A digital story - four skills in language learning.

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In this video, I discussed four skills that I will be focusing on during my lessons. Since this is an ESL classroom for adults, I think that students need to be fluent in all areas of language skills, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. In terms of that, this video will work as an introduction in my first class to show and emphasize the four skills as a goal for this course.

A comment on Mrs. Yollis’ Classroom Blog Post: Learning how to comment!

At Mrs. Yollis’ Classroom Blog, I found an interesting post that describes how to comment on the classroom blog for students who might be unfamiliar with the world of blogging.  The post starts with a kind explanation about the aspects of blogging and what students can do in the space. It also presents some tips for creating a quality comment and provides a lot of beneficial information with interesting images and video. The instruction seems to be easy to follow and clear enough for those who are “novices to the world of blogging”.

                                                       

                           

 Since this is a digital learning space, it is necessary for students to be able to compose a comment in order to participate in the class for their learning. Thus prior to the assessment of students’ activities, giving them a clear instruction of how to utilize the blog is one of the tasks that teacher must to do for students’ effective learning. In terms of that, I found Mrs. Yollis’ post very valuable for me to develop my own digital learning space more efficiently as well as for her students.

(To view the post, go to
http://yollisclassblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/learning-how-to-comment.html)

Students are Eager for Digital Learning!

     K-12 students today are using Internet for most of the time they spend a day. They blog, play games, write a letter, listen to the music, and watch TV online. These things happen all the time in students’ lives and the Internet is always involved in their digital activities.

     However, students still want to learn things more digitally, getting away from taking classes in which technology does not exist and makes them to merely pay attention to teachers. This is not the way of creative learning that we expect from our educational system either. What we really need for today's digital learners is to provide them a digital classroom. In this type of classroom, learners will finally be comfortable and happy with learning and thinking creatively. 

     Therefore, it is an important task for teachers to be able to plan their lessons involved in technology so that learners could consider learning as an interesting process of constructing knowledge, just like playing with the Internet. We can only make it possible within the active engagement of technology.  The video, A Vision of K-12 Students Today, has a great inspiration in students' desire for digital learning.

(To view this video, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8)