“Absolutely intercultural”- To obtain different cultures from different countries

 

The podcast of “Absolutely intercultural” is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues, it is looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we will be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with us any intercultural gossip we come across.

We could obtain many different cultures from each part of the “intercultural”, they have absolutely reciprocal, absolutely inexperienced, absolutely open-minded, absolutely entrepreneurial and so on. For example, in the part of absolutely reciprocal, a girl named Elena from Spain, where the majority of people are Christians. Through her international volunteer work she has developed an intercultural sensitivity and awareness of different traditions and ways of thinking. She tells us how she embarked on this intercultural learning journey thanks to her parents, who encouraged her to get involved in a volunteering project at high school. Later she collaborated in an association in the South of Spain whose aim it is to support children and young homeless and unprotected migrants from the Northern and Sub Saharan Africa. Also, a couple of years ago she was nominated to participate in a work camp in the region of Kurdistan, in South Eastern Turkey. She is convinced that volunteering is a great recipe for reciprocal learning.

I will use this podcast in my future teaching to inspire the thoughts of interaction to the kids through exploring the different cultures from different countries. And we can also inspire the thoughts of helping to the kids, use the different examples to teach the kids that helping is a great thing in human activity and could build our world more beautiful.

Epals for Education

Epals for Education

 

EPals is one of the innovative education organizations in the world to connect people worldwide together. It is an online platform for both students and teachers. Students can use the search tools to seek ideal partners to join a teaching project in which they cooperate from global aspects, learn from each other, and reach a consensus. Teachers are able to create a project for students to broadcast his/her thoughts or teach practical skills, solely or together with others. Also, They can gather together to form a learning a group or community to discuss opinions, share files and ask questions. EPal also provides teaching resources, such as textbook, on specific subjects and topics and edublogs for teachers to express and share their thoughts on teaching and learning.

One project in the EPals is seeking cultural e-mail exchange partner for 3rd grade class. They seek and then afford their students opportunities to correspond with other 3rd grade classes around the world. Students can learn about what the difference or similarity is between their lives and other children around the world including China and Brazil. By e-mail exchange, the communication skill and teamwork spirits of the students are cultivated. Another project is group of 50 USA students aging from 11-17. They want to find pen pals with students from other places. Through e-mail exchange, they will gain knowledge and experiences of daily lives and culture of students around the word. Contrary to the previous project, these students need to work in groups to perform a PowerPoint presentation to show what they have discovered.

In practical teaching, I will create a cultural exchange project for my students online and make each of them seek a learning partner from other regions in the world. Each student and his/her partner form a group to learn together, discuss some topics, and solve questions for each other. For different groups, students will make the presentation in the class to tell what they have learned in the daily discussions with his/her partner and find the differences and reasons in their thoughts on the same topics. At the same time, I will invite a foreign teacher on the ePals site to join our online class, which provides the students a different horizon to understand global culture.

"Animoto" for Teaching

"Animoto" for Teaching

 

 

In part two, I used Animoto to created a Photo Story about my Winter holiday, It memorized the great time with my good friends in the vacation. I could use pictures, music and text to memorize the great things.
As for education, We could use Animoto to remember the important knowledge which we should know from the book or anywhere else.  At the end of the semester, I will let my students to make an Animoto to show us what is the most important knowledge I taught them and what they thought is the most important content they considered. And they can also add the interesting activities during this class or this semester. I think through this way, with the pictures and music, students could memorized the knowledge more impressed instead of just an uninteresting test.

Voice Thread for Teaching

Students on Voice Thread can be both producers andconsumers of the content within each digital container, referred to as a thread. Each page features apicture, video, word document, PowerPoint slide, etc. Creators of a VoiceThread can act as a presenter by using recordings, called comments, which are captured on audio through a microphoneor telephone, through video using a web camera, or through text. Alternately, the creator can inviteother users to leave their own comments or input on the thread. A VoiceThread is navigated somewhat like an online book, where users can skip to any page of the thread and even draw or write over top of the media while leaving a comment. It may have only one page or as many as a hundred.Viewers can turn the pages manually or can passively watch and listen to the thread, similar to a slideshow. Viewers also have in their control the ability to skip to any slide at any time, listen to or see anycomment at any time, and zoom in on any portion of the slide.

The most two interesting Voice Thead from our classmates are Suger's The TV shows we watch all the time and Ying's The princess in the Disney World.

In Suger's "The TV shows we watch all the time", She give us many picuture's about the movies in America, that are popular movies in our daily life, I think students may be very interested in the movies, while waching the movies, students can not only learn some american culture but also pracitice their listening while listen to what the actors saying, because they want know what happened next, and they have to listening, at this time, their listening is improing. They can also learn some slang which they seldom know from their daily life and then improve their oral English.

On Ying's "The princess in the Disney World". We could know all kinds of pricess through the student's disscusstion. Student's could share information about what they want to know from what they discussed, sometimes they may not know other roles of the princesses, but through the disscusion, they may rewatch the moives and changed their ideas and then learned the story more specifically.