Technology in Chinese Lessons

I haven't written a blog post in quite some time. It's not that I haven't any content. I just don't have much time with my transition to a new school next academic year and a lot of demand for workshops :) I thought that I should share a recent workshop that I presented in Beijing. It is a collection of my tips for Chinese language teachers using iPads or Macbooks with their classes.

I am always careful to use creation apps on the iPad. There are some good content apps out there but you really need to look carefully as they often don't match with your curriculum needs.

Here we can see a teacher using a stylus to input Chinese characters. This allows for quicker typing of the characters. It is easy to set up via the keyboard options in your Macbook settings panel.

This is a very exciting way for students to write calligraphy on an iPad using an actual brush! You need a paint brush stylus. I have used the Sensu brush which feels so natural. I actually feel like I am writing calligraphy but there is no messy ink!

I really love the Drawing Pad app for iPad. I have been using it for several years now and it just keeps getting better. What a great way to make pictorial calligraphy to help learners remember their Chinese characters.

There are many Flash card apps for iPad. I like this one because you can draw right inside the app which is helpful for remembering Chinese characters. It is easy to make new sets and to share them across your classes. You can also download sets that others have made.

A few years ago I helped some Chinese teachers at my school to make Mr Bean movies with Chinese voice overs and Chinese character subtitles. It was so much fun. Here is a video made by a student. The learners gained so many new words from this project and had loads of fun!

me>

Here is the video that I made about Chinese books being creating using the Book Creator app for iPad. This lesson led to Keily Setiawan becoming the youngest child to ever publish an English/Chinese book to the Apple iBooks Store!!

Here is the link to the Apple iBooks Store for the book 'Chen Chen Goes to Space'.

Classroom Behaviors in Chinese Intermediate Lessons

We had some fun in Chinese lessons today using Skitch and the laptop webcams. Skitch is a great little app that allows the user to take photos and mark them up with hand written notes. Take a look

Mr Bean Speaks Chinese?

At SWA we have three languages, English (language of instruction), Indonesian and Chinese. Chinese lessons are taught by native speakers and streamed into beginner, intermediate and advanced classes. I have been working with one of the five Chinese teachers at school over the past week. Rachel wanted to use more technology in her teaching to make the lesson more engaging for her students. She liked the idea of teaching the students to dub a movie.

The original idea was to take a Chinese movie but I suggested to use something that the students are more familiar with, like Mr Bean. Mr Bean has very little dialogue which makes it the perfect choice as students can create a voice over that explains what is happening rather than trying to match with a person speaking.

I asked the class of Grade 8 students to choose three different Mr Bean movies so we could download them from You Tube. The students chose the Camera One, The Baby One and The Swimming Pool One. The students were immediately engaged and started to ask for vocab that they didn't know.

We asked the students to take only 2 minutes of the clip and to add voice overs but this was allowed to be creative and not necessarily follow the original video. After that the students changed the Macbook International settings to ITABC for Chinese characters and created subtitles.

The end results have now begun to be published on the school LCD screens at the school cafes for the other students to watch. I have uploaded Marc's video here for you all to see. Chinese is a second language for Marc and I think that he has done exceptionally well. This video was shown recently in a shopping mall at the 21st Century Learner Seminar hosted by iMac (Apple) in Indonesia. It got a lot of attention and drew a big crowd.

Transportation in Chinese

Today in Grade 7 the students learned about different types of transportation. First the students wrote down all the different kinds of transportation that they had ever traveled on.
There were plenty of unusual ones like metro mini, flying fox, helicopter, skateboard and even an elephant!

The students were then asked to make a Keynote slideshow with photos and the words in pinyin.
For example

火 车 －huo che - train



Teachable moment!
Just as this lesson was in progress a helicopter landed in the field beside our school. Of course we took advantage and got all the students to take a look and learn the words for helicopter:

直升机 － zhi sheng ji - helicopter