Hello and welcome to my blog. It is very excited and fresh to share my thoughts and works in this comfortable space. It is also a great opportunity for me to improve my professional skills as an educator as well as a teacher in #Maryknoll School. One of our school missions is to provide a #21st century learning environment to our students, I believe that throughout this course, I am able to connect myself and make my step closer to my goal.
As we all have known, in this digital world, learning is not only from the books or teachers. For me, I always enjoyed learning by looking at the news posted online, and the current events shared by my friends on Facebook. I can always update the latest information by accessing to social networks. For making my students and parents connected to my class, I have created my Mandarin class website for student to keep track of their progress, and for parents to see the great examples of their children’s works. (Please check it out my Mandarin class site @ http://liyuwang.weebly.com/) I have also created a traveling blog with one of our high school teacher and two sophomore students last year when we were asked to teach English to our sister school in Wuhan, located in the central part of China. (http://maryknollwuhanenvoy15.weebly.com/) However, I still consider myself as a beginner. There are many benefits of blogging. After reading the articles from George Couros, I have deepened my impression. For instance, I can elaborate my writing skills because we need to think in a wilder perspective of how to appropriately attract audience to read our post, and we can also “listen” to other different voices from our audience. When the word description is not enough or not fully express my idea, I can share pictures or simply make a short IMovie to let my audience to have better understanding. Asking students to create the blog is also useful and beneficial. Similar to the idea mentioned, students are able to share their assignment or feeling to their peers and learn from one another. It is also a good way to assess them and provide feedback to develop their knowledge by using #technology. In addition, I felt I was the frog in the well after reading the article from Aaron Hogen about the usage of #social media. There are lot more things we can do through social network and we can develop our professional skills in a variety of ways. I can simply click the button [follow] to the people or organization that inspired me, and I can share my ideas to inspire others. Like Derek Sivers said in his video, “Some ideas are obvious to you but amazing to others.” We can support one another as an educator around the world. In this #EDCS480 course, I hope I can be fully “connected”. Sometimes I feel that being an educator or teaching is just a “job”. I really hope that education can become part of my “life”, and I can always connect myself to everything I am doing and striving. I would like to get more practice of using technology to truly feel the importance of making my students and myself to be a 21st century learner. As I mentioned in my previously, social media is a good tool for students to share feeling and learn knowledge; however, social media can also cause serious issues such as Cyberbullying and other negative peer influences. How to appropriately manage and include technology as part of my curriculum is one of the essential things for me to work on. Moreover, I would like to jump out of the well to explore more about social network especially for #Twitter. “Building students’ interests through learning” is one of my teaching philosophies as a second language teacher. I believe that including technology to my instruction, activities and assessments is a good way to support my quote. I am now in the process of learning how to elaborate my blog as both an education and EDCS 480 student. Therefore, I go online and search some educators’ blog especially for the middle level education. This websitehttp://www.learningfirst.org/user_blog/215 has many posts provided by AMLE sharing by lots of middle school teachers.
2 Comments
Thank you so much for sharing Li Yu. First of all, I took a look at your Mandarin class site, and I'm very impressed. What a great way to connect school to home, and convey your information in a colorful and inviting way. I particularly like the picture you provided with you and your students.
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Adrienne Pulu
9/3/2016 09:55:18 pm
Aloha Li Yu,
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Li Yu WangMandarin Teacher @Maryknoll School |