Pay Attention

The following presentation from Teachertube draws our attention to one important feature of today's learners, the digital learners. Since most of today's students can appropriately be labeled as "Digital Learners", why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices?
In China, the problem has not become eminent yet as most college students are not well off enough to possess Ipod or other new tech stuff. But still, it poses the inevitable question we must face one day - how to incorporate IT in our every day teaching? This presentation was created in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching.

Photo Caption Contest

Last week's Photo Caption Contest failed to attract any comment from readers. Maybe I could do better this week. But in case it happens again, I am attaching the original caption with the picture for reference.

This Jaybird picture was shot by Noël Lee, who loves Jaybirds for their personalities. If you view this picture large, you can actually see the bird's face and the sky reflected in its beak.

The original caption reads:"Couldn't You at Least Break It Off the Cob for Me???"

E-zine

I read an interesting post today on Read/Write Web about the evolution of magazine. All you have to do is to click the cover, turn the page and zoom in/out to read. The whole demonstration reminds me of the saying: everything is possible, and the impossible just takes longer.

I do foresee a multimodal gadget that everyone is going to have in the near future, which is a combination of cell phone, TV, computer, camera, book, newspaper, magazine, etc. You just name it and it is all in one. I wonder what it will be called and how small it can be?

Did You Know?

This Did you know video recently is the most popular educational video on Youtube, which is also known as Shift Happens. It talks about globalization in the information age. Tell me how you like it.

Audio Slideshow

Among other choices of movie, website, newsletter, the final IT project show saw many audio slideshows. I really enjoyed the creativity of my classmates, whose final products, such as Mer-people, Cinderella, were exceptionally good in their storyline design.
I happened to watch another good example of audio slide show, The Sound of Music, which was about one of the most enduringly popular films of all time. The slideshow attempts to explain why the movie was so successful.
This was one of the doable projects that I consider assigning to my students when I go back to China. I am expecting to see a flood of amazing products from them.

SoftChalk LessonBuilder

I have registered three E-training lessons: E-lesson Builder, Photo Editing and Enhancing and Digital Photography. In this first lesson, a software named SoftCalk LessonBuilder was introduced.

SoftChalk LessonBuilder is a powerful web lesson editor that allows us to easily create engaging, interactive web lessons for our e-learning classrooms. It has a very simple and intuitive interface. There are menus, then a simple toolbar (where we have access to the most used functionality in SoftChalk LessonBuilder while creating an e-lesson). I was thinking this had a great potential for teachers in China. We could easily arrange an E-listening lesson using this software. At the same time, we dont have to worry about whether students are listening to the course materials or not for we can ask them to finish all the questions and send their grades to us.

Studying here in NIE, we have e-learning week when we dont have to be physically in the classroom to learn. I am thinking the same thing for my students back in China. Maybe it is time for us to abandon the traditional listening lessons but adopt this e-learning approach. Instead of teacher's talking most of the time in a listening class, we can give time and freedom to our students. We should be a guide to facilitate students' learning instead of teaching listening. According to my own English learning experience, there is not much a teacher can do in improving a student's listening skills than giving them plenty of time to practice. I will definitely give it a try when I get back to China.