ePals

ePals could be a combination of the functions of Google Blog, Twitter, Wiki, and Flickr. According to its website, ePals is a virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content. On top of that, it also provides a safe and secure environment for students and teachers to build up an education-orientated community. Among all of the features, SchoolMail and Digital Lockers have impressed me the most. With digital lockers, users of ePals are able to save and edit personal documents, photos, or audio files. As to schoolmail, users can not only rid themselves of spam and virus that slow down their time of work-processing, but also make use of the instant language translation in 35 languages. To use ePals in my own teaching, I would divide into groups and assignment each group a blog project. In this assignment, they are asked to design the layout of their blogs, decide the topic, and delegate the responsibilities of group members. Publishing at least one post is required to be able to continue working on their blogs which would be graded at the end of semester. As an ESL teacher, I would make English as the only viable language for communication. In this regard, students would be given opportunities of improving their fluency of writing.

Improve Students' writing by using Bubblr

Bubblr is a tool which users can create their own comic strips based on the pictures from flickr. The comic strips remind me of my entrance exam to university in Taiwan so long ago. In that exam, students were asked to make up their own dialogues in the bubbles. Then they had to compose writing based on the dialogues they created. I found this creative and fun activity could really give students a boost to their writing. Though it appears to be simple, this writing activity based on comic strips requires coherence and logic, in which students will be trained to be more aware of their flow and organization in writing. Other way of using Bubblr's comic strips in the classroom include asking students to do storytelling. For example, the teacher divides students into groups of four and those who are in the same group will be working on the same comic strips. Students can discuss their topics, pictures, and storyline for the presentation. By showing their comic strips to the class, students have to tell a story using their work. In this activity, not only will students' speaking skills be developed, but also their cooperative learning will be increased.

Creative Commons

Never perceive all the photos on the Internet as public until you are introduced to Creative Commons. What is Creative Commons?  According to flickr, Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright. The Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.  In fact, Creative Commons is comprised of four different types of licenses.

Attribution
Users chosen to offer their work under attribution licenses give the permission for others in duplicating, passing on, and exhibiting their images as long as others attribute the images to the creator.
Noncommercial
Users chosen to offer their work under noncommercial licenses allow others to duplicate, pass on, and exhibit their images for noncommercial purposes.

No Derivative Works

Users chosen to offer their work under no derivative works licenses enable others to duplicate, pass on, and exhibit their images verbatim.

Share Alike 

Users chosen to offer their work under share alike licenses agree on distributing derivative works for others who also share the same license.