How Microblogging Friends Teaching

     Before reading the article, "Teach with twitter? Read This!," I would never relate Twitter to a stage for teaching because it is the most popular blog among young people while I cannot imagine its relation to teaching. However, after thinking about the in-time response feature as pointed in "28 Creative Ways Teachers Are Using Twitter", I start to reconsider it as a tool that can be helpful to students because it offers an interactive stage outside classroom for teachers and students to present discussion. But, there is some points that teachers should notice. As mentioned in the first article, a teacher can no longer follow the old posts once s/he becomes a friend of the user because what twitter focuses on is the current not the past. However, the author mentions how to add a feed for a Twitter hashtag, which I believe is really useful for those who choose Twitter as their stage of teaching since they can share any article with students on Twitter. 

     In "How To Use YouTube's Video Editor," the author introduce the newly launched video editor on YouTube for people to edit the raw video they uploaded.  Also, people can add soundtracks into the video with the online video editor.  This tool is really helpful toward teachers, especially those who would like to share videos with students. Sometimes teacher may find an ideal video to assist teaching while it may be too long and costs lots of class time. Under this kind of circumstances, teacher can try this video editing tool to cut their video shorter and preserve the parts they need. 

    I think video plays an important role in teaching because clearly it catches students' attention well and even encourage them to learn what appears in the video. Further, although twitter may not able to provide long-term posts, it offers a stage for teacher to answer students' question immediately, just as really chatting with each other. Video is a tool that is necessary in traditional classroom, let alone classroom in 21st century. However, when the class is held online and teachers no longer bring videos to the classroom and project on a screen, they need to prepare the materials they plan to use through managing the online resources well such as editing the video before presenting to the class. Additionally, teacher can create a twitter account for the class on which students can share their questions and teacher can reply right away or even some students in class can help each other because another student may know the answer to this student's question. In this way, students not only are able to solve their problems immediately but can improve themselves or reinforce what they learned at the same time.

Computers Assist Learning

     On an Yahoo group, "Learning with Computers," one can find various information for people among different groups. For instance, it offers information not only for children with children books, games but some ideas about pedagogy with distance learning and free technology for teachers. Being a teacher in 21st -century classroom, students are the the only person who need to learn something new. Teachers should learn how to present instructions through technology. With this blog, both teachers and students are able to find some suggestions toward technological teaching, websites or books they may be interested or even discover new ways to assist learning and teaching. Though its target blog readers may be teachers, students still can try to receive the information they need through checking the websites or instructions such as using mobile phones and learn to create their own social stream with other people. As in the video, Levine mentions people should no longer having the idea of being failed to keep up but should start with building a connection with networks of college through emails, blogs.... Staying connected is important for people since we can learn something we do not know from others, including their experiments or experiences in life. Additionally, one should also put what they already learned or are familiar with aside, touch something new and continue learning.  In my home country, smart phones are not that wide-spreaded as in the U.S.; however, I think teachers still can start creating teaching with technology through using computers. After all, lots of free tools and websites can be found online to assist teaching and learning.