Day Eight

Course Reflection

How time flies! I feel that I have learned a lot in the past few days. This is the very first time that we have a Chinese teacher who teaches us SNUTH-WOU collaborative course in early childhood education. When Dr. Wang greeted us with a genial smile the first time we met, I thought that she was an affectionate and amiable professor.

There is no doubt that the role of education is changing alongside information technology. After taking this course, the biggest thing in my mindset is within education we have to determine the “needs” from the “desires” of technology. And there are numerous ways in which schools can demonstrate how technology benefits education.

From my perspective, ED 326 not only teaches me how to use the modern technology, but also arouse my attention to what I should teach to my students. For instance, I need to allow them to learn in play, learn in what is really happen, and learn independently. However, nothing plays a more indispensible role than driving my students to learn how to learn.

In this course, Dr. Wang introduced a lot of tools with powerful functions. My group members are really fascinated with ClassDojo, Rubistar and padlet. And I am willing to share my experiences in this course reflection.

I would like to appeal all my students to sign up in ClassDojo at the beginning of the term and let all the parents know about this communication platform. I will assign virtual characters to every student and then add points and minus points to the students’ daily performance on notebooks, tablets and smart phones. If students do well one day, they will get a “smile”, that is, plus 1 point. And if students make mistakes one day, they will get a “hit”, that is, minus 1 point. So ClassDojo will help me to track students’ performance from days to semesters, providing final results for their parents. Meanwhile, children will have strong interest in learning as well.

I love Rubistar, too. I can use the Rubistar rubric generator to create my rubrics. After choosing a content area, I am allowed to identify categories I want to assess my students in the projects, either using the pre-filled descriptors for each category or editing them to meets my own needs. When I sign up for an account, I can also analyze the effectiveness of both the rubric and the project for which it was assigned – that is a cool feature.

As for me, I will also use padlet in my classroom while my students are doing the group project. The group leader can make a padlet about their work, during the cooperation, all the members can put their works on the padlet to record the process of the project and all of them can see the materials. In addition, group members share one account number, so they can use it to do anonymous communication to express their thoughts.

As far as I am concerned, I will not use wenjuanxing in my teaching, because the interviewers have to log in with their QQ account. Otherwise, they cannot complete the questionnaires, surveys or evaluations. And I can edit my videos in Easy Movie Making, so I might try to avoiding using Powtoon which is too difficult to master. The third tool I may not use is Testmoz. Because I think it is much more complicated than Poll Everywhere. And the size font in Testmoz is too small, not good for children’s eyes.

In this course, I find my strongest point is willingness. My motto is “Always do what you are afraid to do”. As a matter of fact, I challenge everything actively. I’m always passionate, responsible and eager to communicate with others, so I believe that I am able to build a harmonious and happy relationship between children and me.

And it seems to me that sometimes I just stick to one opinion, which means that I am stubborn and I don’t change my opinion easily. And I have tried to listen to different points of view currently.

To make any progress we must overcome our own weak points by learning from each other’s strong points, and I will strive to achieve it.

Since I am the leader of Group 5, I’d like to talk something about our group next. In fact, I am not good at IT. At the very beginning, I just forgot the procedures about how to create a website. And I am glad that Charlotte solved the problem for me. Our experience taught us that we should not revise our web page at the same time, as we lost our materials for several times. We entered the websites made by other groups sometimes, and then we would expressed our amazement – how could they make such an eye-catching website?

Stress promoted us to move forward. Despite the fact that we felt depressed, we all fought for the same purpose – to make our website elaborate. It was the team spirit that contributed to our later success in creating a nearly perfect final product from nothing.

When I was a child, there were few children’s books, toys and teaching methods that were provided by my parents and teachers. However, nowadays, the government and families put more emphasis on early childhood education, so the demand of the kindergartens exceeds the supply. According to some statistics, in the past ten years, the average annual growth rate of kindergartens in China was about 6%, significantly lower than the number of children at the growth rate of about 7.1%, especially from 2007 to 2011. Since the scale of kindergartens was set upper limits by our government, every kindergarten cannot expand the enrollment. At the same time, more and more kindergartens and other educational institutions require to be built, which brought us a lot of golden opportunities.

Furthermore, it is notable that people are more aware that early childhood education is the first stage of fundamental education and children’s development is the most important period of life. So a growing number of parents realize the significance of the preschool education. However, they sometimes put too much value on the environment and education instead of their children’s character that includes habits, beliefs, values, dispositions and capacities. Not surprisingly, these parents’ ideas are unsuited to the requirements of the times.

In my humble opinion, the teachers’ task is to offer good environment and give appropriate guidance to every child. The need of children’s physical and mental development is vital, and their moral education and talents are more vital.

In order to make children develop healthily, we must adopt a cautious attitude and meticulous care for their pure and sensitive hearts. Education should involve every aspect of children rather than impart knowledge only, which required us teachers to carefully observe the performances of children, on the basis of the understanding of the measures of children’s education.

Influenced by my kindergarten teacher, I began to play the piano. I’ve practiced playing the piano for 13 years. I love my kindergarten teachers as well. As a result, I’m willing to be a teacher with love, patience and tenderness like them. I’ve been chasing my dream of becoming an outstanding kindergarten teacher in my daily life. And I have confidence in realizing it.

Thomas Carlyle once said: Cease to struggle and you cease to live. I think that’s the reason why I often have positive energy to overcome difficulties and pursue my dream.

Day Seven

Online Questionnaire, Worksheet, and Quizzes

Today is Day Seven. We were asked to create a quiz to assess our students’ learning outcomes.

I first used Testmoz to create a rubric. It is an effective tool for evaluating authenticity, which contains a set of standards for evaluating or rating students’ works, achievements, growth records, or performances. At the same time, it also builds a vital bridge between teaching and evaluation. However, the font size on Testmoz is too small to read, so I don’t believe that it is suitable for children.

I maintain that Wenjuanxing is much more suitable for Chinese people, as it is an accessible Chinese website. But we have to log in if want to make an online questionnaire, which is not as easy as Testmoz for us to use.

Not only can it make surveys, tests and evaluations, but also get the results of these questionnaires. After people complete the questionnaires online, the system automatically forms the responses, so that we can process the results in pie charts, line charts and many other forms. It facilitates investigations to sort out and summarize information.

It is a piece of cake when I want to make a test paper in wenjuanxing – I just need to choose the test paper randomly from the question bank. In addition, I can set the longest answer time of the test paper and simulate the real test. After students answer the questions in the paper, the system will carry out automatic marking according to the answers input in advance. After students submit the examination paper, teachers may receive their own scores within few seconds. Many social apps can be used to share my survey so that I can receive more answers. And I can set some red packages, and as a result, more people want to do this survey or test.

Poll Everywhere is quite easy to handle and make survey. From signing up a new account to finally finishing a survey, every part is really concise and clear to me. Poll Everywhere can also keep users’ phone number private and it has additional options available with paid versions. However, we can only insert the poll into a PowerPoint presentation.

For instance, I can use Poll Everywhere to create a survey to get familiar with children’s background knowledge so that I can assess them and give them specific tasks. Testmoz is convenient software for me to make the daily tests. It will save my time very effectively. Moreover, wenjuanxing can be used in many situations such as investigating, making tests, evaluating and many other things. It’s really useful software in teaching.

From where I stand, these projects help me to meet the ISTE standards about design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments. We can use these applications to evaluate, design and develop. All of them can give teachers great help like searching, reporting and so on.

Here is my rubric created with Rubistar. The directions are as follows:

This rubric is an assessment method of Lesson 5 based on the theme Drawing Fruits in this art course. It evaluates children’s performances with the scores in terms of the use of materials, drawing, painting skill, sources of inspirations, color choices and techniques. Teaching and learning will be promoted by applying this rubric.

Here is my quiz created with Testmoz.

Here is my evaluation created with wenjuanxing.

Day Six

Video Editing

Digital story-telling combined traditional story-telling with modern technology. This means that anyone with a computer and a story to tell could create a video on the web, the CD, or a DVD. Compared to a movie, a digital story is like a postcard. And a typical digital story is usually 2 to 5 minutes long. Digital stories could be creative or simple, depending on our tastes. All we need is pictures, background music, and a story to tell.

When I use digital story-telling in classroom teaching, I would create an environment that is conducive to effective story telling. For instance, if the project is being completed in a small space, not all groups will be able to record their narrations at the same time – because too much background noise will muddle recordings. If I choose to have groups scan pictures for use in their presentation, I may need to stagger the groups to ensure that students are actively involved in the project whenever time is allotted to work on it.

And it is also necessary to make sure that the equipment that will be used in the creation of these projects is available. Children need access to computers, microphones, digital camcorders, digital cameras, scanners, and software that allows for the creation of multimedia presentations. If my school is networked and children are not provided with file storage large enough to hold these large electronic files, I should develop a plan for how these projects are going to be stored while my children are working on them.

Today, I used my smartphone first to shoot my video, and then I use iJianJi.com to edit my video. It is quite fabulous software to handle and use for a green hand like me.

At the beginning, I encountered some problems during editing the video. When I need to add a cover and a credit in my video, I can hardly find how to make them. I also felt a little bit nervous when recording the video. After the explanation of teacher and Yufan Zhuang, a few new ideas came into my mind. Clever as me, I solved the problems later. I think what I should improve is to be bold in speaking to the audience and try to be more confident.

The suggestions that I want to give to those who want to use video in their classes is to remember that quality does not equals quantity. When children begin collecting pictures to accompany their story, emotion often overtakes them. And they come to class with dozens, and dozens, and dozens of pictures that all have sentimental value. If all the pictures are used, the result is a digital scrapbook, not a story. For a three-minute story, we teachers have to limit children to a maximum of fifteen images. This achieves two goals: first, it forces them to make value decisions on the photos, and results in only the “best of the best.” Second, it focuses the attention back to the story. Children must rely on the story driving the images, instead of the images driving the story.

Furthermore, for a story to be a story, it must be shared. At minimum, children should view all stories created by their classmates. I tend to make quite a “production” of the whole experience. Children spend a moment introducing the story, and after the film and a hearty round of applause, classmates give positive feedback to the storytellers. So production and presentation is a show time for children.

From my perspective, this project links with Standard 2 in ISTE Standards. Because this project ensures all the students to pursue their individual thoughts and decide their own learning models. The new teaching method and the new tool we use to display for children will enhance their attention and make them relaxed. Therefore, teaching with digital story-telling is a kind of modern method in the modern world.

And here is the video I edited on digital story-telling.

Day Five

Audio Editing

In the morning, we were asked to create an audio file to teach the content in the lesson plan. Since I prepared to teach children about mixing colors in my audio file, I wrote down some procedures and then turn on the recorder on my cell phone.

Creating audio is not an easy job for me. I created my audio file in my iPhone for three times to make it perfect. But accidentally I realized that there is no memory available in my iPhone and I didn’t have any apps in it to upload it to the computer. I was very depressed. The solution I found is to record my words on another cell phone – Mi Max.

This time I became more careful. I recorded what I wanted to taught to my kids. I thought there was too noisy when my classmates and I were recording our own words at the same time, so I wore earphones and talked to the microphone. After I finished creating my audio file, I saved it in MP3 format, and then uploaded it to pan.baidu.com. And about the tips that I am willing to tell my classmates is that converting the audio file in the MP3 format in the cell phone is a bit easier than in the computer since I tested the two methods respectively.

This is my audio file about the lesson of my art lesson.

Video Creation

We were asked to create a video about 2 minutes to teach the content. And I did it for the whole afternoon and whole evening. In my humble opinion, creating a 2 minutes’ video is much more difficult than creating an audio. Well, I have to admit that I am not good at these two things.

I made the PowerPoint for the primary colors, the secondary colors and mixing colors. And it took me a long time to decide how much knowledge I should impart in this video. To meet my course objectives, I listed their favorite fruits as examples. In terms of creating my video, I first made a PowerPoint, and then clicked the slide show window to record voice-over, so that my PowerPoint became a short video clip.

However, I spent about 2 hours producing this video clip because I was not familiar with the slide show window and its operations. I also recorded the audio which would be added to my video creation by for several times, just for adjusting the speaking speed and pronunciation. Therefore, the final product that I devoted 100% of my energy was the best time I created.

By the way, I mixed the short video clips, audio recordings and background music with Easy Film Making, software provided by www.microsoft.com, on my bosom friend’s laptop with Windows 10. It’s a really well-done software and easy to handle and use, but it is complicated when I was not satisfied with my products and tried again.

This is my video creation about the lesson of my art lesson.

Day Four

Website Design

This morning, we learned how to create a course site based on our lesson plan. It sounds very awesome and I want to try to use it immediately.

A web page is a document that is accessible through the Internet to share things, containing links to images and sometimes other types of media with people all over the world. We can put music, video, pictures and everything we like on our web page. And we can also put several links on it. It is free and convenient to use.

A document page is relatively simpler and less interesting. Its site is always the same. Even if these two pages are similar, the difference between them is that the web page has a linked hyperlink which is only belongs to it, but the document page cannot be found online. Having some other coherent method of navigation like the web page is more constructive.

According to certain rules, the website is a collection of web pages for displaying specific content on the Internet, using tools such as HTML. So people can access websites through web browsers, access to the information they need, or enjoy web services.

As a group leader, I discussed how to create a storyboard to illustrate our site structure first, and then assign the responsibilities to every individual in my group. I think the storyboard is of good use because it shows the framework of our thoughts and provides a high-level view of the overall layout. It is certain to be easy as we think logically about the theme of the establishment, the structure of the site, and the group division.

The first challenge I confronted with is that I forgot the process of how to create a website although Dr. Wang demonstrated it for the second time. Luckily, Charlotte is good at technology, so she devoted herself a lot to our group. When she operated on her computer, I recorded every detail and now I can manage it very well. And we also thought that we should make our website appealing, and we tried to customize the theme many times until we were all satisfied with our web interface.

From my perspective, it connects one of the ISTE Standards: Design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments. It suggests that teachers should “Communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital age media and formats”, so we teachers are able to design, develop, and evaluate authentic learning experiences and assessments incorporating contemporary tools and resources to maximize content learning in context and to develop their knowledge, skills, and attitudes. For example, I create a website about my teaching plan, and then my students’ parents will see it. As a result, they will get to know what we will do in class and what they should do to help them study, such as the materials like books they should prepare, or background knowledge they should have, etc.

And this is our website. Hope you will like it!

Day Three

My experience with class management software: classdojo

We were asked to create an account with Classdojo, and create a class with ten students. I have to say that ClassDojo is an amazing classroom communication platform for teachers, parents and students. It is available as a web application that can be used in any device with a web browser, and also with native applications for iPhone and Android.

ClassDojo is easy to set-up and use. Simply create an account using my email address and I am ready to go. The service is also completely free! Once I am into ClassDojo, I can choose icons for each class and begin setting up my class. The program automatically assigns fun avatars for each student, but I can change them. Next, I can use the pre-set positive and negative behaviors or personalize them. Very quick and easy!

I am suggested that I should start by setting up my own custom behavior points after logging in. For example, instead of just “Off Task”, I can also create points for “Talking in Line” or “Out of Seat during Seat Work”. What I learned from this project is to make things as specific as possible.

We explored ClassDojo on our own. And our group found an exciting button to record kids’ attendance. Click it and then we could mark the present and absent ones. The colors of the icons at the top right corner of the avatars will change red, yellow and green. What impressed me most deeply was that Dr. Wang told me some educational differences between the US and China. She said that teachers in the US couldn’t touch kids even if they are quite cute. So I will bear it in my mind if I go abroad for further study someday.

I will change the skills for which the students obtain feedback to adapt to the needs of the class or of the school. ClassDojo is so conducive and customizable that I can encourage students’ learning, skill development, and character-building.

According to ISTE Standards, I am aware that teachers should “Develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.” Luckily, the use of ClassDojo to monitor positive learning behaviors, as carried out well in the class, could engage my students in meaningful and effective conversations about their own learning behaviors, including strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, students seem to enjoy classroom use of the web-based system, and responded positively to the development of personalized behavioral goals, which is also consistent with Standard 2b in the article. Meanwhile, positive learning behaviors and self-regulatory behaviors increased and negative behaviors decreased even though only the frequency of positive behaviors were tracked using ClassDojo.

This is an awesome program we are using to promote my kids’ academic success and self-regulation. This program allows me and the kids in my class to view their classroom behaviors from home any time!

This picture below is what I created in ClassDojo.com.

Integrating electronic white board in classroom teaching

Padlet is like a piece of online paper where people can put any content anywhere on the page, together with anyone, using any device. It allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It is very user friendly as it can be accessed from various digital devices.

I think this project connects to Standard 1 in the ISTE Standards tightly, because it encourages students to communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals, which is in accordance with “Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity”. There are lots of features that I can customize. For example, I can make it public, private, password protected and even moderate everything.

When I become a teacher, I’d like to create a board for students to submit, because padlet is a virtual wall where students and I can share our ideas, thoughts, photos, videos, articles and much more. Different opinions will be pumped up and posted under the topic I created, where students are able to revise their answers.

There is no denying that both teachers and students can use padlet to make notes, reviews, brainstorm ideas, share information and do collective research across borders to work collaboratively.

Here is the padlet wall I made in class. ☟

Day Two

My understanding on the flipped classroom

We discussed what a flipped classroom is, and how and why it works in teaching this morning. The flipped classroom intentionally shifts instruction to a learner-centered model kids can explore topics in greater depth with meaningful learning opportunities during class time, while some educational technologies such as online videos are used to deliver content outside of the classroom. So I believe that the difference between the traditional and flipped classroom is that kids learn the content passively in the former, but keep thinking actively in the latter.

And it’s also worth mentioning that self-control is very important if I apply a flipped classroom in my teaching due to kids’ curiosity. Under the circumstance, what we can do is to ask their parents supervise them – sitting beside their kids and viewing the videos together.

As far as I am concerned, I advocate that the flipped classroom can be put into practice on campus at present. Imagine that each video that my professors present is on a specific problem with strong pertinence, how easy it is for me to find solutions! And the school library and my dormitory are both covered by Wi-Fi, which is conducive and convenient to my autonomous learning.

The flipped classroom allows me the time to have private, individualized conversations with each of those students who fall behind and begin working beside them. As a result, I will use this method. And I would say explore it deeply and learn what it truly offers me as a teacher. It is a great tool. However, I still needn’t flip 100% of my content or class. Only what fits in my instructional practices.

And I also think that the use of video as an instructional medium is only going to become more prevalent. Learning to produce quality instructional videos would be very beneficial for me.

Working experiences on creating a lesson plan with the flipped classroom teaching model

There were too many ideas came into our mind so that we felt lost at sea. We can hardly choose a topic at the beginning because we don’t know kids at 4 to 5 years old are interested in which lesson and how difficult this course should be. To be frank, we decided to teach kids art after a heated discussion.

I think kids will enjoy our art lesson a lot since we made our plan very attractive and interesting. We were excited that there is a large amount of knowledge that we want to impart to our kids – we are like the knowledge base! We have to choose, or compromise.

Having revised the lesson plan several times, I came to realize that it does not have to be an exhaustive document that describes each and every possible classroom scenario. Nor does it have to anticipate each and every kid’s response or question. Instead, it provides us with a general outline of our teaching goals, learning objectives, and means to accomplish them. It is a reminder of what we want to do and how we want to do it. In my humble opinion, a productive lesson is not one in which everything goes exactly as planned, but one in which both students and instructor learn from each other.

View on Our Group’s Lesson Plan (Original) and Our Group’s Lesson Plan (Final)

View on My Lesson Plan

My experiences on working on the survey

In order to have a brief understanding of my students’ background knowledge, we started to use https://www.polleverywhere.com/ to create a survey. And I think it is not too difficult for us to use this technology because we used the same kind of tool this summer holiday for a questionnaire survey.

Despite the fact that we argued a lot owing to what questions we should raise according to our art lesson plan in the project, we finally determined to design two polls, facing both kids and their parents.

I will use this tool as a daily technology due to its simple interface and convenient operations when I become a real teacher in the future. It will engage my students and get responses straight from them. What a beneficial quality interaction it is!

View the parents’ survey

View the children’s survey

About Jiayuan Wei and ED 326

Hi, my name is Jiayuan Wei, and you can call me Olivia in English. I come from Yangpu District, Shanghai. Currently, I’m a sophomore specializing in early childhood education in Shanghai Normal University Tianhua College.

The reason why I choose this major is that I love those simple and naive children and prefer the feeling of building a harmonious and happy relationship between the children and I. Actually, being a teacher has long been my dream. There is no doubt that it is indeed my pleasure and privilege to have a chance to chasing it.

Since the course we took is related to technology, we talked about what technology we were familiar with and used frequently in our daily life. Then I found a common phenomenon that the modern technology has recently penetrated into our daily life. As for me, I use WeChat and QQ for communication and Sina Weibo for entertainment. But how can we apply these technologies to early childhood environment? It is a quite thought-provoking question.

Surprisingly, I noticed that the kids are fascinated with the materials which are provided on the screen. Their curiosity motivates them to count things on the screen with high-tech pens and then give out the results, which means that using technology in class is necessary.

It is widely acknowledged that modern technology contribute to making our activities more economical and less time-consuming, improving our living standards. In conclusion, I strongly advocate that I should take advantage of instructional technology, information communication technology and assistive technology, and bring them to my future class.