Teachers Guide on The Use of Graphic Organizers in The Classroom

Teachers Guide on The Use of Graphic Organizers in The Classroom

Condense the sense

Waiting for an invite from strawberry but have created a news paper and embedded it on a new page in this blog. At this stage I'll just have a weekly paper and I can probably stop buying The Australian on saturdays- it is a woeful, prejudiced and opinionated rag! Actually,  there was one article I found interesting about collaborative consumerism which reported the work of Rachel Botsman. Its all about how social media is allowing people to share resources like homes, offices, cars rather than just owning everything outright- bit of a new take on our relationship to the means and forces of production. I think I'm going have a look on twitter too.

I did not find TopicMarks comfortable to use and it was frustrating trying tp think of links etc to put in but I did find newsorganiser http://www.newsorganizer.com/ useful and i put its rss feed into wibbitz

Also I came across the peeplo search engine http://au.peeplo.com/ wich searches through blogs and domains too and it has a widget to enable sharing social media.

Progress

My students are beginning to use prezi.com:

Chinese Assignment on Prezi

Chinese Assignment on Prezi

Search Engines.....

Kngine proved to be a bit of a dud as they must have moved it from an online thing to a mobile app thing so all I could get was the advert for downloading the app to the iphone which in my case is a work one and I need some code that I don't have because basically these downloads cost heaps apparently. I liked the little video and tweeted it. Anyway, I have never been able to download an app; what's on the phone is what i have. So maybe I need a personal mobile....? Anyway I continued with my search terms "learning Chinese pedagogy". First I checked out Twurdy and saved to Diigo and also used bit.ly. Through Twurdy, here is an article I found from another search engine, for free articles, www.articlebase.com . I wasn't keen on Blekko as it tended to throw up commercial textbooks, software or institutions but I did like this media article: Found this general article about
growth of Chinese

:

View Chinese as a foreign language and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.
The Dewey Digger and the Wolfram Alpha weren't super helpful for the topic I was focusing on although i did find an interesting article on ERIC through D/digger: Found this from a Podobook on podcastco from Big Shed audio documentaries. it has nothing to do with Chinese but it caught my attention!

I'm not certain which engines are best: I think it depends on purpose but Twurdy and Blekko are probably better for more specific inquiries unless your looking for journals/articles/books which might be more suited to ERIC and other such archives.

Had a look for some other engines and came across http://www.mamma.com/  and located this opinion piece about learning Chinese and yes there is a reference to pedagogy.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10295 

Following on the Cow theme

Photo tools

Here's one from Zoom.it

And also one I did on Be Funky

Novitiation: China- Jinan Foreign Language School

Novitiation: China- Jinan Foreign Language School:  Visited Jinan last December and signed a sister school agreement. The school was very hospitable and really happening place with lots of very engaged teachers and students. Next stage is to get an exchange going. Picasa has helped me share some photos.

China- Jinan Foreign Language School

 

Sourcing audio-visual material

What riches! A wealth of material but mostly to do with English, Maths, Sciences, Social Sciences. There are incidentally organised materials for languages but a lot is sourced from commercial producers or generated by individuals. I looked at Chinese language material and it was not inspiring but I guess its how you adapt and use it. One thing that would be useful is explanations about how [a] language works e.g. the metalcognition around how to learn it so that students have a resource that say shows them how to structure a sentence. One thing I find really curious in a lot of Chinese didactic video for listening and speaking is the constant emphasis on Chinese script which is actually to do with reading and writing so its not actually helpful- people don't speak in Chinese characters!!
I found this little clip quite interesting from a language point of view though the interview style is a bit static but it is not too long:

 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wnvrZpcOosU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I also enjoyed this TEd talk on English and the opportunities to flip the lesson:

This also got me thinking about the fact that the resources deal a lot with the English language: it all assumes that English is all there is so this Patricia Ryan talk was pretty interesting, especially when I think about the 58 non-English speaking background International students we have let alone all the other local NESB students and what they bring to education:
http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ryan_ideas_in_all_languages_not_just_english.html

I like the tools that these sites provide for developing ideas and contributing to a community of teachers. In order to do this more it will involve rethinking my work: there is going to be more time in selection and preparation and less emphasis on classwroom delivery. This is where the Flipped Teaching mode is attractive. I think students do benefit from active facilitation through an activity in contrast to active pre-instruction followed by "independent" assignments whether in groups or otherwise. There are big questions here about how teachers work is structured.

Using these various sites seems to solve the copyright problem as the rights for use are clearly specified so that sort of allays my earlier concern. And I think I'm at the end of the space!!