpose. Most of the time, students are attracted by something else in the pic or video, and changed their focusing points discussed; I wish I can obtain more knowledge on this area and even start to make my own video and pictures in the near future.