Recent years, WeChat, a cross-platform instant messaging service created by Tencent in Shenzhen, China, has become the most popular social media platform for Chinese people to use. Over 1000 million people spend over hours on WeChat daily. WeChat is a multifunctional social media tool that brings convenience to people’s life.
Firstly, WeChat is similar to other popular social media platforms, which offer people a space to share and express opinions, videos, pictures in public but only those people you are friends with. You can follow some public pages that provide educational information, such as some free online courses and meaningful articles, which benefits people. Take myself as an example, I took a three month GRE courses on WeChat, which was very good assistance for me to pass the test. We watched some videos about how to solve math problems on the WeChat platform. The teacher gave us homework to practice. What is more, WeChat allows people to create a group to study together too, the maximum number is 500 people; it also provides a chance for people to have multi-people video talk. Additionally, you can learn many things on WeChat and you can find almost every information you need on it. For example, you want to learn about Chinese Spring Festival Culture and how do Chinese people celebrate the Spring Festival in China, then you can go to search for videos of how Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival and its history on those relative topic pages. I personally believe that the educational function on WeChat is effective for people to learn and get improved in certain areas.
Secondly, WeChat has become one of the most popular online payment tool, which brings lots of conveniences for people. It is easy to link your Bank accounts and cards to WeChat account then people can use WeChat payment to order airplane tickets and hotels, pay bills, taxis, shopping mall, pets caring, even little street food vendors, it is easy to pay via WeChat by scanning the WeChat Code. Well, honestly, Mobile payment service is everywhere in China.
Of course, WeChat fundamentally is an instant service that connects people, WeChat gives people more security and safety because it asks people the exactly ID number of the target person when you want to add or befriend with, however, in Facebook, you only need to know his or her name and can find him by searching his full name. Additionally, nobody else can your posts unless you “allow strangers to see at most ten posts”; you can also set how much of posts in timetable can be viewed by public, for example, you can set “only the recent three-days posts can be viewed by people”, “only the recent six-months posts can be viewed by people” and “all posts can be viewed by people”.
However, WeChat has some disadvantages especially for people who are crazy about posting videos. At the “Moment” section, the place people share and express their feelings and opinions in public, it does not allow posting a video that is longer than ten seconds, which is not always convenient for those adolescents who love sharing their selfie videos frequently. Also, WeChat payment only supports using Chinese dollars as the only currency; even though the range of usage and acceptance has reached to European countries and many American countries, people need to consider about the exchange rate from the Chinese dollars to the target currency. when they are using WeChat payment.
Monthly Archives: October 2018
Instagram as a tool of social studies
I found that there are fewer young people choosing to use Facebook these years. Probably it’s because their parents and grandparents started using this social media platform, and they are trying escaping from their family’s eyesight on the internet. Instagram, a platform that you don’t have to show your real name, is becoming more popular. It is very interesting to realize that a lot of adolescents are using more than one accounts on Instagram. They will use the different account to present different aspects of themselves; they also use it to see the new trends among young people and those trends influence them a lot.
As an educator, I think no matter which social media modality we want to introduce to our students, the first thing is to let them know that people always “Discourse” themselves in the way they want. I read Plato’s Allegory of the cave in my undergrad, and I found this story was particularly giving me a lot of thoughts on social media when I was an adolescent, and I believe it can also help today’s young adults to learn about social media. The allegory is that a group of people was sitting in a cave, facing the wall, and seeing nothing but shadows that cast by a fire behind them. That’s the way they learn about the world–they might think that was the real world, but it is just the world that being projected on the wall in front of them. As long as we see this world thru a lens (media), they are modified by a filter and are presented in a way that not necessary they original like. I will help my students to understand this and let them know that there is always a real world beyond this “projected world” on the internet, we should never be fooled by those filter, and we should have the courage to walk away from the wall and see what’s really happening in the world.
In terms of the merit of Instagram, I think this app can be a tool to find the same group of people. By typing a tag that you want to research, you can easily find the related pictures and videos. If a student is struggling with some issues and also want to know how do other people like them dealing with that issue, they can search topic like #ADHD to figure out how other people with ADHD deal with this, and maybe some professional accounts giving advice to issues related to ADHD.
I also believe Instagram can be a useful tool for community learning. By searching “near me” in their searching engine, young people can figure out what’s happening in their community. Or if they want to learn somewhere else in the world, they can search the name of that specific place and see what people are doing, what is happening in that place.
Social Media in a Foreign Language Classroom
Building media literacy in a classroom starts with the teacher. Before considering the pros and cons, the teacher needs to get to know the outlets available in technology and media to select which one they’d use for students to be able to relate and connect to. I want to focus on social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because they share similar features. It’s a popular outlet that students and adults are familiar with. As adults, we use social media to network, create an image for ourselves, to update our friends on our current events, and to get our point across using nothing other than memes. With that said, I think students can also use these social apps in the same way but with the objective of learning a second language, we just need to make that clear to them and monitor their use of it. Some of the pros I foresee with using social media in a foreign language classroom is that students will be exposed to real comments, tweets, and posts in the target language, they can find new ways to express themselves, and it could motivate them to participate or keep them interested in the lesson since they can connect to a device or app that they may already use. A con I think educators may encounter, if they use this approach, is if the social apps will be used negatively, as in, will this be an open opportunity for a student to get bullied? This thought came up because one of the biggest topics concerning social media is cyberbullying. As educators we need to remind students that they are given the privilege to use social media apps in class, but if used inappropriately that privilege will get taken away. We want to model media literacy as something fun and useful, so we must model a kind ethical use of social media: what is and is not allowed.
I would use all three social apps because they all share similar tools. First, they all have a language setting, so you can ask the students to change the language of the app to the target language. It’s a way for students to get used to the language, it may become second nature to them knowing how to navigate the app. The apps also share the translation tool, you can encourage students to read comments on a post, and if they’re not sure of a few words they can click the translate button. A downside to this is that it may become tiresome monitoring each student to make sure they’re not using that tool every second. Another way to implement social media in the classroom is using the target language for a specific purpose, we can do this through hashtags. For example, let’s say your objective for students is to be able to express their feelings or opinions on brands that aren’t animal cruelty free. They can look up the hashtag “#AnimalCruelty #AnimalCreultyFree” and see what posts come up and analyze how people write about that topic. A con to this is that we need to monitor what hashtags students look up, they should stay on task and not consider this activity as free time.
Lastly, students can use the apps to communicate with each other using memes! I love this part because I truly believe we practice this every day. For example, instead of having a conversation through tweets, texts, comments, or posts, what we do is communicate through memes (images with a funny/clever caption). When I say that I mean send a different meme back and forth with someone. This definitely needs to be monitored because a meme conversation has to make sense like an oral conversation, we need to make sure students don’t send random memes to each other just because it’s funny, it should relate to the same topic. Although I find using social media apps in the classroom as an effective learning process and convenient, since most of us have it downloaded in our devices, educators must get to know the privacy settings, always keep the objective clear, and monitor the students.
MVP # 8: How to make Curriculum Integration more benefical to a range of students; and how does traditional curricular designed classroom benefit students?
When I start writing this MVP, I think the most interesting point is the curriculum integration. There are many benefits that curriculum integration can provide for students: engage in learning ideas that are meaningful to their lives; make significant connections between ideas they study and their lives; learn concepts and principles at a developmentally appropriate level; participate in democratic decision making that affects the daily classroom, etc. It also mentioned that students themselves can engage in the decision of making curriculum integration. “Student-designed is true CI as defined by ultimate curricular decision making by students ”(P195 Middle-Grade Research Journal Vol.6, No. 4, 2011). Then I have questions. What is the standard to exam students and courses when adding more different levels of people to decide the new curriculum? All Students have different and similar backgrounds. So how do we decide what types of students can join into designing curriculum?
The article also mentioned one interesting point is that “many classrooms have become less progressive in their curricular design than in previous decades”, which can refer to the traditional curricular designed classroom. I experienced the very traditional curricular designed classroom when I was studying in China. I think the traditional curricular designed has the explicit learning and teaching goals, and the benefits are more obvious reflected on the exam scores, which is the most direct way to see how is the students level and what percent of the knowledge he has mastered from class. And the traditional curricular designed classroom can definitely meet the high schools need because high school students have more exams for entering into higher education level.
The Big ‘Why?’
“The reasons for providing student-directed learning through CI are many and proved opportunities for students to…be exposed to social equity issues that are on young adolescents’ minds…” (Brown, 2011, pg. 195)
Education does not exist in a bubble outside of what is happening socially, politically and culturally. Standardized content is limited in that it does not move, change or react to what learners observe constantly in their daily life. Content Integration seems so vital to me, not only to keep learners engaged, but to address challenging, disturbing or puzzling things that happen in the world. To not address things like #metoo, the 2016 election, climate change, Parkland or Colin Kaepernick kneeling is not only a hindrance to young developing minds but an insult to their intelligence. Curriculum and content must exist as fluid, and educators must be creative and adaptable.
For example, last year I was teaching dance to high school students and they literally could not concentrate right after the Parkland shooting or #metoo, because they wanted to talk about it, to process and to analyze it. Whatever I was trying to get across that day did not matter in the slightest because they knew and could feel in the world around them that bigger things were happening, things that actually affect them on a daily basis.
Content Integration can begin earlier than middle school too, however maybe in a different way. I do not teach elementary age students, but I nanny for two as my day job. Recently, I overheard the 4th grader and her friends talking about Donald Trump and immigration, they were mostly mimicking statements I’m sure they overheard their parents saying, but what was most clear was that they knew something about it was important.
In these situations the most obvious question being asked is why? Why are people devastated by the election? Why do school shootings keep happening? Why do we keep people out of our country? While, we may not have the answers to why, and may not ever, we can engage our students in deep thinking about the systems at work that allow for certain events to happen or to not happen. We must integrate content or we are seriously limiting our students.