Posts

Hao to improve speaking with Flipgrid?

Image
Do you use Tiktok in your spare time? As for me, I am a little bit addicted to it (I really don't want 😥). Every time when I didn't feel like studying, I spent a lot time on it. I think the popularity of Tiktok is partly because its short video form which takes up your time bit by bit and without noticing it.  To be fair, it is a good way of communicating and spreading information in short video form.  It would also be great to use that in teaching and the introduction of 🔗'Flipgrid' , therefore, would be necessary.  Flipgrid Flipgrid is a video discussion tool quite like no other as it's designed with the might of Microsoft to work specifically for teachers and students in a digital classroom.  The idea behind this education tool is to use video to create an open platform of discussion and learning that doesn't require a physical classroom to get everyone involved. That makes Flipgrid an ideal remote learning tool as well as a powerful homework based applicat

Hao to make your students engaged with Nearpod?

Image
Mobile learning The education I accepted was totally in a traditional way, sitting in a classroom, reading books, looking at the blackboard. The only technology in the class was the use of computer through which teachers presented their slides to us.  However, nowadays almost everyone has got their mobile devices, phones📱, pads, laptops💻 and so on, which means theoretically, we can study everywhere we want as long as the device has the access to the Internet or teachers. If we can do that, study would be more effective.  In the last ICT class, I experienced an outside-classroom class with the teacher in the classroom. Though we could not meet or talk in person, all the requirements were told and the teacher could monitor the progress of our work and evaluate the outcome in the end. How could that be possible😨? All these could not be accomplished without 🔗 Nearpod .  What is Nearpod? Nearpod is an online tool that allows teachers to use slide-based teaching both in the classroom and

Hao to design your own course with H5P?

Image
Blended learning In 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic changed people's life. For teachers and students, the most prominent change is the way we teach and learn. When I worked as a teacher during the pandemic, I started to teach online. At first, I thought that online technology is nothing special for me because I had always been a geek👨‍💻 and a big fan of technologies💻. However, the experience of online teaching still gave me something new to learn and I realised that online learning would definitely be more and more necessary and important in the future. (PS: I really like online teaching and it gives me the opportunity to be a streamer😆.) In the ICT module and professional practice module, I have experienced and learned more that blended learning. Personally, I think blended learning can help students do better in their studies as long as we teachers make good course design and preparations and students make full use of it. Moreover, with so many online resources and in

Hao to practise English speaking with Youglish?

Image
English Varieties Have you ever been curious about the accents of people speaking English? When I was a child, I was given the concept of British English and American English, yet I was not clear about it at all. When I grew older, I found that people may pronounce a word in different ways and they are all correct.  After knowing the varieties of Englishes in TESOL education, I realised that it is important to accept all the varieties in this global era and know several commonly seen ones.  Pronunciation of Vocabulary Vocabulary is the base of Enlgish learning and mastering the pronunciation of words will help to build a solid foundation as well. However, in China, most of the English teachers are not native spearkers and what is more annoying is that even with dictionaries, there might be differences between the phonetic alphabet given in dictionary and the pronuciation of people actually speak in real life. For example, the word 'identify', in American English, people usually

Hao do we team work with Stormboard?

Image
Teamwork Experience Collaboration has always been significant in learning. During many years of learning experience as a student, I have had so many team works which acquire me to collaborate with my classmates or friends. Sometimes, it could be fun as we invested a vast amount of energy into the work. However, sometimes things didn't go well as we expected only because of a small mistake. For example, in the ICT class, when we were asked to work as a team to communicate via a online tool without talking to each other and finish a passage, we chose to use 'vialogues' without actually knowing anything about it. To be honest, the teamwork was a disaster and we barely write nothing in the end. Because 'vialogues' is a video based tool on which we can only communicate in the 'comments section'.  While when I was struggling with our tool, I accidentally saw another group happily working together and made successful outcome with another tool, which was 'Stormb

Hao did I encouter Duolingo?

Image
First Encourter It is so quite a surprise that I can see a tool that I used to use  before in ICT class. Actually, I saw Duolingo quite often in China and heard of it many years ago. Like the Duolingo English ability test for applying colleges, learning a language, the advertisements and so on. And  the first time I really saw how it was used was when  I was watching a game streamer, Mayumi, who is from Brazil but streams on a China streaming platform. She didn't know Chinese at all, yet she needed to communicate with the audience. So she opened Duolingo and tried to learn Chinese there. Thoug we are talking about learning English through Duolingo in ICT, I think we can also learn something from others' experience of learning other languages.   Mayumi's experience of learning Chinese I firstly thought it was many years ago when I saw it. However, when I wanted to search for a video (start from 16s)  about Mayumi learning Chinese with Duolingo just now, I found that it was i

Hao do I struggle with WebQuest?

Image
To be honest... 😅This is really a tough topic for me. I don't like WebQuest the first sight I saw it ( Because I mistook the website  QuestGarden.com  as WebQuest. It has the old-fashioned website design (with no offense at all) and the large amout of words in each of the WebQuest🤐). So I was trying to escape from the fact that I have to write something about it.  At first, I thought that WebQuest is outdated and wondered why we should still study it. So I tried to search for some information about WebQuest and was so surprised to see that on Weibo (a social media platform like Twitter in China), there are many people who have the homework about designing a Webquest. One blogger shared her  experience of learning based on the use of WebQuest through which she did learn a lot and she's really grateful to and likes the teacher who uses WebQuest in teaching. So I guess it's time for me to put away prejudices and reconsider the role and the use of WebQuest in teaching and lea