Padlet - The Golden Mean

Created with Padlet

  Padlet

The Prezi - The Golden Mean

The prezi site can be very useful and helpful one for teachers to use in their classes. It can show the flow of the main idea with fashionable and distinctive graphic features. I made this prezi for the purpose of checking if my students understand the content and the flow of thoughts in the text. After reading through the text, I let my students answer the questions such as "what is the golden mean?" or "how to achieve the golden mean?". After being given these questions, students have the time to think about the answers individually, in pairs, or in groups. I show the answers from the text using the prezi. By checking answers of those questions, students can follow the flow of the thoughts in the text and comprehend the whole content.

Quizlet - The Golden Mean

   The word is from the textbook that I used in classes for my sophomore students in the highschool. The text including these words demonstrates what the golden mean is, who shows the Golden Mean to us, and how we can achieve the Golden Mean. The content deals with somewhat abstract subjects, which led my students not to understand the whole content easily. I think this kind of quizlet(flashcard) is very useful for my students to know what the new words mean and learn them, so that they can apply the meanings of words to understanding the main idea of the text. It can also help students to check their learning of words after learning the text.

Effective practice with e-portfolio

Electronics portfolios: Engaged students create multimedia-rich artifacts

  As I’ve been taking the course “Content-based approach to writing,” I have interest in how to make my students to write continuously in English. As I read through the articles “Electronic portfolio: Engaged students create multimedia-rich artifacts” and “Effective practice with E-portfolio,” I’ve got an idea that I can use in my class. Before reading these articles, I regarded e-portfolio as just writing their learning log and capturing some video files, photographs, and hypertext links. I thought that e-portfolio is convenient means for students to keep their records online and to keep their resources found via the Internet easily. E-portfolio absolutely has these characteristics, but they are not the only advantages it has. Through using e-portfolio, teachers can give feedback to their students any time anywhere if they can use the Internet, which can encourage students to improve their works in a continuous and progressive way. Students’ classmates as well as teachers can give feedback one another through the Internet, making all students participating in the online conversation enhance their own works through other friends’ comments. In addition, e-portfolio doesn’t just include written form but also many various forms or dimensions regarding their assignments or their learning goals. While taking their courses, students can make any style of e-portfolio such as artifacts, paintings, etc. Therefore, even students who have difficulty writing can make their own types of e-portfolio. E-portfolio is not the same as learning log, but I think I can start to let my students write their learning logs in the written forms or in any other forms that they feel easy and then let them move their learning log to online e-portfolio using their blogs and make and keep their e-portfolio whenever they’d like to do. Students can easily have access to the Internet, so I think it’s more easy and convenient to do their e-portfolio online than do the portfolio on the paper. Furthermore, I came across “flipped classroom” to my mind when I read through these articles. Students study what they have to study before the class, and using e-portfolio, they can ask questions to their classmates and teachers, which can promote the real learning and learning process in the class.

What happens when students use text-to-speech and word predict programs to compose text?

As I’ve taught English to my students, I’ve wondered if there is any correlation between sound and letter or symbol affecting students’ English learning. When I read through this “What happens when students use text-to-speech and word predict programs to compose text?,” I thought that there is. What I found when I taught my students English was that my students had difficulty finding out proper words that they tried to express and there was a gap between the words that they wanted to write and the ones that they actually wrote. That was because they didn’t know how to pronounce the words and spell them. Therefore, the words they pronounced and the ones they actually spelled out didn’t match, which made it difficult for others reading their writing to understand what the students tried to say because of many spelling errors. I agree that the correct spell of words is not the most important factor for improving students’ writing and English proficiency. However, the more accurately students spell out words, the confident they become to write their own writing assignment. Through reading this article, I feel sure that I need to teach relation between sounds and symbols (letter) and to teach not only how to pronounce words and the distinction between words that have similar pronunciation so that students can figure out what the difference is between the meaning of those words when letting students learn and memorize the words, which will help students have confidence in their writing and improve their writing without concerning spelling errors. 

what is useful for my teaching?

The Digo site can be very useful for me to use for searching what I thought would be useful and for finding out which site it was.

In addition, especially for my high school students, tools and sites for making mind maps and graphic organizers are very helpful for me to help them to think about the main idea of what they read and organize what the writer wants to say in a reasonable fashion so that my students can recognize the main idea or the flow of writer’s thoughts. For Korean high school students to get better grades in their English subject, it is most important I think to figure out what the bottom line is. I usually fixed figures to help my students to understand the main idea of what they read. Whenever I used those figures, I wondered if there was any other figure, mind map, or graphic organizer. That’s why the websites that the professor introduced in the course could be very meaningful to me.

 The site “Quizlet” can also encourage my students to make their own word quizzes and solve what their friends made each other, which helps them to understand the meaning of words more clearly. Letting the students make their own quizzes can give them self-confidence and self-respect that they can manipulate the “English”, even though the level is not very high.

 “Voki” is also useful for me and my students. Students can type what they’d like to say in English and hear what they typed, through which they can figure out what they typed has any error. 

QR code