Infusing Twitter into My Future Classroom

After reading two articles, Can we use twitter for educational activities  and Forget E-Mail: New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter, I have concluded some ideas about microblogs. To illustrate, one of the Microblogs, Twitter, is considered as a popular, user-friendly, and interactive application to people all over the world. I myself as a novice twitterer have been thinking about how I can utilize twitter to facilitate my future teaching recently.Finally, I have figured out some ways I can use tweeter as one of my teaching methods as the followings.

Firstly, I personally think that the hashtag is a good one that I can use to bring up a small talk for my students. For example, I would enter a hashtag for weekly question associated with our current lessons so as to encourage my students to brainstorm together and to motivate their English learning.

Secondly, I would recommend my students opening an account of twitter for the purpose of learning English only. If some of the students have already had a twitter account, I would ask them to follow my twitter also. In this way, I can show my students good educational twitterers I am following. I believe through my twitter I can guide my students to follow instructive, edifying and beneficial twiiterers.

Last but not least, I would teach my students how to use twitter educationally and intelligently instead  of using it as an on-line chatting application for as a teacher, we do not want them to use twitter as a killing time tool, do we?

Mod 6: RSS Feeds

I found an inspiring and interesting blog called English with Rosa Among all the posts, I am especially interested in a current post with a video clip, Football Players Also Learn English , she shared with the audience about what two famous Spanish football players, Iker Casillas and Pepe Reina do for leisure activities. Rosa’s comments and the video clip remind me of a Taiwanese tennis player: Lu Yen-hsun His efforts to make him become the first Taiwanese player to reach the quarter-finals of a Grand Slam, and the first man from Asia to reach the quarter-finals at a major in fifteen years. Of course, as a national player from Taiwan, Lu not only practices his skills for tennis but also his English as best as he can. These efforts of his all show that making people notice him and Taiwan needs both continuous practice in order to catch up with other top-notch international players and a good faculty of English to communicate with people around the world. I think no matter which country you are from, being able to communicate with people around the world is very important. Therefore, as a teacher, we need to teach our students that English is not just a school subject but a tool to connect you to the world.  All in all, I enjoyed the post Rosa wrote and I am looking forward to receiving more instructive and interesting RSS feeds from her!