Blog for LAI590

USING PODCASTS IN MY CLASSROOM:      Podcasts are a series of videos or just audio that are uploaded to a website that anyone can download and view. The content of these podcasts can be about anything. They can be about politics, food, games, new products, the culture of a city, or someone's everyday life. Anyone who is interested in these items can view or listen to the podcasts at anytime from anywhere using a variety of electronic mobile devices.      Because the content of these podcasts is so various they are really useful for education. Odds are, if you are interested in learning something, you can find a relevant podcast to help you. Learning languages is no exception. There are podcasts for learning many languages and the culture of the countries that speak those languages. As a student or a self-learner, they are extremely useful for improving one's language ability and learning about specific elements that are rarely explained in textbooks. As ...

REACTION TO FLIPPED CLASSROOMS                               (MOD#8) These two articles (one found here and the other here ) are not much different from other articles I've read about flipping one's classroom. It seems to be a good way of trying to have students get the most out of their class time at school by having them initially learn the material and concepts at home and then come to school to practice what they had learned with their peers while the instructor facilitates the interaction of the students' usage of the concepts. In this way, the students are able to use the class content in a more meaningful way, and the teacher gives advice, asks engaging questions, and makes sure that the students correctly understand the material and that they are on task. When you add all of these elements together, they give us those perfect stereotypical photos of the teacher and the students all smiling together in ...

Professional Development With Twitter and 'Twitter Chat':                        (MOD#6 P1)      The Twitter chat that I participated in was the Educational Technology Chat or #edtechchat . I chose this one because, not only did it start at a good time for me, but also it is extremely relevant to the LAI 590 class. Before I get into the details of the Twitter Chat and of how I believe it can be beneficial to professional development, I would like to share an event of how Twitter itself has been beneficial to me as an educator after just only a few days of signing up for the website. When I was looking for 10 educators/ microbloggers in my are of study to follow, I found it very difficult because there are not many 'Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL)' teachers out there to connect with, so I tried a bit harder. I found " The Modern Language Teachers Association of Queensland Inc. (MLTAQ) " on Twitter and sa...

Using Twitter to Enhance One's Teaching:                                                  MOD#6 P2      Before I even read the articles, I began to see the educational use of twitter as I explored it. I created a Twitter account years ago not long after it became extremely popular as I wanted to see what all of the hype was about. However, to my disappointment, there was nothing interesting about it. It was very similar to Facebook, if Facebook didn't have anything but its status bar. At the time, it just seemed like a platform on which to follow celebrities, which I had no interest in. I shortly deleted my account after just creating it and never went back onto the site until recently. I have to say that this is a much different Twitter now than the one I knew all those years ago. It has a new look, and for the purpose of teaching, it is just...

(MOD#5 post3) The website, " ePals " seems to be an online educational networking site that allows one to search and connect with others from all around the world who are in the same educational field as you. In addition, the website advertises and seems to offer special experiences for learning about a variety of concepts such as effective advertising and technology use. These learning experiences can be customized depending on how you would like to implement them with your students. As a world language teacher, this seems like it would be a helpful resource for connecting students in the classroom with someone who is a native speaker of the language you are teaching. I can see it being helpful for cultural exchanges too. I noticed that one of the people on the website is looking for someone who can exchange snail-mail with his students in French, which is the language the students are learning. Being able to carry out ideas like this one would be a kind of unique benefici...

REACTIONS TO VIDEOS FOR MOD#3 I recently watched this video , and there are a few things I would like to say about it. The beginning of the video discussed many of the concepts that we are learning today will be obsolete in the future, so as time goes on, so should the nature of what we teach (I found this especially true for information retrieval skills). In this way we are preparing students and giving them the tools to handle what they will encounter in the future. I really have to agree with this. As time goes on, technology and the needs of our society develop along with it. Many students graduate from high school today without the necessary skills needed to tackle the real world. Implementing this would be difficult and controversial, but we should identify what skills students will need for the future, and what skills will be obsolete, and adjust our curriculum as needed. The second half of the video talked about how we can do this and how we can engage our students in the l...