3 Series on Podcasting: Just try it

To podcast or not to podcast? What is it? What would I use it for in a LOTE classroom? Isn’t it just a bit too hard?

A podcast is simply an audio or video file that you can share. Podcasts usually come in an mp3 format and there are thousands out there on just about every topic imaginable – news and current affairs, technology, the world of dogs and cats, podcasts for running, language courses and so very many more. You could think of a podcast as a radio show that you can create yourself. You record what you have to say, edit it a bit, add some groovy music maybe and voila, a podcast. You don’t have to make it available online, but that is a great way to share your work with other teachers and students in other schools. You can be guaranteed that no matter what it is you podcast about there will be someone out there who will be interested in listening to it.

As for using podcasting in the LOTE classroom – what a fabulous tool! So far, I have used podcasting to record my students speaking Chinese and put these recordings on the classroom blog so their parents can hear what they can do. My Gr 6 class worked in small groups and created podcasts about the Great Wall of China. You can hear them here. Other ways I’d like to try using podcasting are:

Getting students to create audio lessons for other year levels at our school and at other schools
For higher year levels, recording that sort of lesson content that can be a bit laborious to go through in class, leaving time to play more games and spend time talking to the kids about how they are going with their language learning. Recording this sort of content gives the students the chance to listen to it several times at their own pace and gain a deeper understanding. That way we can use class time to answer questions and have discussions about what we are learning that we may not have otherwise got around to if we had had to spend the time going over the content for the first time.
Getting students to create podcasts where they chat to or interview other students about what interests them about China.

Podcasting is so much easier than it sounds, and really is totally accessible to anyone who is interested. All you really need to know is

how to make a recording
turn it into an mp3 file
and if you want to, publish it to the web.

There are several ways to do these things, but I will show you one that will get you started and creating some pretty cool podcasts! All the software you need is free and I’ve created an instructional video that will help you along the way. If you are interested in giving podcasting a go, stay tuned for the next posts in this 3 Series on Podcasting, and for my next podcast where you will hear me interview someone who has won an award for his use of podcasting. The power of the pod is on it’s way to you.

To read more on podcasting and to find out how to make one yourself, check out these posts: DIY Podcasting!, Podcasting: Some Groovy Resources and Where to Find More, Making Teaching More Human (technoLOTE podcast Episode 2).

3 Series on Collaboration: I Will If You Do

Collaborative Project Ideas for the Language Classroom (and other classrooms – it’s all adaptable!)

I’ve written a couple of posts on collaboration and it was also the topic of my first podcast. So, to round it all off here are some resources and ideas for collaborative projects.

SOME GREAT COLLABORATIVE RESOURCES:

wikis for keeping up with your project and sharing things in written form. You can creat your own wiki at Wikispaces, pbwiki or Wetpaint.
Skype and a webcam if you want to have live conversations with with the other class
Google Docs if you want to create resources together. Google Docs and Spreadsheets is free web-based word documents and spreadsheets which allow you to share and collaborate online in real time.
Classroom 2.0 and other ning networks for getting in touch with other teachers who are keen to collaborate
An imagination – no matter what you think of, there will be someone keen to work with you!

IDEAS:

Teaching other classes some of the language you are learning. A great authentic audience task for your students!
Assessing each other’s work. Your class could send their recorded reading to another class for assessment, or their writing etc.
Sharing writing. A favourite is writing about a teddy or some other character and then sending it to the other school for them to write about it’s adventures.
Sharing games – create a class games list between you and use Skype calls to hold games sessions.
A collaborative research project, a Flat Classroom. Students could work in teams on 4 (2 from one school 2 from another), communicating through email and a wiki, and put together a research project on any given topic. Check out the link above to see what’s happening around the world with Flat classroom projects.
Share artwork created in your LOTE room or other classrooms.
Create online slideshows to share with VoiceThread. They could become an introduction to your project or another way of presenting a lesson to you partner classroom.

Here is a great example of a collaborative project. Voices Of The World was created by Sharon Tonner and the result of September’s Task was a group of Vokis (an avatar that you can add a voice recording to) recorded by students from all around the world. It is a great project and my kids had fun doing it. We’re looking forward to this months task which is singing our national anthem for the rest of the world! Love it! You can check out the Voices of The World Vokis here. If you’d like to join the Voices of the World ning network you can find it here.

So, get in to some collaboration with another class and let me know how you go! Stay tuned for results of a couple of collaborative projects I’ve got in mind…

Where in the world will you go?

To read more about collaboration projects and ideas you might like to check out these posts: A Virtual Tour at Midnight, Typing Furiously, and Talk Swap – webcams, Skype and 4 Chinese kids.

Also, check out the first episode of the technoLOTE podcast which is called Classroom Collaboration the Ning Way.

Touchy Feely Language – literally!

One learning style that probably could to be more focussed on in the LOTE classroom is that of the kinaesthic learner. According to Wikipedia, Kinesthetic learning is a teaching and learning style in which learning takes place by the student actually carrying out a physical activity, rather than listening to a lecture or merely watching a demonstration. Students with this predominant learning style are natural discovery learners; they have realizations through doing, as opposed to having thought first before initiating action.

How do you get students to touch and feel language and to create it in order to help them engage with it and learn it? Here are some suggestions:

1. Match sticks and /or playdough Give each student a bunch of coloured match size sticks (you can find these in the local $2 shop or similar places) or a lump of playdough (local supermarket) and ask them to make whatever word you say as quickly as they can. This works really well for Chinese characters. If you are teaching a non-character based language, you might get the students to make the whole word, or just the first and last letters, or if the language has any sort of accents and inflections, you might get them just to make that part.

2. Air writing When you are introducing students to new words or characters, you could get them to write it in the air rather than straight on to a page in their books. It provides a different and often amusing way for students to start ‘feeling’ the shape of the new words or characters and allows those kineasthetic learners to move their whole arm which may help them to make more sense of what they are learning.

3. Character Relay This works really well with Chinese characters or shorter words. Divide students in to four teams, each lining up facing the board. Students are not allowed to turn around or to speak. As the teacher, go to the back and show the student at the back of each line a flashcard with a character or word on it. The student must then ‘write’ the character or word on the back of the student in front of them, who in turn writes on the back of the student in front of him or her, and so the message gets passed down the line. When it reaches the student at the front, that student must then either say the character or word, or rush to the board to write it first. The first team to correctly write or say the word or character gets a point.

As far as characters go, this game is good for getting students to pay attention to stroke order. It helps kinaesthetic learners by giving them an opportunity to stand up and move a bit more than they normally would when writing, which can be imporant for them.

4. Swat!

This is a flashcard game that involves fly swats. The class or group if divided into two teams. One student from each team takes a swat, comes to the middle and kneels beside the pool of flashcards that have been layed out. The teacher (or other students) then calls out one of the cards (in the LOTE or in English to test translation) and the student who wins that card is the one who swatted it first. Students should start with the swats held up beside their heads. This game can get furious and loud, but it’s great fun! I find that even the most reluctant students are very keen to get involved with this one. Do be careful that the only things that get swatted are the flashcards, not yourself or any of the students!

5. Human Sentences

You’ll need to make up some sentences on flashcards – putting one word per card. One word typed per A4 page on landscape layout works well. Then choose as many students as there are words in the sentence and give them each a card. Tell them in English what the sentence is and then let them move themselves into position, holding the flashcard up in front of them. An alternative is that you could have the class tell the students which order they need to be in. This activity tests students’ knowledge of sentence structure as well as giving them to opportunity to move around to build the sentence properly.

The above games and activities are from a book called ‘Lai Wan You Xi‘ written by Margaret Furay and Deborah Kessler, and published by the Curriculum Corporation. Lai Wan You Xi is the Chinese version. This book is also available for Indonesian (Ayo Bermain) and for Japanese (Asobo Manabo).

6. 10 second Human Characters or Objects

I have adapted this activity from a book called 101 Drama Games and Activities by David Farmer.

Get students in to groups of 4-6. Call out a character or object in your target language and give them 10 seconds to create it using using only the people in their group. This can be a highly entertaining activity and can be great for kinaesthetic leaners as they have to literally be part of building the word, character or object.

7. A Few Other Things to Do

Get students to make words or characters out of strips of paper, gluing it to a piece of card and displaying it around the room.
For those students who find it hard to sit still, you can get student to work in pairs – one sitting at a desk and one moving around the room to collect clues, or snippets of sentences that they have to bring back to the other student who then uses that information somehow. This could be good for some sort of dictation activity or sentence structure activity.
If you have an Interactive Whiteboard, create slides that have sorting and matching activities where students can move things around the board.
Put students in groups, giving each group a set of small bit of paper each with a character or word on it. (All groups need to have the same words). Then call out a sentence in either your target language or English and the students have to work together as a team to put the bits of paper in the correct order. Just moving things around a table rather than writing them down can do wonders to help the kinaesthetic learner.

If you’ve got any activities for kinaesthetic learners that you would like to share, please get in touch as I’d love to read them and include them on this site!

For more LOTE games check out the post called The Polish Monkey King and also the LOTE Games page.

What Language Teaching Is All About

At the start of the week I was involved in a meeting at the University of South Australia that focussed on professional standards for language teachers and what that specifically meant for teachers of Chinese. There was a lot of important talk about what exactly teachers should aim for if they want to be considered to be an accomplished language teacher. You can read these standards here. This all of course got me to thinking what teaching languages is and is not about for me personally, and here is what I came up with.

My overall aim as a language teacher is to be knowledgeable enough to foster an interest and engagement in 2nd language learning amongst students. For me, language learning and teaching is about interacting with the language, not about teaching fluency necessarily. It’s about communicating, not explicit grammar lessons, and it’s about understanding another culture and language system, not about getting language ‘right’ all the time. Not to say that things like fluency, correct grammar and getting the language ‘right’ are things that should never be considered and aimed for, but essentially I believe the other points are more important.

In just two classes a week, it is near impossible to teach students to speak a language fluently, so getting them interested enough and giving them to skills to learn it beyond school should they choose to is what I aim for. If they enjoy coming to my classes and are willing to give things a go, then I’m happy with that.

To read about a special year for languages, check out this post: A Special Year for Languages and how all teachers can help.

Classroom Collaboration The Ning Way

This is technoLOTE’s first podcast. Click on the badge below and have a listen to me interviewing myself about collaboration! Or you can find the podcast in iTunes. Just search ‘technolote’ and then you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit as it won’t be the first one that comes up! Well not yet anyway…