Every week I meet with my Chinese friend, Ginger, to practice Chinese (& English). She is a Teacher Trainer for primary school teachers of English in Beijing. As we are education “obsessives”, no matter how hard we try to find new topics to discuss, we always end up talking about teaching and learning.
Even before I started my online Masters in Digitial Technologies for Language Teaching three weeks ago, Ginger and I had both tried out a myriad of online courses, MOOCs and digital tools to inform and support our teaching of English. At the same time, as I have a personal interest in how Chinese is taught to non-native speakers here in China, I’ve always seen the potential of digi tech for TCSOL. That said, as most of the platforms use English as the working language, not to mention that many useful platforms are blocked (anything from Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.), it is clear that a “Chinese” version of these tools will be the way forward.
And so, just as I say to Ginger there “must” be Chinese versions of digital tools in development as we speak, she comes across Emoodle, the Chinese Moodle! My online Masters is actually being taught on Moodle, so to discover Emoodle is very exciting. Now I just have to figure out how to use it…
P.S. I finally learned how to embed a website into my blog from here:
http://http://www.mulinblog.com/how-to-embed-web-page-in-a-wordpress-blog-post/