Second Life

http://secondlife.com/

It is a good idea to have classes in Second Life world when I first heard of it. I always believe that it will be very effective to keep students' interests and motivation in learning, just like playing games on computer which is fun and challenging. 

According to the presentation of using 2nd life in education, many activity can become possible if being conducted in 2ne life world. Students can have the class with his/her avatars siting in the classroom and himself/herself personally siting at home. The lecture can be listened through earphone and they also can ask and answer questions through the microphone. All the homework and test can be done in 2nd life classroom, which is easy for students to do and good for teacher to collect the papers and tests and record the results. All the paper work can be transferred into paperless work online in 2nd life. By walking around in the "school", students can use all resources online freely. They also can go other places  to have fun in any parties and activities in 2nd life. A whole new world is waiting for them to explore while learning.

However, when I actually tried to log in as a resident of 2nd life, I found many problems. It took me some time to get to know how to navigate and how to walk on the map. I am still having troubles to change the view which is a little bit dizzy for me. I think it will be the same situation, if a teacher give students 2nd life to have class. It will take time to get used to the view and get to know how to manipulate the avatar. There is also a requirement of the setting of the computer to be able to show the 3D view in 2nd life. I tried on a rather old computer and I found sometimes the screen will get stuck. I have to wait about 30 seconds to let the view change and let my avatar move. It seems not an advantage to use this in teaching and learning when students lack of assess to the computer or assess to old and poor computers. 
Considering the situation that most of the Chinese students have been addicted to the computer games, most of the Chinese parents have the anti-games attitudes towards the websites like 2nd life. I don't think it will be a good idea to assign my Chinese students to use 2nd life to take the class at home when their parents are at home too. 

Personally, I like the idea of making teaching and learning  process online in 2nd life is wonderful; however, time that needs to getting familiar with the navigation and manipulation, the requirement and the assess to the devices, and the culture influence all make me hesitate to make the decision of using 2nd life in my future teaching. 

Mission US

http://www.mission-us.org/

Most of American students find it is hard to learn and remember the history of the United State, a immigrant country. It also is a difficult task to teach history to students, especially when teach the American history to ESL/EFL students. The history of an unfamiliar country and the foreign language create many difficulties when ESL/EFL students learn about American history.

Mission US tries a different way to  teach the boring history into an interesting way. Watching the animation of the history stories and events becomes a relaxing and fun way to know the history and the famous people who played important roles in the history. When watching the animation, students are put in the shoes of any history people and they will be asked to complete the history mission along with the character. The whole learning process turns out to be a story-listening and game-playing experience, which is more interesting and engaging than reading and memorizing the history event from textbooks. 

Besides the videos, Mission US also offers many interactive games to test students about their knowledge of US history.  With the goal to reach a place on the map, they need to choose the right answer to the questions for moving step by step towards the destination. 

The resource, covering overview, background, activity, other resources, is very rich for teachers to use in the real class. Teachers can download those printable documents for teaching the history class with using the videos and games in Mission US. 

There only have two missions, which is limited. And adult learners may not be interested in it. And most of people are not big fans of history, so the use of this website is also limited. 

Comix

 

http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/ 

Students are very interested in comics since most of them read the comics to learn their native languages when they were young. Using comics again for them to learn a new language can also be interesting and effective. Reading comics can be fun and students can read it with less pressure with the short dialogues comparing with a long paragraph.  It can be attractive not only to younger learners, adults learners also will be interested about making a story into comics.  

Comix provides a very good idea of allowing students to create their own comics with their choice of characters and the dialogue. It is very handy to create a comics through comix. I was surprised to find that to make a story into comics can be so easy and interesting with Comix. Every character that can be chosen by a click of the mouse. There are many different choices for people to choose from, which provides diversity of student's work. And the size and the position of the images and the bubbles can be changed in the picture easily. It offers a large free space for students to be creative and productive. 

By collecting and sharing students' works in front of the class can be a great activity for them to do the role play or storytelling. They can practise their pronunciation and speaking skills with their comics. Since most of the dialogues in the comics are conversational which can be heard in daily life. It will be good for students to pay attention to the daily conversations with native speakers after them tried using comics to make the story. They may want to make their story and dialogues more natural and more native-like. 

Study Jams

http://studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams/index.htm
In our second 3 minutes demonstration lesson class, I learned a very interesting website from my classmates. It's called Study Jams. It is a website offer animated videos of teaching fundamental knowledge of math and science in English.

There are four major roles in the animation and they will explain and teach the learners different aspects in the field of math and science with the visual tools.

By watching the video, learners can find the key words list below and they also can click the bottom "Test yourself" to try to test what you learned from the video you just watched by answering 7 multiple choose questions.

It is a very good website for students to learn English through content area in through K-12. They can learn English and other subjects together. With the animation characters to explain the knowledge in an interesting way, they may have the motivation to keep watching and learning. It also can be beneficial for international students who is going to take TOEFL test which contains many long readings and lectures about different subjects. By watching and learning from the videos, test candidates can prepare themselves with the English names of different things and know how to express the process or the results in English. It would save me much time to match what I know and the English expression when I prepared for the test if I have knew this website at that time.

Every video is about 6-8 minutes short, which is very suitable for students to watch after school and learn subject and language together.  I will recommend it as a listening practice (It is sooo good that it doesn't provide subtitles) to my students who are preparing TOEFL test.

LiveMocha

                        
                                         http://livemocha.com/
I have heard of Rosettastone which is known as an expensive language learning tool. LiveMocha, is a similar language learning website for language learners. Although they two are similar, LiveMocha has more advantages comparing with Rosettastone.

Firstly, it is free! Anyone, in any countries, at any ages, who wants to learn a foreign language can sign in with an email address. The whole registering process only takes a few seconds and you can start your language learning journey! Sounds very easy and simple! (Though the higher level class may not be free.)

Secondly, LiveMocha takes the native language of language learners into consideration. It is very good for adult learners to pick up a language as a beginner in a short time. What is more, I find that the language of the website can be automatically changed into learners native language by recognizing the language of your computer operating system.

Thirdly, it can guide learners to follow learning, reviewing and testing process step by step. One can be tested through different kinds of ways: matching, multiple choosing, dictation (native language and target language both), making sentences, ect.

It is very interesting to find that one can be a foreign language learner and a language teacher at the same time. It is a wonderful idea to involve different language speakers into this language learning community. Every one can be benefited by having the communication with the native speakers of the target language.  

One thing that I am not very into about LiveMocha is the lack of teaching part of the alphabet pronunciation. I am learning Korean now, and I found that without knowing how to pronounce the individual words, I can not know how to say the sentences and words besides the sentences that I learned from LiveMocha. By throwing simple sentences and the pictures to any beginners is unreasonable. It will turn to be audio lingual approach teaching method which is not good for learners who also want to learn how to write and read the language. 

Another thing that I dislike is lack of the hits of right answer offering when I forget one or two words in the review step. I just stuck there and no place or no one for me to turn to help. The only thing for me to do is to close the current window and go back to the learning step to keep clicking to find the one word or sentence that I forget. It wastes my time and causes me some troubles.

ESL games plus

   http://www.eslgamesplus.com/

I found this website when I was preparing for my lesson for my internship in ALI level 1 class. I just typed in"ESL games" and then I found it in google searching results. Although the web pages look like for kids, but some of the games are really useful for my ESL adult class. 

It offers 12 different kinds of activities and games for learning and testing English vocabulary and grammar in different aspects. Personally, I used Sentence Monkey often in my class since some of the topics fit our lessons and my students are more familiar with the format of the game: drag the right words into the sentences or phrases. By answering correctly, the monkey will jump out to applaud for them. If they choose the wrong word, it will ask them to try it again. Luckily, we have an Internet-connected computer and an Over Head Projector in the classroom, and the number of items in one game fits the student number in my class, so it is possible to ask everyone of them to come to the computer to play it once with the help of the other classmates if they need. Learning language through this colorful and interesting game, my students learned a lot. 

On the homepage of this website, you can find many orange tags for you to choose. You can choose according to the type of games and you also can choose according to the topics. It is time-saving for teachers to find a suitable one in the ocean of hundreds of games. 

Under the tag of PPT/Printable, you can find many well-done worksheets, charts, flash cards and power points there just ready for you to print them out and bring to your classroom. If the teacher wants have some changes of the materials to make it more suitable for the class, they can do what they want based on these documents. It is also time-saving, effort-saving and convenient for teachers. 

I have used Sentence Monkey in teaching and testing them Present Continuous and the Food Quantity in the class. They like them since it is fun, easy to manipulate and they learned something new outside of the textbooks. 

Course Sites

https://www.coursesites.com/webapps/Bb-sites-course-creation-BBLEARN/pages/index.html 
There are many different websites offer the course management systems for teachers to choose from. Sometimes, it is hard to choose one among too many choices on the table. But, the good thing is that every CMS has its special character that is different from others. Based on the different needs and the requirements of the class and the teachers, choosing the suitable CMS will be much easier. 

With green interface, I feel the user-friendly characteristic of Course Sites. It is run by BlackBoard, a CMS that NYU is using currently. But comparing BB that we are using, Course Sites provides more possibilities for us to make our accounts more personal and practical by moving up and down, removing or adding different modules on the homepage. What's more, writing an announcement, changing schedule on calendar and checking the to-do list becomes easy and simple. 

It is good to see that it separate the lesson plan and syllabus, which will be easier for students to go to the module to find what they want. When you manage your class, it's also very easy to add any images, audios, videos an web links into your course folder. More options from the media can be imported into the Course Sites for better learning with the authentic materials. 

Course Sites also makes it easier and convenient to take the test, survey, assessment (self-assessment, teacher-assessment and peer-assessment) and hand in assignment through Course Sites.
It also provides a module named Teaching Style for teachers to keep the setting of the course themes, menu style, layout, content and banner images as a template for future use. It saves much time and also save the good teaching styles for other class. It is convenient to group students or students make their own group when they do their projects under the Course Sites. They can shear the information and discussions within the group members online. 

Just as what Schoology does, Course Sites also provides a Resource tag. In its Resource tag, I found many links to other software that help teachers in making lesson plan, managing exams and using some videos to improve teaching. 

I also found it is very interesting to have the Course Sites Instant Messaging for teachers and students to keep in close touch if they need any discussions or Q&A whenever and wherever. 

It is a great CMS to use in language teaching and learning, though it only offers 5 courses a year for one teacher. 

Hot Potatoes

                      http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
By first heard the name of this lesson construction software, Hot Potatoes, I thought it should be very difficulty to use, just like solving a complicated problem. However, when I downloaded and installed it, I found it provides a simple and clear interface for teacher to create different types of exercises for students. It offers six applications: Multiple choice, Cloze, Match, Crossword, Short answer and jumbled sentences for teachers to choose from. The multi types of the items can help students learn and test the knowledge from different aspects. 
It makes creating exercises based on the class become simple, easy, convenient and fast.  It allows teachers to insert passages, pictures, links, media objects in the exercises. Font, colors and size and the reading order of the words can be changed according to the different needs. It also becomes easy and handy for teachers to change, delete, add, move and shuffle the items in the quiz. Hints, clues and feedback of each choices can be edited to make the exercise more personal and interesting for students. 
The exercise made with Hot Potatoes can be done online on a web page or be downloaded as a zip package as well as be done on paper by printing it out. Teacher can have the preview of the interface and the print format before starting the exercises. 
Teacher can make one single type of exercise as well as mix all of them together in one. In the Masher section, teacher can put all the exercises together to make them as a complete exercise for an unit or a chapter, which is useful to check the degree of the mastery of the knowledge when students play with Hot Potatoes. 

Schoology

             http://www.schoology.com/home
Course Management System is a very useful technology tool in teaching and learning, no matter in which subjects. I have never used a CMS before I came to the States. In China, the only technology that we use to hand in papers is email. When I first time used the a CMS in to find the information of a course, I was shocked and surprised by the usefulness and convenience of it. 
Schoology is one of CMS that is used by many schools whose teachers find that it is useful, impressive and easy to be adopted. It provides a comparing chart among the major course management systems: Moodle, BlackBorad, Schoology, Edmodo, which fully shows the advantages of Schoology. Its facebook format may attract many FB fans to use it as a CMS. They can feel fun to like someone's idea in academic area. 
By signing up as an instructor, the tour will guide you to know more about how to use it, which I found very useful and convenient. I like it offer different colors of the events on calendar, which is very attractive for me who is a visual learner. 
You also can expend your network through facebook, twitter and gmail.  By choosing the school that you teach, you can find your groups and invite your colleagues into Schoology to share this useful technology tool. 
In Resource part, there are many different education resources shared by different instructors. You can find the resource that you want by filter them by subject, type, level, format and rates and then you can add them into your resource and download them for your teaching use. 

Schoology also is available in App Store now. Teachers and students can download the app in their smart device and check any post, discussions, homework and take tests. In its app center section, it also offers many popular used educational apps for instructors to download. 
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/GoAnimate-Now-Live-in-the-Schoology-App-Center-1716010.htm

Quizlet

          http://quizlet.com/
In the 3 minutes demo lesson class, I got to know a website called Quizlet through Yichen's demo lesson. I found it was very useful and interesting. I checked out this website after the class and put it into my future teaching tool list. 
It is a website for teachers to create quiz for students. The quizzes cover many different subjects: languages, standardized test, math, science, history, literature, law, medical, etc. Although it is called quiz, it is more like learning through self-testing. 
On an English learning lesson set page, there are a list of the new vocabulary with audio, picture and meaning for learners to study and flashcards for studying one word by one word. Learners have different choice of learning. There are two big chooses in a quiz: Study and Play Games. In Study part, one has three options: Speller, Learn and Test; in Play Games part, one can choose from: Scatter and Space Race. 
In Speller part, one just need to type in what he heard, which is much like dictation. When the spell is wrong, the wrong letter will be highlighted and cross out automatically. At the same time, the audio will play again and the right words will appear for learning. Then everything disappear for the learner to type in again. It is a very good way to learn and self-test. 
In  Learn part, learners need to type in the words by listening to the meaning of the words. The prompt and pictures may be offered for the visual learners. Once one fails, the right answer will appear and one will be asked to copy the right answer in the box for reinforce learning process. 
In Test part which is the real quiz part, students will have blank filling questions, multiple choice questions, matching questions and T/F questions in the test. One thing that calls my attention is the randomly questions in this part. Every test is different from the previous one. The website will automatically create different tests for learners to keep testing the same knowledge in different question forms. 
Scatter is a fast-paced action game for dragging the vocabulary onto its definition. Space Race tests both of the vocabulary knowledge as well as the typing skills. In these two way, language learners can learn and test their knowledge through fun games. 

OWL--The Purdue Online Writing Lab

             http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
  The OWL was introduced to us by one of professors in last  semester. I just had a glance of the website without looking carefully and deeply into the details. Based on the handouts that my teacher gave to me, I can tell that it's a great site for teachers and students to look for information about writing. 
  It offers the resources of teaching and learning writing, grammar, ESL writing and writing job searching. It's not a simple writing website in helping the language learners but also helping people in writing in other different majors and fields, such as medical, engineer, social science,etc. It provides a site map which is very helpful for people to have quick looking of what the web offers and quickly locate what you are looking for. 
  With  the purpose of teaching ESL, I found many useful grammar exercises, mechanics， academic writing guide, writing rubrics, APA/MLA/Chicago format guide and the use of punctuation in this writing lab. It covers the knowledge that ESL students need in learning writing from words level to the article level. There is a resource section for writing tutors, teachers and instructors, which provides many useful documents about how to teach writing in different grades, how to prevent plagiarism and how to tutor people write cover letter and resume for job hunting. 
  It can be used in the writing class teaching but also can be used for students who want to improve writing after school. With the site map in hand, adult and advance level students can go to different sections to find the information about learning writing and they can practise those writing skills by themselves to see the effectiveness. 

3D Bloom's Taxonomy

               http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html
  Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the learning objectives. It was proposed by an education committee and discussed with a series of conferences for improvement. Its old version has two levels  of thinking: basic level: knowledge, comprehension and application; and higher level: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The big differences between the old version and the new version is the position change of evaluation and synthesis and the replacement of synthesis into creation. One goal of Bloom's Taxonomy is to motivate teachers to focus on helping students to develop from the basic level to the higher level in their thinking and learning.
  This 3D version of Bloom's Taxonomy offers teachers visual colored blocks to show the different steps in teaching and learning. Teachers can use this 3D picture to locate the development of students and try to focusing on helping them to move to the higher blocks. With this colorful mouse over blocks, it can be introduced to the advanced level students and they can make fun on these blocks and look for where they are and where they should work hard to move to, which can serve as an interesting and useful tool and a kind of motivation as well. 
  Besides the 3D picture, this website also offers many recommended resource for people who are interested in it to have a depth view and understanding. Some useful websites that related to the application of the Bloom's Taxonomy in different level classroom also can be found through the links on this website. 

Website Evaluation

 http://olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/webeval.html

  With the openness of the  resources on the Internet, we save much time going back and force to the library to find the information that we need. With some key words and a click, everything that related will automatically list for you. It's a big convenience for people. Students and teachers also benefited a lot from this high-tech development. Teaching and learning can all be done online and the access to the information and knowledge also give students the chance to learn more as many as possible.
  However, with the development of the Internet, the crowd gradually turn into the role of producing the information and resources. Everyone is able to edit the information on the web, such as Wiki. There is no guarantee of the authority of the materials, which makes people who want to use the material in academic environment hesitate to do so.
  Using Internet as a teaching tool in the classroom is a great idea, but teachers have to be fully aware of the authority and the reliability of the resource and the information on the website. The website evaluation criteria that Cornell library website offers can offer teachers great help in choosing and using the online resources. It does not only provide the criteria from Cornell University but also from other famous University in American, such as UC Berkeley , John Hopkins University. Those criteria covers the the authority, accuracy, objective, currency, etc.
  Besides the criteria, it also offers some other website links for looking for the reliable websites and some articles that related to this issue for people who need to a research on it or want to have a better understanding. 

Text-to-speech

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php 
  Text-to-speech is a very interesting website where you can type in the text, choose the language, the accent and even the different interesting effects, then you will hear the real people voice reading your text out. It offers 30 languages and more than 200 different people's voices for you to choose to read your text. 
  Language learners can learn different languages through this website. It will be very useful for English learners to distinguish the American English, British English and Australian English.  They can type in the same words and choose different voices to listen to the different pronunciations. For intermediate level students, they can use this website to help them to pronounce the new vocabulary if they don't have the access to any native-speakers in theri learnign settings. For entertaining, you can change the effect to listen to the interesting voice effects or you can type in words that you want to say to your friends and then record the voice to make it fun. 
  The only one problem with this website is that the length of the text is rather limited. It just can allow you to type in one to three short sentences one time. It may not be a good choice to read a passage for learners. 

Learning Pronunciation

     http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html
  This website is a really good source for beginners to learn and practice their pronunciations in English, Germany and Spanish. It offers the names of different phonetic symbols for teachers (the names will be too abstract for beginning language learners). For learners, it offers gif pictures of the movement of the tongue and the the shape of the mouth, the sound and the example words. By clicking the bottom, learners can have a clear picture of how the tongue moves and how to shape your lips to make the sound. 
  Learning pronunciation can not only rely on the listening of the sound and imitate. Learners should know where their tongues should go and move and how to shape their mouths before they can make a right and clear sound. 
  There are many second language learners will be influenced by their first language pronunciation. For example, some Chinese students from North may mix the pronunciation of /w/ and /v/, and some Japanese students may find it's hard to distinguish /l/ from /r/. Consideration this situation, it becomes more important for them to have these gif pictures to help them to pronounce. 
  This is a very useful website and I surely will use it in my future teaching of the beginning pronunciation.  

Teacher Tube

                     http://teachertube.com/
  People are very familiar with the Youtube which is a very popular videocast website. Here is a Teacher Tube for teachers' community to share ideas and lessons. There are many videos, docs, audios and photos  for other teachers to download and apply to their own classroom. Any the channels conver different level education and different subjects. There also has different discussion groups for teachers to discuss and debate different topics. 
It is a good website for teacher to post their ideas or lessons for seeking comments or for encouraging other teachers to use them. The different materials are offering teachers different approaches to teach and apply the ideas.
  Meanwhile, I find some parts of this website need to be improved for better use. First one is about the catagory. I am going to teach in ESL for adults, but I can not find any materials related to ESL in Teacher Tube. And there isn't a channel that related to teaching English for ESL teachers. Second problem is the name of the materials. Since all the materials are uoploaded by different indicidual teachers, the way of naming the materials are various. Some of the names of the documents are just numbers from which nobody knows what it is. I even can not fin any discreptions of the materials after I click in. It makes the search become time-consumming, difficult and troublesome for teachers. Teachers who are planing to use this website should be careful about these problems. 

Silent Movie--Let's Guess!

Silent Movie is a great idea and in-class activity for teacher to use in speaking and listening class. I have experienced this activity in one mini-lesson that one of my classmates gave to us in my first semester. She first divided us into two group with the first group watch the silent movie and the second group sat with their back to the screen. After watching the movie clip, the students in the first group went to the find one partner in the second group and retold the movie that they watched. After they finish the retelling, the students in the second group were asked to repeat what they heard from their partners. At last, we all watched the movie clip with sound to verify our description. We really enjoyed the activity and found it can help students to open the mouth to say something.

The whole activity involves guessing, explanation, interpretation, listening and speaking ability. Students should try to use the right adjectives and verbs to describe the people and situation and the other students should try to understand his/her partner regardless the mistakes and possible mispronunciation.
Sure will try to use it in my future class.

Photo Story--What's your story

Before the Monday class, I would think of using the power point to show the images, record my voice and embed it into the PPT, which definitely means a lot of things to do. However, Photo Story makes everything simple and easy to do. And what comes out at last is so great!

We just need to choose the photos that we would like to share, then record our voice while switching between the pictures and we may add the background music if we want. Then, we are done! Every step is simple and very easy for any one who has never used it before. It means that it is also possible to introduce it to the students and let them to create their own digital stories even if they know nothing about this soft ware. 

With the strong interest and the emotion of a personal related topic, students can have the freedom to create different stories by using the Photo Story. The whole process will be fun and students will love to watch other students' story. If they find any common with someone else, they may have more willingness to talk with them after class, which is helpful in creating a good class atmosphere.

In the whole process, four language skills are all involved in--Reading, Speaking, Listening and Writing. It is a good chance to let them to write something personal and read it out loud. By listening to their own voice record, they may be aware of the mispronunciation, the speed and the rhyme of their speaking, which will make them want to redo it again to make it better. With less pressure to read a paragraph in front of the class, students can have time to rehearse and to modify their digital story before showing to others. 

My digital story

My digital Story-- Why Am I Becoming A Teacher?

There are many reason behind the reason why am I becoming a teacher.

1. Growing up in a teacher's family
2. Love Language
3. English is a gloabl communication tool 
4. Teaching= Learning
5. Help poor kids
6. Have holiday for travling 

e-Portfolio

                http://eportfolio.lagcc.cuny.edu/
I really like the idea of e-Portfolio. It can be people's online academic blog in which resume, working experiences, personal background and other related information can be found.

In this semester, I am also taking Internship course in which my instructor strongly recommended us to build our own e-Portfolio. It is very troublesome to send or upload your resume, lesson plan, curriculum, teaching philosophy together when you apply for a job. If you send your cover letter with an e- Portfolio link, all of the things become neat. The employer can just click the link to view what he needs to know. If he needs more information, he can just choose other tabs to view more, which greatly save the time for employer to keep sending emails asking for more information. By attaching the e-Portfolio link with the cover letter, it also shows that you a teacher who knows about technology and you may well use it in your classroom.  My instructor was more convinced that e-Portfolio is useful and important for teachers after she received an email from one of her Japanese student who got a teaching job in one of the Japan university just because of his excellent e-Portfolio.

For preparing for the coming job hunting and personal academic records, I am going to set up my e-Portfolio soon!

Open Culture--website links

http://www.openculture.com/
This website does not only offer links of 530 online courses that covers most of the college subjects, but also offer the links of 450 audio books, 500 online movies, 375 ebooks, and 160 textbooks. It seems that there are tons of information here, no matter they are authentic or language adapted learning materials for learners to use. People have the different interets or focuses can find their cups of tea to learn what they want through online courses or YouTube.


On this website, it separates the Language Lessons into a single link tab in which 40 languages can be learned online. As an English teacher, I look more on the English learning part and to see what can I use in my future teaching. Under the category of English, there are subcategories that related to the different focuses of learning English, such as English speaking, business English, English Grammar, etc. Those links will guide the learners to different websites to find the online courses or the audios for them to learn the language. One website that I find interesting and useful is the BBC learning English. It was recommended by one of my college teacher, but I did not have a chance to view this website in detail until now. If I were the teacher, I would recommended it to my students.
This website can be used as a guide website for self-learners to find the online sources to learn courses and it also can help teachers to find more possible teaching materials to enrich the teaching in the classroom.

Open Learning Initiative--Learning through science

http://oli.cmu.edu/learn-with-oli/see-our-free-open-courses/

Open Learning initiative is online course website running by Carnegie Mellon University. Its purpose is to "transforming higher education through the science of learning." It is very obvious that most of the online courses in this website are about science, such as chemistry, biology and statistics. Speaking of the English education, it only offers two couses that I think relate to English eduction: American English Speech and Argument Diagramming. The first course is about the English pronunciation which is for the beginning level learners and the second one is about how to write argumentative papers which may suitable for the advanced level students. In each course, there is a syllabus that clearly presents how many units and modules it contains and what the topics for each unit ad module. Learners can study by themselves follow each unit and do the exercises after each lesson. Teachers can use these courses as a guidance or a references of what to teach and how to teach.


It is also very useful for students who are working in science field. They can find learn the science subject and many terms in the field at the same time, which is like hitting two birds with one stone.
Personally, these online courses may only be used for adult language teaching since there are many descriptions and the definitions that may be boring and too difficult for young learners. Too much readings are very hard to keep young students in their seats.

PREZI--Zooming to the point!

                                                                http://prezi.com/ 

When I first watched my teacher giving presentation with Prezi, I was immediately attracted by its zooming and the path showing. Then I went to the teacher after class for asking for how to make this fancy power point and at that time I just got to know that it was not a power point. It is a software for making zooming presentation named Prezi.

Students' attention is very essential in teaching and learning. Its zooming and moving function can attract students attention when it is used in the classroom. People like new and special things. Prezi can offer a new and special leaning experience for students in learning. Students will be excited waiting for what's next and they will pay fully attention to the information that is zooming, which is helpful in memorizing. Prezi presentation also is a path-leading one, which can give students lesson in a linear story style. It will be very useful in teaching younger students who needs more interesting things to keep them in seat. 

It is very necessary for teacher to have the big picture of the lesson as well as the details in mind. Prezi successfully helps teacher to have a bird view of the lesson and also have a zooming focus on every details. It is also helpful for adult students when they finish one unit study and they can see what kind of learning path they have taken and what's the purpose of this unit, which can help them to build a foundation of controlling and mastering their learning process. 

As many of my friends said, the only problem with using Prezi is the dizziness that caused by too much fast zooming. My solution to this problem will be offering more information in each slide, don't make two zooming slides too far away from each other and put the related information together. 

I really enjoy watching and using Prezi and I am surely will use it in my classroom of teaching English or use it to show  my trip in US to my friends. : D

Lessonwriter--Saving time in planing lessons

                                                         http://www.lessonwriter.com/

Lessonwriter is a very convenient software for both novice and experienced teachers to make their lesson plan easily and quickly. For novice teachers, with the text or the video in hands then they can have a well planned lesson after just copying, pasting and a click through Lessonwriter. Using the EXPRESS way to automatically create the whole lesson can give them some clues about what to teach based on the text that they would like to use. There are some ready made lesson plans which can set as examples for new teachers' first teaching and guide them to find their teaching style and method in the future.  

For experienced teacher, Lessonwriter truly benefits them in saving a lot of time to prepare for the lessons and come up different questions for the text. STANDARD and DETAILED provides free space for teachers to design the higher order thinking reading questions based on different prompts such as Blooms, Hess and writing prompts as the guidance, which saves time to go back to the books and generate appropriate questions themselves. The comprehension questions are offered for different literacy levels, which can help teacher to provide questions that are appropriate for students' language level.

Personally, I like the order of each teaching steps in the lesson plan, which could be effective for Chinese EFL classroom (which is using Grammar Translation Method) since most of the Chinese teachers just directly jump to the grammar and leave other parts blank for students. If the teacher can follow these lesson plans which pay more attention to the pronunciation and word use, students can surely be benefited a lot in improving their learning. 

The only thing that I would like suggest Lessonwriter to improve in the future is adding more in class activities. Currently, Lessonwriter offers two activities: Flash Cards and Words Searches, which is rather limited for teachers to choose. Look forward to seeing more interesting activities and the coming REPORTS function.

All about myself

Self Intro

My name is Zengfang Lin and you can call me Lilo. I am a Chinese student currently studying in New York University (NYU) and majoring in TESOL (not lead to a state certification). I completed my undergraduate study in Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) in Beijing, China majoring in English.

I come from a small city named Dali in Yunnan Province in the southwest of China. My hometown is famous for its nature beauty of lakes and mountains as well as the rich Bai ethnic group cultures. I belong to Bai ethnic Group which is one of 56 ethnic groups in China. Bai people speak Bai language which is different from Mandarin in the sound and words order. People from other ethnic groups may not be able to understand this language. Unfortunately, with more and more young people leave Dali to find jobs in metropolitans, Bai language, a language that only can be passed down orally, becomes an endangered language. I am trying my best to learn as much as I can from my mother now. It is not only for the preservation of my ethnic group language, but also for the possibilities to teach Bai young people English in school if I will teach back in my hometown. 

I have been an intern teacher in an English tutoring school teaching speaking and listening for secondary school students for one month in China and I am doing my internship in American Language Institute for level 1 international students now. My passion about teaching and learning languages makes my goal to be an English teacher in the future. I am planning to be an ESL teacher in New York City or to be an English college teacher back in China after graduation.