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.
Category Archives: Media and Technology Critiques
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.
Confessions of a Teacher Turned Gamer
True confession. I am technologically challenged. 1985 freshman year at NYU. Computer? Commodore 64. Whaaaattttttt…?! Yes. I’m old. There you have it y’all. I did not grow up with technology the way my own kids and students seem to have been born with iPhones attached to their hands, panic-stricken if their battery is in the red without an accessible charger or socket to refuel their addiction. Civilians without daily exposure to teens may balk with astonishment at the real-life melt-downs portrayed when a cell phone is taken away from a teen videotaped in CNN’s study on social media and teens, “#Being13: Inside the Secret World of Teens.” (2015) But this is not Kansas anymore Toto, you feel me frfr, this is some real shaaaaa…we as educators must deal with every day. So how do we navigate these tsunami waves of teen dissention to phone separation anxiety when negotiating the curriculum, classroom management, and frankly, our sanity as educators? “Embrace the rainbow” you skittle head my kids would tell me. So here I am.
For the past two weeks I have laboriously interviewed my students, who were so psyched to school me on social media platforms for this paper: Instagram, Finsta, Snapchat, and World Star…Yikes! The teacher becomes the student and my students definitely felt the breadth of my frustration as this role reversal was quite enlightening for all involved. Bottomline? My kids were enthusiastic to teach me all about the idiosyncratic nuances of all of these platforms, but when I finally explained the why, that I needed to choose one to focus on with the goal of using it to promote more engaged, motivating curriculum development; they were just like, “Nah. That won’t work Miss.” (Insert bug-eyed emoji face here) Ok. Redirect.
Chapter Two. My son has dyslexia and a processing disorder. He’s had an IEP since 3rd grade. He only has two social media platforms he engages, Snapchat and “Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), also known as action real-time strategy (ARTS), which is a subgenre of strategy video games that originated as a subgenre of real-time strategy, in which a player controls a single character in a team who compete versus another team of players. The objective is to destroy the opposing team’s main structure with the assistance of periodically-spawned computer-controlled units that march forward along set paths. Player characters typically have various abilities and advantages that improve over the course of a game and that contribute to a team’s overall strategy. MOBA games are a fusion of action games, role-playing games and real-time strategy games.” (Wikipedia) Sean is an athlete, was always an outdoor-playing kid, until last year, freshman year of high school. He suddenly wanted an Xbox and a Microsoft Live Subscription for Christmas. He literally was no longer part of the male-bonding social circle at school any longer if he did not participate in this platform. He needed to learn this at home to be part of the socialization at school. I have never seen/heard my son more engaged, motivated, excited, focused, and ultimately confident than I have when he is in MOBA world with his friends. So now I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how I can incorporate video gaming, specifically MOBA, into my English classroom curriculum without the bloodshed, cursing, trash talk, and violence that these now 10th grade boys live for. The more research I did, the more positive aspects I stumbled across for gaming to be beneficial in educational environments. There were actual studies demonstrating how gaming can enhance brain flexibility improving a teen’s ability to learn, improvise, problem-solve quickly and efficiently, focus intently on goals in spite of external distractions, increase visual and audial acuity, multi-task, collaborate, make predictions in order to plan and implement strategies for success, and even relieve stress to be able to clear your mind and body of tension that could prevent learning – all issues that my son with SLD struggles to overcome in the classroom. How can I transfer these benefits to my students in my inclusion classes with similar obstacles?
I found the amazing gift of Kahoot! I’m not gonna lie; I was real scared to approach a computer-based technological activity that required my kids to actually USE THEIR CELL PHONES IN CLASS! But if I’ve learned nothing else in my experience as a teacher, I’ve learned to be honest with my kids and admit when I do not know everything. Bingo! The students become the teachers and proceed to step up to the challenge vigorously to demonstrate to me how this modality can enhance their learning. All I could think was, is this what curriculum integration looks like? Basically Kahoot! is an international interactive gaming platform with over 50 languages available that can be downloaded in a free app to cell phones or a website opened up on a pc in which teachers and students can play educational games individually or on teams that they themselves create on any academic subject. In addition to creating their own academic games in every language my kids speak, they can play other students’ games that are shared publicly on the site. Recently Kahoot! released a new Challenge Mode for HW used to assign after-class challenges to students, either by sharing a unique PIN or link via e-mail, Google Classroom or other messengers they use. The challenges called “kahoots,” or trivia quiz games, can be customized and cover a range of topics i.e. English, Science, Math, History, Geography. The company also recently launched an online library for curriculum-aligned kahoots for K–12 classrooms. I am still trying to learn all the cool ways I can incorporate this medium in my classes, but so far my favorite is having my students’ create their own Kahoots! to share and play in class. My ELLs focus on creating vocabulary games so they are learning the synonyms and antonyms in English so deeply since they have to create the answer choices as well as the questions. My more advanced students create formative assessments without even realizing it on literature we read in class like Macbeth. I can even retrieve data on each kid’s answers and note their progress in the reports option. Coolest thing ever though is that the immediate scores come up on the leaderboard on the Smart Board but no one knows who got which answers correct or incorrect except for me and that respective student.
The potential problems that have arisen with my student population which is Title I, is not having a cell phone to play with or not having a data plan with service. So I reserve class sets of laptops just in case we need them and I provide them with my hotspot for data. This easily avoids kids feeling bad about not having and prevents teasing because no one really pays attention to who has or has not because they are all so engaged in the game designing and competition of creating the best questions and researching the best answer choices. Resources to participate fully are made available to all. My ELLs love creating games in their native language and sharing them which gives my native English speakers a great insight and lesson on how it feels to try to learn content in a different language. Very empowering for them!
Only other negative issue I have experienced was bot hacking our games. I’m not sure I am saying that correctly or even sure I can explain in writing what that is, but it happened, it ruined our games, and we had to start over. I did figure out who did it but it wasn’t the norm. Only one wise guy in one class who eventually stopped when I redirected his brilliant sinister gamer mind by assigning him more rigorous tasks to focus on completing! Conclusion: Kahoots! has opened up a whole new world for my kids to succeed and learn. I am super stoked! Game on!
Instagram and the Adolescent Language Learner: A Critique on Media
Instagram has become a powerful tool for many, whether it’s showcasing, marketing, self-expression, or more. This past week, while trying to sort out lessons within a unit for my middle school ENL class, I took a brain break to scroll through Instagram and noticed that immediately afterwards, the ideas began to flow and I was able to get right back to writing. I’m currently mapping out the main topics I want to teach my students from now until December, and I’ve split things up into two units: Belonging to my community and Belonging to the world. In the former, we learn the parts of speech and how to describe ourselves and the people around us (family, friends, and others in our community). One of the lessons I have planned involves listening to a short interview of M. Tony Peralta, an Uptown and Dominican native that expresses latinidad and afrolatinidad visually through his art. Thus, scrolling through his Instagram page and discussing the images that catch students’ attention seem naturally like a great way to engage them and give them control in the learning process. I think Peralta is a great figure to share with students, because his page will feel culturally familiar for them and many of his posted videos include him speaking English and Spanish, and planning this lesson allowed me to begin to see the value in using Instagram as a tool in the classroom.
Initially, Instagram was developed for iPhone users, but after its purchase by Facebook, it became accessible on all smartphones. A desktop version has subsequently been developed, which could be used with full sound on a SmartBoard present material in class. One great benefit to using Instagram in class is that by showing public accounts, students can engage with the material that sparks their interest outside of class and gain more knowledge, which would be great for my Belonging to the community unit. For example, @SubwayDoodle takes the New York experience of “riding the train” to a whole other level by layering cartoons on top of actual photos of train commuters, so students can not only feel closer to the commuting community that they are most likely a part of, but also learn interesting idioms and visual representations of the absurd. A character created entirely of springs at Spring St. Station or a cartoon’s face melting on a hot summer train platform would be great visual aids for English language learners. For the unit Belonging to the world, a way to create consciousness in my students on their interconnectedness with the world would be by showing the page @Parley.TV which creates awareness of the oceans to help work towards ending ocean pollution. Parley for the oceans features stunning images of marine life, as well as examples of the ways humans have affected aquatic habitats with suggestions for how to alleviate human environmental stress. Students could discuss a particular image or video that caught their attention and then write a response to it.
All in all, there is a powerful learning opportunity hiding in one of the apps in our phones. While not everything on Instagram should be shown in a classroom full of adolescents, there are ways to proceed with caution and I believe the pros outweigh the cons and this could be a valuable tool in many classroom settings.
@tallerperalta / @peraltaprjct
@subwaydoodle
@parley.tv