TED-Ed Lesson

I have created my first TED-Ed lesson today, and I must say that the website is very easy to navigate, and you can use these TED-Ed lessons for a lot of purposes. In this lesson, I imagined that I am teaching adult English language learners. I designed this class as a pre-reading task for my students to complete before we read an article on what minimalism is. In the video, Graham Hill talks about what he means by "Less Stuff, More Happiness". It is about 5 minutes long, which is good for a pre-reading task. Students are expected to watch the video, answer two detail questions and discuss what minimalism means to them.














Below are my objectives:

1) Students will be able to relate what they know with the text they will read.
2) Students will be able to listen for details to answer the comprehension questions.
3) Students will be able to understand what minimalism is.

I could test the first and last objective by reading their response to the discussion question. Their response to the discussion question will show how much they relate to their background knowledge, and what they understand from the concept of minimalism. I could test the second objective by looking at their answers to the comprehension questions as they will show if students were able to catch those details.

Twitter for Professional Development and Education

When I hear "professional development courses/certificate programs" I immediately think of travel and accommodation costs. Professional development is very important to me as I don't want to lag behind while things are changing so fast! I want to know what is out there and what is happening, what the new trends are. I am always curious about other teachers' classrooms and what those teachers are doing differently, what works for them, what their opinions would be on my classroom struggles. I have recently found out that Twitter can be used for this purpose. We can still benefit greatly from those professional development courses and all, but Twitter is a gold mine for educators. Many educators today are using microblogging to talk about many different topics which we can all relate to, and they are sharing invaluable tips and amazing ideas. It is very easy to follow and you get a lot in an hour. I will recommend this to all my colleagues who are not aware of twitter chats.

You can also use twitter for educational purposes. In their article, How Twitter Can Be Used as a Powerful Educational Tool, Alan November and Brian Mull mention that Twitter can be used as part of the learning process by any classroom. One of the activities that he explained amazed me. A teacher from Texas posted a twit to her students along with a picture from a game and the picture was her holding a soda cup in her hand. She asked students to come up with questions based on the picture, and reactions from the students were amazing. They were very creative and came up with a lot of questions. What was amazing was that students stopped whatever they were doing and rushed to respond to their teacher. This is a great example of sharing learning opportunities with others outside of classroom




 Another way that we can use Twitter for students is we can have them collaborate on writing a short story. It is a fun activity where one person starts it and another continues. It can take a few days, weeks or even months to complete it, but it is a fun activity and very good for improving writing skills.

Pinterest and Diigo

This week, I will be comparing two social bookmarking websites: Diigo and Pinterest. I had opened a Pinterest account a long time ago, but I did not quite figure out how it works, so I deactivated my account. This week, I have watched a few tutorials on how Pinterest works, and actually it turned out to be pretty straightforward. Diigo, on the other hand, is a little bit confusing for me. Both Diigo and Pinterest have their own advantages and limitations.

You create a library in Diigo, where you save websites. You can download a Diigo extension on Chrome, which I found very useful. When you save a website in Diigo, you can go back to it and highlight parts. You can even insert comments. You can follow others, send them messages, or you can create groups in Diigo. While you are saving a website in Diigo, you can enter a description and multiple tags. You can also see other people’s tags and websites that they have saved.  

You create boards on Pinterest and save your websites on these boards. Link to your saved websites are found right below the images you saved on your boards, so you can click on it and read further. You can follow other people and their boards. You can repin something that someone has pinned. You can send messages to others and leave comments under their saved images. Pinterest offers you suggestions based on your pins and boards.

Diigo has a more academic feeling, while Pinterest is much more fun. I will definitely continue to use Pinterest. I will create more boards and discover new things. I also like checking out other people’s boards and see what they have. You get a lot of ideas while doing this. I will use Pinterest to save classroom ideas and come back to these as needed. I also love the website design of Pinterest. You can spend hours on Pinterest. There is a lot to discover! I think I will use Diigo when I work on a research paper. In the past, I used to bookmark the websites that I wanted to go back to, but it was not very well organized, and it was not enough. I can save websites in my Diigo library, highlight parts of the text, insert comments and tags. It is a perfect platform for this purpose.