Blog for LAI590

(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...

(MOD#5 post2)      Being a foreign language teacher, it's important that I keep up in the language that I am teaching. After all, content knowledge is one of the key components of being a good teacher. One helpful foreign language social networking site is hellolingo .com. It's free to create an account and it enables one to search for native speakers in the language he or she is learning or wanting to communicate in and speak with them via text or voice chat. The website has speakers from a large variety of languages. In addition, you can search for others who are learning the language that you are to gain helpful advice from them on good methods for learning or practicing the language. Your students can use this website as well to practice the language you are teaching as a way to gain person to person practice.

CONNECTIVISM (MOD#5 post1) Today, a learner is like a GPS. If it wants to find a destination, it has to know the correct routes to get there. A typical GPS has thousands of roads stored on it and to get to the correct destination, it has to sort between all of the unnecessary roads and the roads that lead to that destination. Then, based on that information, it chooses the quickest route among them to get to where it was asked to go. Another critical key point about a GPS as well is that it needs to be kept up-to-date. It may know how to get to a destination today, but in the future, because of road changes and changes to the environment, if it's not kept current, it may not be able to get us to the same destination using the same route as it was able to before or there may be an easier and faster route it would not know about. Therefore, it is important that it is given updates, so that it stays efficient and doesn't fall into obsoletion. If you didn't understand the ...

Diigo VS. Pinterest   Diigo and Pinterest are both very useful websites. They are similar in many aspects, but the main difference in purpose between them is that in Diigo, one mainly bookmarks websites to his or her page while in Pinterest, one mainly bookmarks images or pictures to his or her page. Some of the useful similarities between them is that one can share what one saves to his or her page with others, and follow (or be followed by) others with similar interests or posts. This is really helpful as it allows us to have easier access to information or resources without having to go to multiple locations to search for it. Even by posting or saving particular articles and images to our page, the websites recognize what we are interested in and follow up with recommendations. Other similarities that are mutually shared on both sites include being able to post comments about particular articles or images. Though I was unable to find a method of sending a message directly...

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...

USING BLOGS FOR STUDENT EDUCATION: - Depending on the subject area, teachers can make use of blogs for their students in different ways to supplement their learning. In my case, as a Korean language teacher I believe I could use blogs with my students to develop their Korean writing skills. As a daily assignment, I could post questions in Korean that my students would have to answer in Korean. I would include a criterion or rubric for students to follow when answering, such as 'respond with one sentence with no less than five words and using at least two vocabulary words covered in class. Each response must be different.' In this way, students will have to be creative as they would not be able to respond with the same answer as another student that already posted. Also, every student will be able to read the responses left by the other students along with my input for each answer, so that they can gain a broader understanding of the language. For example, say I post the questi...