Joanna

The last week of CALL. The end is near. I almost finished my final project and uploaded to my edublog, except some video and audio that I took in my Chinese class. I don’t want to publish them, so I just saved it in my computer.

Last week’s group discussion helped us to get comments from others to improve our final project. By seeing each other’s work, we learned a lot in another way.

This is really a useful and helpful course. I feel more comfortable and confident with computer. I do use computer now to assist my teaching while I was taking this course, and I’ll continue using it in my future teaching. I hope we can develop a way to keep contact with people took this course and share the experience of using CALL in teaching, or solve the problem we have by computer.

Like of my work in this course: http://efl537.com/user/40

There was no new tool learning last week, but focusing on my final project. I can’t believe we’ll finish this course in two weeks. Looking at all the badges I got, I realized how much new tools I learned so far.

One of my students left for China this week. I took a video of our farewell party for him, editing with transition of each clips. Record words of best wishes for him, adding background music using Audacity. I selected some discussion we had in class recorded by Audacity. I put all these video, audio, pictures, songs together, burned into a DVD as a gift to my student. It’s a power of technology, make this free but a life-long memory.

This is a post about badge test.

This week we made our screencasts in class. It’s easy and fun. I tried to make my first screencast last week. So this week focus on video making. Windows movie maker was the first tool I practiced. It’s ok if you just need to simply edit your video materials, such as put background music or narration, add transitions between clips. Then Jeff suggested another tool: Camtasia. It works the same way, but provide more options, such as adding captions, highlighting information, creating menu, which helps to make your vedio or ppt look more professtional. The most practical and useful function of Camtasia is recording powerpoint. You can record while making powerpoint, which is easier than making powerpoint, recording by audacity, and finally put them together. Whenever you have any question, Camtasia provides both screencast and text information for every single option. I tried to put some vedio of graduation ceremony last week together as a movie, and tried to make some pictures with background music, so that it looks like a vedio. It took time to edit vedio to make it look pretty, but it’s fun.

We are going to have a badge test this week. I felt nevous last week. After watching all the screencasts and practicing at home. I feel more relax and confident. It’s amasing to look back how much you learned so far.

Although we don’t have assignment this week, I still keep blogging. It’s a part of my project to reflect each week’s learning by edublog.

We learned vedio in week 6. How to make our own vedio and edit it is useful and interesting. I use a lot of vedio in my Chinese class. We once talked about Chinese Martial Art. I showed my students different movies of Chinese Martial Art, which made the lesson so interesting. They love it and completely concentrated. Because of the time limit, I couldn’t show them the whole movie but just several segments from different movies. I found it in youtube, but I want to know how to edit the movie, like cut it into different parts so that we just need to show the class only one or two minutes we want.

The new CALL tool I played with is screencast. As I mentioned in the beginning weeks, the screencast is very helpful in my learning. I couldn’t finish all the assignment without the help of screencast. It’s really a great and powerful tool. I strat to make my first screencast of how to use audacity, and it works well. It’s easy to use. I didn’t have much trouble but a lot of fun. I’m going to make a screencast in my project.

I keep reflection for each week as a part of my project, which shows what I’ve learned in CALL.

This week I tried a new tool: Moodle. I can creat a my own coures online! I desired a Chinese course including two weeks classes and two quizes. I’m trying to do something can help and support for my Chinese teaching right now. I started to write in Chinese, but when I published it, it became all symbols instead of characters. I had to change everying into English so that people can read. I don’t know if there is any solution to this problem.

Another new tool we practiced is skype. It’s an inernet phone. I;m using it all the time to talk to my parents, friends at home. When I worked before in China, we also use skype in working to talk to international parteners. High technology makes the world smaller and people closer.

I’m interested in E-portfolios when I did some research for my assessment course. I learned from the aspect of evaluation. E-portfolio is an authentic assessment. Different from pencil and paper test, portfolios are good reflect of what students have learned and how they learned it. When I read the readings of E-portfolios for CALL from the aspect of technology. It’s interesting to compare them together. I googled to find some E-portfolio others did. A list of E-portfolios from former students graduated this program came out. All these materials gave me some ideas of E-portfolio, which I never heard before.

Another thing I liked is the video of E-portfolio from UNH. One thing the instructor mentioned about teaching in 21 century is the book named The World is Flat. It reminds me a presentation I downloaded from slideshare and put it in my webpage talks about the same topic. This presentation named Teaching in a Flat World. It’s the time that teachers to realize the fast develpment of this world, and how much it changes our learners and teaching.

It’s always interesting to read blogs. All pictures and vidros make the reading so different from boring paper readings. I can’t believe that I spent so much time reading online. Blog is such a fasinating tool.

I just tried different blogs from Blogmeister, EFL classroom Ning, Edublog. There are so many things there. So much information about ESL/EFL or teaching.

Another good thing I found about blog is it brings teachers closer to the students. Lots of teachers put pictures, videos, funny stories happened in their real life into their blogs besides teaching materials. Students like it. It’s a real communication between teachers and students. I love that both as a teacher and a student.