A reflection on Roed's reading

Roed (2003) looked at a project based on collaboration between three universities in UK on learning Danish virtually which students were given a communicative language task. The researcher examined how communicating online can affect learner behaviour as well as the perception of learner behaviour.
The results found that students behaved differently when communicating online compared to a face-to-face situation. One major finding was that students found learning via computer was like ‘a shield of being on stage’ that reduced their anxiety of using the second language in front of class. In the task students were asked to interact with students in a chat room, research findings showed that students spoke more freely and were more eager to language learning as a virtual environment created a more relaxed and stress free atmosphere.

Roed also found that students displayed a very different personality in computer learning. Students behaving shy in classroom setting would behave well in computer-based learning.

Considering virtual learning, I can’t agree more with Roed’s major finding: fewer inhibitions motivate students’ learning. Being a second language learner of English, I agree that I was scared of speaking English in class when I was young. Speaking a second language would be a real challenge to many students. They would scare to pronounce words wrongly, carry peculiar accents, even if they could say a sentence perfectly, another challenge would come when they have to respond to people’s question. Engaging in a virtual learning environment, all these worries would be gone. The lesser the anxiety, the better one would be when it comes to language learning.

Virtual learning is possible if it serves as a supplementary tool assisting learning. I probably would try out communicating with my students in online platforms, chat room for instance. Not only can students engage in self-learning and peer-communicating via using the computer, both teacher and students can also connect to each other and create a closer network via the Internet.

Would virtual learning someday replace classroom learning in primary or secondary school settings in Hong Kong? That would be a topic for me to explore a little more later!

Sharing of past learning experience using new technologies

Reading readings of the week has brought back some memories of my own learning experience using new technologies. I remember that I took a course when I did my BA at CityU named Creative Communication projects. One of the main learning activities was to carry out a creative group project. We were asked to work in groups of four to create a support site/ fan site for an organization/ industry. We finally came up with the idea of designing a website for Dai Pai Dong, traditional Hong Kong style food stalls.

That project was fun because eveyone in the group cooperated with one another and worked collaboratively. I was not a big fan of new technologies, well I am still not one at the moment. Lucky that we had got a computer expert in the group. I mainly worked on the writing and proofreading of members' work and that expert helped us out a lot of the technical stuff. He even taught me play with some easy skills making a website. I remember that we as a group hanged out a few times to try out the wide range of variety of food at the Dai Pai Dongs located in Central and took a good deal of photos to post on our website. Yeah, that was really fun. Sad that I can't remember the hyperlink of the website that we created back then. I think that would be interesting to look at it again.

Back to the point, using the Internet for English teaching isn't as difficult as I have thought. Looking back at the experience that I had as a student, I did enjoy project-based learning. Working on our own, we gained much experience and discovered ways to solve problems. Working on our own doesn't mean teachers don't care about us. But as the reading of the week mentioned, teacher's role shift from 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side'. Teachers provide help and give instructions at times. In addition, we did work and cooperate with others in the group. That relates to one of the learning goals of using the Internet in English Teaching.

Putting myself in the shoes of teachers, I think it is very interesting to teach with the use of the Internet. The Internet is so vast and ubiquitous and is fused in our every day life. So as teachers we must help students with the use of the Internet and to equip them in the multimedia future. We have the responsibility to teach students strategies to adapt to the fast-changing technologies, motivate them to think crtically and work collaboratively. Wow such a challenging job for teachers.

Um I think it's really time to think about which age group I want to teach in future. And where to teach.

My first blog post

This was the class that I taught when I was in an English Summer Camp in Hainan, 2008. They are all students of advanced level.

We had some activities together after class. It was so much fun.

With my teaching partner and two of our students.

This photo was taken in Hanwang, Sichuan, 2009's summer. I went on an programme visiting those who affected by the 512 earthquake. Here are two of the kids that I taught.

With my teaching partner and a group of our students. They were excited about having their English names.

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First time up here blogging. So excited!

With the photos above, they have shown who I am and what I have experienced in the past years. Make a little intorduction of myself. I am a full-time student, not a teacher at the moment yet and I am doing some preparation work to be a teacher and that is why I am doing this MA programme. I have a passion in education and I would love to get involved in this field later in my life.

To be frank, I am not that good at technology, let alone using technology in my teaching. With this course, I expect to make use of the good that technology brings us when I teach in future. I also expect that I can use this blog as a platform to share my views towards language teaching and learning, and exchange ideas with other classmates.

Here are some web sites that I usually read. I like reading teachers' blogs because they can give me some insights and inspiration about teaching.

http://teacherlingo.com/

http://blog.brian-crosby.com/