ePals

I love this website because it is a real learning community to me, involving teachers, students, schools and parents! Students are the center of the community. Activity Theory in sociocultural theories suggests the integral role of community in the learning process. Students learn through social interactions and develop themselves in the process. Community is what a student live in and conduct social interactions in, so when the community is recreated online, it is really helpful for students to learn. ePals has different classrooms that students may choose and it also has a special blogging space for students to interact with teachers and with each other, which I was excited to find out！
I am extremely excited to learn about the global community project of ePal! Students in different parts of world may get together in one classroom and learn from each other! This was a huge step forward for the real global voice and the concept of jumping from one flock another. I couldn't wait to introduce the website to my students. I wish one day I could establish a classroom there where my students may communicate with native English speakers who are interested in Chinese culture.

Google+ & Class 2.0

I tried two “community” websites, Google+ Communities and Classroom 2.0.

Google+ Communities is kind of handy, since I am already a Google+ user. I was recommended with many users I had contacted with, which was cool to see some familiar faces. I joined three communities, TED, ELLs and FLT. Members of communities may share texts, pictures, videos… everything with other members, and they can comment on others’ posts. Interactions are realized in comments. I also tried to establish a community myself and posed the first entry. The whole layout was clear and neat. The community can be public or private, which means you may get to decide who can be in your circles. I believe that it would be a wonderful place for interaction journal keeping between students and the teacher. Students may publish whatever they want to share, and the teacher would interact with them in comments. Dialogue journals are often used inn SCT, which I have always wanted to try. The biggest problem here is that Google is blocked for Chinese users, so my students wouldn't be able to use the tool. What a pity! 

Class 2.0 is a comprehensive forum community for participants. One may find everything there, forum, books, audio resources, projects, conferences... I believe it is a wonderful source for us teachers to exchange ideas with peers and learn from them. It is not a student-teacher interactive community, though. Unlike the interactions realized in comments on Google+, interactions on Class 2.0 are realized in traditional forum. Users follow each entry and interact with each other under one entry, one after another. Users may check on the poster's all discussions and follow her and add her to the contact. It is a traditional way of forum community, helpful for group discussions. I may find interesting sparkles in the discussions, but I will not use it as an interactive forum with my students. 

classroom 2.0

Invisible doctrine: the nightmare we don’t know we had

Future Learning Documentary

Every time I think about doctrine, order, power and authority, I would naturally play the “China” card, since we all know what the country has been through, thousands of years’ (still ongoing) centralization which is deeply rooted in education as well. However, I am not going to reflect on culture and policy today. Instead, I will take a retrospect journey back to my own teaching today. Have I ever realized that the key words of Foreign Language Educations are not only language but also education? Have I secretly criticize some other teachers who would do things differently or whose English proficiency is questionable? Have I even felt lucky when I got away from students’ questioning? Have I refused to use technology in classroom since technology has never been my thing and it would be too challenging and troublesome for me to go through it?

Unfortunately, I would have to say that I didn't do such a good job being a teacher. There is “traditional” idea in China that those who have better language proficiency would be better teachers. That’s why I decided to teach in the first place—people around me encouraged me to do so, since they kept saying: “why don't you do it? You majored in English!” So I did it. Since I majored in English in college and I also have a Master’s Degree in translation studies, I assumed that I would do well in the profession. That is the first doctrine I followed that I didn't know. Now I realized that the assumption was invalid at all. It’s natural to believe that a person who can speak a totally different language would teach the ability to others and she or he would be a good teacher. But actually, it is not.

Teachers have the power in classroom in China. When students misbehave in classrooms, like playing cellphones or iPads, they would be punished for that. Seldom would teachers talk about what students are doing with their electronic devices, let alone that teachers would encourage students to learn using such devices. Teachers would follow their own teaching plans, which is much easier for them to do; they wouldn't even want to share the plans with other teachers. Like bosses in classrooms, teachers are teaching from a distance far from students. That is the second doctrine that I didn't know before.

Above all, the biggest doctrine I followed but I didn't know is that education is a job. If it is a job to me, I would take the road which would spare me of all the troubles or difficulties on my side. That is the why I didn't use technology much in classroom, since it is hard to me, and more importantly, I followed the invisible doctrines. I always tell my students to open their eyes, their hearts and free themselves from ideological shackles. But I didn't practice what I preached. The video woke me up from dreams in which I followed all these invisible doctrines. I want my students to be free, but before that I need to free myself. There is no personal excuses for teachers to adopt one method over another just because the latter is inconvenient or new to them. Teachers are humans with personal preferences or strengths for sure, but such personal preferences can never be the reasons why we can stay in our comfort zones, neglect what would benefit students better and follow our own doctrines. The new era of foreign language education should be focused on the word “education”, for example, how we can help students acquire language skills using a wide variety of tools instead of cramming them with what we know about the languages.  Teachers who can feed students with the best organized grammatical rules and tips for examinations are not good teachers to me. The real good ones are those who would lead students through the learning process. Therefore, I am no longer a follower of the doctrines I had: I don't believe that someone who have better English levels can teach better and I don't think teachers should involve too many personal preferences in education. Teaching is education, no matter what subject we teach. As long as it is about education, we need to fight against doctrines built inside ourselves before we can teach students to fight against their own doctrines.  

Two ways to use blogs in language education

I taught and will teach writing to students. So I mainly reflect on how to use blogs on writing classes. I don’t think we can use blogs too much IN a typical Chinese writing class which is too large to have students use blogs in a limited time-frame. We may use blogs in writing workshops which may also take place in classrooms yet are not considered as typical Chinese writing classes. I will talk about two ways I would use blogs with my students outside the physical classroom.

1. Blog is a forum. Students may post anything in English, for example, stories they like, poems they wrote, interesting news recently, their own feelings and confusions and so on. Others can comment and interact with the bloggers. It is like the way we are doing at LAI 590. I would suggest students to create things of their own not only to practice their writing skills but also to attract more comments. For example, students may keep diaries on their blogs, describe interesting photos they took and expressed their confusions about life. Since I think I will be teaching teenagers, I believe they have a lot of confusions to talk about.

2. Blog is a wiki. I may create a public blog for a workshop or a class. Students can write together. It is a cooperative writing blog. Students contribute a part of one task, mostly a story, individually. It could be fun. I always want to try that with Chinese students. I did it once with one student, but not on blog but on paper. We wrote a story together: at first it was an ordinary daily conversation between two girls, then it lost control and turned into a horror story. The twists were fun. I want to use a public blog as a big platform to involve more students on such tasks.

Performance indicators: Standard ESL.1.5-8.2

Students will listen, speak, read and write in English for literary response, enjoyment and expression.