Final Blog

I have learned many things from this class. I hope I will retain those information in my long term memory forever. I love this experience because not only did I learn things, but also I enjoyed sharing the experience with the classmates. Thank you for the teacher's hard work and patience with us. I think I will be able to use blog in my teaching.

Class Survey

Here is the class survey:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dG9JUkhITzRmblcwenhEd1JBUENZOVE6MA

How does the students react to the blog assignment?

Once I announced the blog assignement to the students. My students have two main reactions. Some of the students said:" not again, this is my third blog homework. Why do we have the blog assignment?... ". Some of the girls said: "Wow, Ms. Fan knows how to blog, ...." Today it is Monday, I check my blog and find there are two comments. I think their comments are interesting. Actually, the due day for the assignment is this Thursday. I will see if I will have more comments by then..........
I have received 42 blogs on the due day. I am supposed to receive 55 students' blogs. When I read their comments, I find that they talk about their true feelings. Compared to the weekly journal, I feel blogs really tell you something real about the students themselves. Just one problem, some of them do not use their real names. I have to ask them for clarification. I hope I can do the spreadsheet and I will know who did or who did not. Overall speaking, I like this experience.

What will I do for my students in the Mandarin class?

I feel I have learned a lot during these meetings. If I want to teach something I have learned from this class, it has to be something I really understand. Google search lesson is good. But I think I am not very good at. Google Doc and presentation is a little hard, I probably need to learn second time. I think compared to other lessons, I really like Blogger. I will set up a new Blog which is only dedicated to my Mandarin class. For my fourth year students, I usually assign them to write a weeking journal. Now I will post some reading assignments on my blog, they will read and write a short response to it. I am really looking forward to seeing how it works. I hope I can make it.

Students should learn the skills in order to "survive" on line!

Frankly speaking, it is a good article that raises the issue which I feel struggled all the times. Teachers and students use Internet information either to prepare their lessons or to finish the homework. We rely on it so much, but there is no mandatory course to teach all of us to be skillful on line. You have to figure it out by yourself. How to effectively locate the information and at the same time to minimize the distractions from those bad websites is critical to know. Reflected on my first year of browsing over internet, I frequently entered the wrong websites which the information really scared me. By the time, I was an adult already. I do not want a child without any tech support/supervision to browse over the websites. I think the state should put computer class as a mandatory course.

What suprised me in this exercise?

After I took the Google search lessons, I thought I understood everything in the lesson. When I took the quiz, I realized I need to go back to the lesson because many of the things I am not very clear. My experience is that the lessons with video clip is much easy to remember compared to the lesson in pure text.

What did this experience make you wonder about?

I feel I am really cool now. Before this class, I feel Blogs are for tech people not for me. I admired people who have their own Blogs to freely express their opinions to the whole world. Now I can do it, I may use this blog as a way to communicate with my dear friends. Because everyone is very busy, it is hardly to make phone calls to each other. Now through this website friends can find out what I am doing. I can also update the pictures periodically. For my teaching career, I not only can post the homework on the blog and also can post any assignment which can generate discussions among the students. This experience gives me confidence to become a 21 century educator.