ePals on Education

ePals is a free network that connects students, teachers as well as parents all over the world. It is a Global Community of collaborative learners, teachers, and academic experts in 200 countries and territories. It also provides Connections to students, classes, and school districts worldwide that are safe and secure. Moreover, it is the safe and protected solution for linking classes, schools, and school districts globally.

I have created an account and scan the teacher forums, student forums, family forums and the project forums. In these forums, I saw questions waiting for answers, and projects waiting for participating and cooperating. For example, in the teacher forums, I saw an ESL teacher, in Portugal, wanted to have his/her students trying video conferences with ESL learners or native speakers, in order to enable the use of the language in a real context. It is a very good activity and I would like to participate in my teaching. Another example is, when I was scanning the student forum, I saw a student’s question that whether Harry Potter or the Twilight Saga more suitable for off-class reading. Some native students recommended the Twilight Saga because it is more American and some people voted for the Harry Potter because it is more interesting and the author has a better control of English. One more thing, I saw a parent sought an English pen pal for her daughter from other countries.

Therefore, in my future teaching, I could use ePals to connect my students and myself to the world. I’d like students to communicate and change experience with people from other countries and regions. And for me, I could participate in funny projects and ask questions to other TESOL teachers around the world.

Flickr in teaching

Let's go to the market!

 

I made this photo book with Bookr. I think it could help my teaching about the “There be sentence”.

I’d like to share this photo book with the class, show them pictures, and let students make sentences with “There be…” to say something about these pictures. As I have already given sample sentences, it would not be very difficult to students. In class, students are asked to discuss what in the market orally. After class, the students would be assigned to work in groups and make their own photo book to introduce a place. They could describe what are in the summer beach. They could also talk about what are in the garden in the sunny spring. The students could acquire new grammar knowledge by making photo book, which is a more communicative way. If the teacher focus only on the linguistic items the class would be very boring.

Creative Commons License

The Rainbow Connection by Ani-Bee
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

As we all know, copyright protect your creativity against people you don’t consent to. You automatically won the copyright to anything you created. However, sometimes full copyright is too restrictive. What if you want to make contributions to others’ creativity and what if you want your works are shared by other people? Therefore, we come to the Creative Commons License. The Creative Commons License provides free copyright licenses you can use to tell people which parts of your copyright you are happy to give it to the public.

By answering several questions, the Creative Commons will choose the suitable license for you.



There are several types of licenses:

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.