During my stay in Nanning, China, I presented three education technology workshops – two at the Chinese Traditional Medicine University (CTMU) while the third was held at the Sino-Canadian College of Guangxi University(SCC). At CTMU I did an informational session about education technologies ESL teachers may be interested in using in their classrooms – Podcasting, Blogging and Hot Potatoes. The second workshop was more of a hands-on session where I reviewed how to create learning activities with hot potatoes and then went step-by-step over the process of recording and uploading audio. I also showed how to publish a powerpoint to the web. For the Sino-Canadian folks I looked at podcasting or more specifically incorporating audio in the classroom.
A few very positive things came out of these workshops – two teachers started class blogs and I became aware of the possible use of screencasting for grammar training. (As a follow up to that idea…I have started work on an action research project on the topic here: )
Here is one teacher’s take on their new blogging experience:
“We encourage you to visit [our blog site]- it represents less than
two-hours work on our part and probably has the
errors to verify that fact! However, we wanted to
share this information with you and the other
teachers, since it represents a readily available
high-tech tool that can help all of us in our
teaching.
It is interesting to note that thousands and
thousands of sites like this have been created around
the world, helping teachers from universities to
kindergartens.
And below you can view a picture of me doing a presentation at the Traditional Chinese Medicine University:
