IPad Lesson

IPad has become increasingly popular among students either on campus or at home. They enjoy watching videos and playing games on their ipads. Therefore, I think incorporating iPad into teaching lessons could be a fun and exciting way to get students engaged. For this assignment, I created a lesson plan and an example, both using an iPad. The application I chose to explain in my example is called Learning Mandarin. This app provides different Mandarin lessons and games for learners at different levels. 

To help explain how to use the Learn Mandarin, I chose to use the application called Explain Everything. Explain Everything is a terrific interactive whiteboard and screencasting app for your iPad. When you start, you select a customized color template that you would like to use. After that, you can import images and videos, annotate and add narration to what you imported. It allows you to create visually appealing presentations that you can easily share.

Click here to view the lesson plan I designed to go along with this video lesson.

Future Technology

Technology is updating at a high speed so that it is important for teachers to keep learning new technologies in order to better engage students in the classroom. One emerging technology that will most likely be incorporated into teaching and may already be available in certain respects is the QR codes. You see them everywhere these days: at the back of the box of cereal, on movie posters at subway station and on advertisements in the window of H&M stores. 

QR, or Quick Response codes, is two-dimensional bar-codes that can be read using smartphones, tablets, laptops and dedicated QR reading devices. They link directly to articles, emails, websites, phone numbers, videos, social media pages and more. All you need is a camera lens on your device and a QR code scanning program which can be downloaded online for free as an app. 

QR codes are brilliant in education. Instead of printing out a long web article to students, QR codes could give them direct and instantaneous access to the same resource in class or at home, which saves time and money. They are also very easy to generate and can be printed on literally anything: paper, textile or walls. As a future modern foreign language teacher, I could use QR codes to give access to GCSE listening papers by printing them out on stickers and stick them into students' planners for homework. I am confident that QR codes can contribute a lot to enrich my lessons.

Please watch this video to find out more about QR codes in the classroom!

Digital Citizenship Presentation

According to the ISTE Standard, it is important for teachers to promote digital citizenship among digital age students by demonstrating the safe use of technology and model and teach the correct and careful use of digital resources. Prezi is a fantastic online presentation tool to create presentations. You can create your 3D zooming presentation online or offline using one of the hundreds of templates available. Prezi is more animated and visually appealing than PowerPoint. Instead of simply transitioning from slide to slide, Prezi has multiple ways of presenting information. 

The presentation that I have created through Prezi is one on a topic of digital citizenship: cyber-bullying. I give an overview of what is cyber-bullying, where cyber-bullying occurs and who are the victims. I also include how can educators prevent and intervene cyber-bullying. I have also included two Youtube videos that summarize as well as complement the information that I have given.

Please take a look at my Prezi presentation on cyber-bullying.