Sharing International Video Conferencing with Teachers-To-Be at NTCU

By invitation of Professor Liaw from the National Taichung University of Education, I shared what I have learned along the way with these teachers-to-be at a workshop. My presentation was divided into three parts, For the Love of English, Embarking on a Fascinating Journey and The Project Will Flourish, because I wanted to create an atmosphere of storytelling so that the participants could be more engaged in it.

To make it more interactive, I skyped Akiko to give a simple introduction to our project, including the thinking behind creating an authentic environment for a meaningful communication and some obstacles she came across. Then, two volunteers asked some interesting questions, and Akiko kindly answered them via Skype. On top of that, I also conducted three activities, such as Hot Seat and Talking about School Life, so that they were all in full jolly mood as showed in the video clip.

When implementing this project, you don’t just make sure that all the laptops are fully functional and the Internet connection is reliable. Moreover, lesson planning is far more important because students won’t know what to do without it. Therefore, Akiko, Bettie and I have been doing collaborative lesson planning to create worksheets as scaffolding, equipping students with relevant vocab words and phrases to talk about the assigned topics. This worked pretty well indeed.  

What I intended to achieve from this workshop was that participants not only would get the big picture of the importance of creating an authentic environment for our students to use the language but also as an English teacher, how some teaching principles, methods and activities can be very handy if we know how to apply them from the textbooks in a real classroom setting.