Monday, April 25, 2011

Exploring the ePals

The website I'm going to introduce today is called ePals Global Community. ePals provides collaborative technology to help the schools, teachers and learners to connect with each other. It gives students the chances to learn under a intercultural context, working along with peers from other parts of the world. In other words, the students are learning within an authentic context. For the schools and teachers, ePals can be a chance for them to look for cooperation, or opportunity to exchange educational ideas, or even friends.

With the help of ePals, teachers can set up a project which provides the students with opportunities to research on a topic with peers from other places and culture. Students can email their peers, exchanging information and ideas with each other. From my point of view, on one hand, it is a GREAT environment for the students to learn because the input is quite comprehensive in this situation; on the other hand, when the students, especially those ESL/EFL students, are working on the projects, they are practicing their language skills at the same time. This is the feature I like most about ePals. In the future, I would love to use it in my classroom. I will try to choose a intercultural topic (holidays, etc), and encourage my students to communicate with voices from all over the world (introducing each other about their favorite holidays and making friends). I believe it will be a good chance for them to learn.

Another feature I love is the virtual field trip series. In this section, there are a lot of video clips introducing different places. The several clips I checked out are all made by the students themselves, and they are so cute! I feel like I'm there with all those lovely students. It's amazing because probably you cannot go there by yourself, but with the help of this feature, you get the chance to see the world from another perspective. Vice versa, I'd like to encourage my students to make videos themselves to introduce their hometown. I think they will like it. Also I am thinking 


This clip was made by the students from Ola School, Idaho USA.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

A Happy day --- Something you can create with Bookr



I recently created this using Bookr. And I will use it in my class. Because we are learning how to describe feelings and emotions now, I can use this storybook to help the students review related words, and provide them with some authentic context through telling them the story and showing them the pic book. With pictures, it is much more possible for the students to get the meaning of the whole story and each word; on the other hand, the students are probably intersted in the storybook and pictures so they are motivated more to learn.

I do feel it is a good way use picture tools like Flickr and Bookr in the classroom. I am pretty sure that my students will like them. Why don't you have a try?:) I'm convinced that incorpotating these things in the classroom will lead the teacher and students to an unexpected beautiful place

LIKE THIS ;-P


a little slice of heaven, and a little bit of you by notsogoodphotography
Attribution License

Burges Window --- Example of using a Flickr picture and attributing it to the creator


Bruges window by Monosnaps
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This picture is called Burges Window, and it was created by Monosnaps. The picture is retrieved from A Flickr CC search toy

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