Chinese Language Resources for Students and Teachers

Over the years, I have created a library of Google slides on Chinese language. These slides have a variety of short Chinese language videos that cover language items for most topics that 2nd language learners of Chinese would possibly learn. The main framework of this resource was based on the Ni Hao series of textbooks, Chinasoft. 

Most of the videos are my own and were created with the flipped learning method in mind.  You can read my post on flipped learning here if you are interested.  The other videos in this resource have been attributed on the site. 

Please feel free to use this resource and I hope it can support your teaching of Chinese.

Click on the image below to go to the site.

https://sites.google.com/view/narralakes/home

Video Activities for the Languages Classroom (1)

       

Using videos in the language classroom is one way of getting authentic language to the students.  In most cases, students can have access to your video activities via prepared video activities and flipped lessons in the classroom or at home, so accessibility is a strong feature and advantage when using videos.  

Some suggested teaching ideas for video activities

Videos can be used at any stage of the teaching and learning process.  For languages, videos can be a great way to introduce, revise and review vocabulary, sentence patterns and language concepts.  With some of the products below, you can create and design video activities to also be formative and summative activities.  Following are a few suggested activities how I have used videos in the classroom.  

Collaborative group work: students can view a video together in pairs, taking notes, stopping, replaying, and discussing the content as they go.  With products like Educanon (see below) and Edpuzzle, strategically placed questions or references by the teacher, get the students thinking and add another activity apart from those mentioned above. 

Flipped Lessons: Flipped lessons have been around for ages and similar to the collaborative group work idea, students can work not only in groups but also on their own.  The great thing about flipped lessons and using videos is that students can go over the material as many times as they need to master the content.  So for example, if they have missed a lesson, they can catch up on their own, take notes and discuss the content with the teacher. 

To view some of my flipped lessons, please go to my Narralakes Youtube channel. 

Educanon 

Educanon is a free web based product that is a powerful tool for any teacher.  You can create your classes or student lists easily by copying and pasting your lists or adding them in manually.  The Educanon dashboard is neat and easy to navigate and the functions below should help you get started.

Creating: The teacher can create an activity via the Design page.  Look for a video or upload your own from a wide range of web based sources, such as Vimeo, Youtube, and the Khan Academy, just to mention a few.  Once you have found your video, past the url in the finder, Educanon finds the video and then you can start adding activities.  You can add questions and crop the video if you only want to use parts of it.  

Assigning:  Once you have created your video activity, you can assign a class from your list.

Sharing: The great thing with Educanon is that you can share it with students or anyone via Twitter, email or Facebook with the url code or embed it into your web page.  

Bulbs: Bulbs are basically your storage area for your videos and then assign classes or students to them, creating the "bulb" .  You can store the videos you have worked on and created or find new videos.  

Monitor: Another great feature of Educanon is that you can monitor your students, this is great for formative or summative assessments and as with most good products, grades can be exported and saved.  

Overall, I find Educanon an excellent product. The free version has most of the functions that any class teacher would need, not many of us would have more than 8 classes.  If you do need feel you need the extra functions the Basic version does not provide, the Premium and Blended School versions come at a reasonable price.  

Here's an example of part of one of my Educanon videos. 




Check out my video resource list at Pinterest. Follow Ken's board Videos on Pinterest.

Online Tools that make a task fun!

There are many online web tools that can make learning fun for the student and are valuable resources for teachers.  With the tools listed below, teachers can actually be giving students a variety of activities such as pre-task (getting to know), formative and summative tasks.  Well planned tasks can assist teachers easily gather student information and see how they are progressing once set up.  

Prior or pre-testing, also known as entry tickets, is to gain the background knowledge of what your students know if they are a new class or before introducing a new topic.  They can take the form of just simple questionaires or surveys and usually short.  For example, if I was to teach a new class of Year 7 (1st year high school) Chinese, I would pre-test them to see what knowledge and language ability they had.  You can find the example I created in Socrative, if you have a Teachers or Students account, you can search for it on Socrative and search for SOC-12288269.  

Socrative is an easy to use web based application for teachers and students.  You can download the apps for iOS and Android and there are lots of support and forums out there.  Socrative's power is not only the smooth and easy way you can design your activities, but also in the way that you can include games and most important of all for teachers, the feedback function.  As soon as the activity is finished teachers can at the press of a button receive an emailed spreadsheet of the results.  You can download from other teachers from the generous list of shared, prepared activities at Socrative Garden.  Student can access the activity via the web or download the app. 

Kahoots  is a fun tool that is similar to Socrative.  The interface is different though and once in the activity it is very engaging.  Students find it very entertaining and it has a count down function that really engages students.  It also has a feedback facility for teachers with a new download to Google drive function.  You can log onto the Kahoots website and create an account for free and then start designing your activities. 


Google Forms are incredibly powerful as an online tool that you can create a multitude of activities with. When you download the Flubaroo or Doctopus add-ons, it is an even more powerful application.  Teacher feedback, like in Socrative and Kahoots, is sent via the email in a Google sheet and then you can check out the data.  To log onto the activity, the student can be sent the link or it can be hyperlinked on your webpage. 

Quizlet is a useful addition to this list of free web tools for teaching and learning.  Similar to the ones mentioned above, Quizlet can be used to support student learning by creating lists for vocabulary and sentence pattern activities in a variety of languages.  It's test feature is a good summative and formative tool that gives a variety of options to how to set up the test.  The only negative aspect of Quizlet is that it does not have the teacher feedback like Kahoots and Socrative in the form of an excel spreadsheet.  I have mentioned this to the Quizlet people but their response was to get the students to screen shot and send it which I don't think is a good option.  For such a good product and if you pay for the teacher's version like I do, I think an excel feedback facility for teachers would make Quizlet one of the best out there.  Besides this gripe, it does have several great feature for example, it has is that is provides native speaker audio for the texts and a few basic but fun games, even on the free version!  The iOS and Android apps work well as well, but do not have all the functions the web based platform has.  

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