API with Language Learning

" How to capture learners' attention and keep them engaged, how to promote learning of difficult concepts, how to take advantage of the social and physical aspects of the classroom to promote reflection,... (p.68)" those are the first grand challenge for educators and also to my teaching experience.

I started working in NE as a Chinese teacher, taught K-12 in three school districts. The curiosity to Chinese language and culture stimulated students' learning interests but lacking of discourse environment and the necessity decreased the interest as time passed by. Fortunately, all three school districts facilitated laptops to each 7-12 schooler. I started my multimedia assisting language learning  journey from then on.

One app, populated to stimulated students' learning interests is Educreation.









My students use what they learn everyday to create their own stories and publish them to their parents. Parents and I have good interface conversations based on them and know the needs and supports from each other through the products on educreation as well.

TEAC882J offers many articles related to a solid learning and utilizing of API in education. I am enjoying reading them and interesting in apply more APIs to my students pragmatically.

Reference:

W., Lane, B. P., Chaudhri, H. C., Kolodner, V. K., & L., J. (2013, December 22). AI Grand Challenges for Education. AI Magazine.

Utilizing ShowMe with an ELL student

Thanks to Angie, I had an opportunity to work with an ELL student Nazo with the utilization of technology.

Nazo is a third grader from Iraq. Before attending school in America, she didn't have any learning experience in English.

I planned to use google translate as a media to start conversation with her. However, there is no Kurdish available. Originally, I thought Arabic would be similar to Kurdish, since I had not encountered these two languages before but from the geographical locations, they are probably related to each other. But I failed after tried two days. Nazo didn't give any reaction towards Arabic translation on second day. So the utilization of technology with her was in a hard time in a degree.

Based on limited conversation between us, we barely made brief introductions with ShowMe. Nazo's teacher Miss Angie Zulkoski told me that she is doing letter tracing recently. So I tried to let Nazo look for words with certain letters and she looks for the picture on web to see what the visual meaning that word delivers. Thanks to ShowMe, whose recording function records the learning process of Nazo's and her pronunciations towards the words she found. I found her voice becomes louder and louder after several days.

The pictures attached below are Nazo looking for words, search pictures on web and her products on ShowMe.

Learner Control with Multimedia Learning

With further study of utilizing technology in k-12 classes, leaner control environment becomes a teaching goal with the facilitation of technology in modern classrooms.

In my 259 sections, we've experienced how to use shorebird, prezi, google slides, powtoon, voki, cacoo, google doc, google form, kahoot, as well as various online education games. With various functions, how to make use of them to meet the goal of learner control environment?

According to researches conducted, an effective learner control environment means four aspects:
















and finally, we expect





To make an effective learner control environment happen, we have to meet two factors:

21st century Literacy

Technology enables students read and write with more creativity. In my class of Instructional Technology this week, my students are required to create their own virtual classes on Edmodo.
The classes are created based on lesson plan with google doc, outline with cacoo.com, presentation with voki.com as an audio introduction and slides with powtoon/prezi/google slides/storybird, self-designed assessment and a survey of the class teaching for students with google form.

The outline created with cacoo.com is new introduced recently. Students had made a couple outline/diagram with it last week, the attached is one example:

Another fresh product is the audio introduction with voki:

users can select characters from available options, change backgrounds and edit words with typing or speaking through microphone. For the spoken language, there are many options of languages, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean so on and so forth, besides the various languages, users can also choose accents and gender of speakers. 

Flipping Classrooms

This week I used educreations.com to create a class of "Chinese Spring Festival", the link is attached below:

https://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/chinese-spring-festival/29910413/?ref=link

This is a lead-in part of my lesson. By viewing the educreation video, students are encouraged to make their own project with shadow puppet or show me to introduce a holiday of their cultures.
While they are creating the projects, I am able to facilitate them.

Digital Citizenship

On the website of Digital Citizenship, it lists eight topics of Scope and Sequence. One of them is "Information and Literacy", under which students are capable to search pictures online based on descriptions, conduct online conversations with typing language, make their perspectives, make photos, learn about fair use and copyright, so on and so forth.

To embed the features into my classes, we implement an app called Heads Up or Charades and a website called Pedlet (pedlet.com), which is an on-line collaboration tool, in my class on Mar 4.

At beginning, students tried to play the word game with Head up, but it didn't work well while my iPad mini connecting with Apple TV, we switched it to Charades. The popularity of this sort of app was out of my expectation. my students were obsessed with it and insisted playing it after we have done three-round two-group competition. Hence, I let them work within their groups on a padlet to list what advantages of using Heads Up or Charades in the class, what are the disadvantages, how to apply this kind of app into their own classes in the future and how to deal with the disadvantages. And here are their padlets:

I really enjoyed the process that students played Charades, which, as they depicted, is an ice-breaker.
As to the use of padlet, it allows students to calm down from the fun and think about how to utilize  engaging apps into their career. This is just a start :)

Shadow Puppet Experience

This is my first try with the app "Shadow Puppet" with a 2nd grader in Rousseau Elementary school. Thanks Mrs. Kutilek and Dr. Trainin for giving me the opportunity.

The two pictures attached below are the app Shadow Puppet.

I was assigned to help a lovely girl make her animal introduction with  "Shadow Puppet". She likes dolphin and had done a writing about dolphin earlier. We collaborated to select pictures and record the voice together.

"Shadow Puppet" allows us to select pictures from website, which is convenient comparing to some apps only allowing pictures from photo library. Further more, we can edit texts and emoticon on each picture and make animation effect of them, which interests the student I helped with. As we record the voice, we can pause and move to next picture whenever needed. The girl I helped with had a good rhythm control after we finished recording at the first time and could pay attention to the instructions from Shadow Puppet. However,  when typing the text, Shadow Puppet breaks down relative long words in two lines according to the width of pictures, such as conclusion-> concl+usion, which will confuse the audience.  I am thinking of using it for a higher level study and ELL students as it is a great tool for a combination of speech practice and writing practice.