final project

Activity 6 reflection

Group Code: 5pdpjv

Edmodo is a free service website which can provide teachers an opportunity to alleviate from the stressed paper work. It is a network which used for teacher/student interaction. It has many educational functions, such as note, alert, assignment, quiz, and poll.

For teachers, we can create a group, and students can use the group code to join in. From that time on, a collaborative classroom is built. It allows us to manage class content more like a platform. We can arrange assignments, conduct quizzes and events, provide files for students, facilitate other learning experiences with students. For example, if you want to send an assignment. All the work you need to do is write down the title, description, due date. If necessary, you can add links or some materials from the library, then click the “send” button, and then you are ready to go. Teachers can also invite other teacher to join the group, sharing educational content and resources, exchanging mind, picking up useful experience and new technologies from each other.

For students, they can use Edmodo to take quizzes, ask teachers questions, message other students, interact in the public discussion spaces, and avoid missing the due date to submit assignments. In the students page, there are links to “Calendar”, “Grades” and “Library”. “Calendar” can help students to have a clear about the day for quiz, assignment, and some events. “Grades” is used to check points. “Library” is the place to find all the files and links the teachers or group members sent to you. As a student, you can also add important files to your library.

Today, some students use Edmodo as Facebook to search and add friends. That is exactly its social function, and that is why it’s so popular among teachers and students.  

Activity# 5 reflection

Screencast is a useful tool for both the teachers and the students. It is a screen recording accompanied by an audio commentary done by the user explaining what is happening on the screen as it happens. It will record your mouse movements and everything you do on the screen while you describe the process.

For the students, especially the students who are very busy during their daytime, they may appreciate the opportunity to go over the lessons brought by the screencast on line. Students can review course materials outside of the classroom, at their own convenience. If they are confused about some theory or concept, they can watch the video several times and stop the video anytime they want to establish their understanding. I found this structured approach very useful, in particular with students that perhaps need special focus. What’s more, students can use the screencast to get the access to lectures if they want to take some distance classes. In a word, screencast provide the students an active, visual resource outside the class. By watching screencasts enable students see every step in great detail, and they can take note of anywhere they want.

For the teachers, screencast offers a positive improvement. First, presenting materials in such a fashion way can make the lesson more engaging and help the explainer adjust to different learning styles. Secondly, the online character of screencast can help teachers to save time in some way. After posting the screencasts online, the students can watch them when the teacher is not available to answer their questions. Last but not least, teachers can use screencasts to explain in details what may be confusing to the students. Students perform well in the class can just skip the part they know well and leave space for the other students to learn better.

Considering it benefits both to the teachers and the students, I would like to try to apply it in my teaching practice appropriately in the future.

Activity 4 reflection

During activity 4, we learnt some new technologies that can be used in our daily teaching practice, such as Edmodo, Twitter, Flickr, Diigo and Socrative .

Edmodo is similar to Canvas . It is a kind of social learning platform for teachers, students, and parents. Teachers can use it to post assignments, grades, quizzes  and whatever they what to pass on to their students. Students can use it to submit their homework, view their grades, leave comments to the teachers, and discuss with other students. Once we sign up a free account, we can then create groups for our students, and then we get a code. We give it to the students.  If they want to become a part of the group, they just need to register for a free account with the group code. Here is the beauty of  Edmodo comes in. Whenever a student joins a group, a parents code is generated. This allows their parents to sign up for a free account and they can go in any time they want to see what their child is doing. It is a very easy website that can be used to associate the students, teachers and parents intimately.

Twitter is also a social networking website. We can use it to connect what’s most important to us, such as following our friends, experts, favorite actors, writers and so on. Once we follow someone, we can see all of the tweets from the folks we are following as they come in. We can also use it to post our own tweets, leave comments to other folks. It is a great website to connect and learn with others who have the same interests with us. So as a teacher, we can encourage our students to use twitter in the classroom. Encouraging students to answer questions through tweets, it will help the shy students to participate. Students can get answers not just from the teacher, but from all their classmates, it will also help to save the teacher time.

Flickr is a photo sharing-community that contains millions of photographs. Teachers can use flickr to help students understand and create an animate class. Let’s say, I am giving a composition class. I can use flickr to combine the writing assignment with individual pictures with multiple pictures which will help to give the students a visual impression. Once we sign up an account, we can download or upload any photos that interest us or we can just share the photo to twitter. We can also use the google map to show the place we took the photos. Pretty cool!

Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows users to bookmark, highlight, share or take sticky note. We can use it to save websites and not worrying about losing them while changing another computer. By saving the bookmarks on the website, other people will be able to see your bookmark on a particular topic, and of course we can see theirs. We can publish a bookmark to our blog, twitter or something like that. We can also join a group or create our own groups. If we use it the classroom, we can invite our students to join, and bookmark some useful sites or take sticky notes there. So the students can check their blog to explore the newest bookmarked sites you have set.

Socrative is a website that helps teachers to engage and assess the class with educational activities on cellphones, kindles, ipads or computers. It is a smart students’ response system that empowers teacher to engage their classroom though a few of educational games. Teachers can set up a room and a group of questions for their students. They can use it to measure their students in real time.

We will feel the amazing power of those technologies with education when we really try to use them in our classroom.

http://www.diigo.com/user/yunhe824

https://twitter.com/yunhe1987

Activity 3 reflection

For activity 3, we learned something about RSS in Google Reader. It is an aggregator which has a lot of feeds. The feeds could be blog posts, videos, articles, news, photos, and so on. We can choose some feeds that interest us, create a bundle and post the link of the bundle on our blogs or wikis. What’s amazing is that if the author of the site changes something on the site, it automatically updated on the blog who subscribe to that feed.

When using RSS in education, I would say that both of the teachers and students will benefit a lot. Firstly, students can easily keep pace with the recourses in time that posted to the blog through the RSS feeds. RSS can also help them to concentrate on the resources that associate with their research study. For example, the students who are taking a political science class have found many websites or blogs on the internet that are publishing some interesting events. It is almost impossible for them to click those sites every time they updated. However, it is much easier to go to one site to read all of the new information. As we all know, online resources have flourished during recent years. It will take a lot of time to search online every time they start their research, especially for the students in university. So RSS will help to save much time and energy. Secondly, teachers can use the RSS feeds to select some useful recourse which will make the students concentrate on their school work. It can be used as guidance or a class preview for students. Children, especially young guys can easily be distracted by some funny pictures or interesting games on the internet, they will go any direction besides of the study which will out of the teacher’s control. RSS can help to solve this problem that plagued the teacher who advocate to use technology in education.

Activity reflection 2

From this activity, I really feel the magic of “sum of human knowledge”.  Unlike blogs belonging to individual, wiki is updated by many people which may has multiple authors. The people work in a group or team need to cooperate with each other. It is an easy website where everyone can easily post and share information. 

What is interesting to me is that people can easily find who has contributed to the wiki for a group work, just by clicking the “recent changes”.  This will effectively avoid “free rider”. Imaging using wiki as a teaching tool in my classroom, I am sure there will be no student complaining to me that “John always utilizes our achievements to win the teacher’s praise” or “William reaps without sowing. I don’t want to join his group” or “Miss He, We don’t want to work with Mike, because he always drags us back as a team member” and so on.

Like blogs, people from different parts of the world can also work on the same subject on wikis, it is a flexible tool which can be used by a wide range of authors. Since collaborative is its typical features, we can draw on the wisdom of the masses which will help the teachers and students to improve their job without a barrier. However, at the same time, precisely because of its collaborative, some teachers may get lost when using a wiki in his class. They can not put themselves in a correct position in the classroom.  Whatever, wiki will bring us a lot of conveniences on the whole. I will try to use wiki as a education setting in my classroom to help the students improve the ability of cooperation in the future, and keep pace with the modern technical education.

wiki link :http://21stcenturywikiclassroom.wikispaces.com/Languages

wiki name: minxu

Activity reflection 1

Blogs are the products of the technology.  It can be easily created everywhere around the world. It is also a website that has the integration of photos, words and videos, etc.  Students, especially those young guys who are easily be attracted by the dramatic things will like the way to use blogs as a part of their curriculum.

There are a lot of digital photos which will help the students to broaden their knowledge. For instance, a geology teacher can use the powerful image resources to show what’s the north pole look like instead of boring description. A history teacher can also use a blog to show some valuable photos that have been taken many years ago. Then, let the students give their own comments on the historical events and exchange their minds with other students, and the comments will never fade from the memory as time goes on.

Nowadays, teachers are liberate from the exhausting  blackboard writing, they can post the most important point on the blog, communicate with their students through the blog. I believe that will bring more convenience to some students and leave no space for those students who do not want to finish the homework on time. As for me, I was a Chinese teacher for the last three years. If I used blogs to post the assignment, I think there was no students come to my office, and explained to me that he had left his homework  at home or the homework has been destroyed by the younger sister. At the same time, I would like to use blog to explain some exposition, add some vivid pictures to narration, ask my students to find resources to historic articles, encourage students to write their own articles on blogs and so on.

What’s more. Because of its timeliness and easily be updated. If there is an inspiration, students can catch it in time and use a telephone or an ipad to post their ideas on their blog wherever they are. And also, it provides a chance for the students to talk with their teachers and classmates after class, so there will be enough interactions which will also help to strengthen knowledge and expand practices. When comes to some puzzles, students can browse blogs to reference a large number of literature before doing  their own research.

It is obviously that videos bring us a lot of convenience, it help us to broaden our horizon. We can just stay at home and know what had happened around the world.  When it put into use in education, the students can benefit a lot. As we know, there are not equal teaching resources in the national average. When the student wants to take a class from an expert that is far away from his hometown, you will find that using a blog is so fantastic. That’s what we called distance education. Another example comes to my mind that trace back to my childhood, at that time when we were taking a music class, the teacher always sat in the front of the classroom, gave us  a very simple instrument performance. However, using blog in a music class is much different, teachers can show the most famous player performing in a resplendent and magnificent concerts to let the students feel the artistic charm in the classroom.