Back from China
I am trying to recover from jetleg. 13 hours time difference are really getting to me.
The experience was amazing. It was my first time to Asia, after spending my most of my life living and traveling between Europe, South-America and North America. I have also visited South Africa before, but Asia was a complete new world for me. Besides for the humbling effect of not being able to understand anything and anybody in Chinese. Something that as a fluent trilingual person in addition to at least understand basics and being able to read in several more languages was hard to swallow.
On the educational technology side, I am tempted to say that so far the “Virtual Field Trip” experience through the China blog that I was trying to create for all the students at my school, seems to have been successful. I went to school for a few hours yesterday before everybody headed into winter break and the response was overwhelming from teachers and students (all the way from Pre-K to 6th grade).
A more formal assessment will be made once we return to school in January. I was also able to get in contact with a fellow teacher, Claudia Novak from Nashua , NH, who has created several Virutal Fieldtrips for her students, the most recent one also being to China. We are planning to extend the learning for our students through a Skypcast in the near future.
As a world language teacher, I am extremely excited about being able to bring foreign cultures, including language, customs and traditions from around the world to my little school community in this part of the world. I hope we can make this an ongoing effort with students and teachers sharing their trips virtually with the rest of us.
Flickr/langwitches
Linkedin/langwitches
Twitter/langwitches
YouTube/langwitches
Del.icio.us/langwitches
Blog/Langwitches
December 19th, 2006 at 2:00 am
The China blog is fantastic! I’ve been following your adventures for the last two weeks, and I can imagine how amazing it must be for the parents of your students back in the US to be reading and seeing what you’re doing all the way on the other side of the world. Not only are your students so fortunate to be able to travel to China, but having this permanent documentary of the trip to share with others is wonderful.
I wonder if there are international school teachers around the world that can work on these virtual field trips with you (like me!)? For example, it would be so easy for my students, here in Malaysia, to take pictures and describe them on their blogs; and you could do the same for us in the US. What do you think?
December 19th, 2006 at 6:46 am
Kim,
I would love to do a combined project. Maybe a “Virtual Fieldtrip” Blog could be created that would link all the different countries and animated more International teachers to participate by adding their blog/link.
Let’s talk…
Silvia