Sunday, April 24, 2011

Epals -- Making Your Classroom Unlimited

    Epals is a really useful website, which provides an excellent platform to connects teachers, students, parents and educators from around the world, enabling them to communicate and collaborate on academic and cultural projects and establish international friendships.
   When I entered Epals, what impressed me most was that it could help teachers to find a program all over the world. And what educators need to do is just clicking on one of the regions in a map of that area, and then finding on any country to see a list of potential ePals learning partners in that country. From this way, teachers could search the program which is suitable for their teaching in the world. So as far as I'm concerned, I would like to use use this function in my culture class. For example, if I teach Chinese students the custom of western Christmas, I would search some western countries to find the similar program, and let students use their English communicate with native speakers to know more information about Christmas. Through this kind of communication, not only students can improve their English, but also they would get the first-hand information to know how local people celebrate Christmas. 
    Besides searching for global classroom, I would like to find the projects which have the similar topic with me. For instance, if my topic is weather, I will search some related projects about weather. I want to know how other teachers teach students using this topic, and then improving my class. I believe I can benefit a lot from this kind of learning.
    In a word, Epals let me know what global village is.  

Friday, April 8, 2011

Puzzles in Classrooms

My Creation

I like puzzles very much. So when I found Big Huge Labs this web, I was very excited, because I could make my puzzles by myself with my favorite pictures. 
Of course, puzzles could also be used in ESL classrooms. For me, I would like to use it for second language beginners or young children. And those puzzles could not be too complicated. 
First, I would show some parts of a puzzle in the class and ask students to guess what it is. And they can also ask me some Yes/No questions. If students cannot get it, I will give them more parts. If they still have no idea, I will add more until they know what the picture is. I think this kind of classes would have a lot of fun. Not only can the activity attract students' attention, but also they would practice their English during the whole process. 
In the future, I think I would create more objects and make use of them in my classrooms.

Butterflies and Flowers
Butterflies and Flowers By Dots Treats Cupcakes 

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/August Sky.
                    August Sky By Pat Dalton
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