Category: EDCI335

The theme of our Blueprint this time is about “Chinese Education”. Utilizing educational website tools such as YouTube, Duolingo, and Kahoot to design interactive learning resources on Chinese education topics provides different ways to meet the needs of all learners. I’m going to expand on these interactive learning resources.

1. YouTube： The benefit of YouTube for Chinese education is that students can understand each character from demonstrations, animations and graphics through audio and video and listen to explanations and lectures.
2. Duolingo：Duolingo’s app allows students to practice Chinese characters anytime, anywhere, except for the daily class study, they can take a little time to study anywhere. And they get instant feedback during practice, enabling them to spot and correct mistakes in time.
3. Kahoot：It has established a gamified learning concept, interactive exercises and game achievements bring interest and engagement to students. Teachers can design Kahoot tests of different difficulty through the feedback of the game to suit learners of different proficiency levels.

I believe our interactive learning resources are there for students to learn successfully when unexpected events occur (such as a pandemic). Because these interactive learning resources come from online media resources, teachers can make full use of these resources to help students succeed even when they are not in the classroom.

In our blueprint about YouTube learning Chinese there are many facets barriers to student success.

First of all, the content on YouTube may be distracting. Although videos can increase students’ interest in learning, they may also spend time on other videos instead of learning Chinese. Second, YouTube lacks interactive elements, such as instant feedback or opportunities for practice and conversation.
I think the way to improve it can be to select some high-quality content or clips for students to ensure the quality and accuracy of the teaching videos used in the learning plan. And share video content through school platforms such as brightspace, so that students can reduce the probability of watching irrelevant videos.

From reading Winnie blog, one of the main benefits of open education for Chinese character learning is increased access to educational resources. This also brought a lot of inspiration for our group topic this time. For example, we can design free learning materials and resources, including online courses, interactive tools and language learning platforms and so on. This also increases the diversity of various learning languages for the students.

Describe an example from your life of when you were taught using each method described in this article: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.

In this article I learned about three related learning theories (behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism).

First, behaviorists believe that learning is the connection between stimulus and response, and their basic assumption is: Behavior is a learner’s response to environmental stimuli. An example of behaviorism in my life is that when I learned words as a child, my mother would look at me with fierce eyes when I did wrong, but when I mastered the word skillfully, I would get rewards.

Second, the cognitivism approach emphasizes understanding and mental processes (such as thinking, problem solving, language, concept formation, and information processing). My example is when I was learning fractions as a child, rather than rote memorization, my teacher would first introduce the concept of fractions, give a clear definition, and explain their relevance in real life. They might use visual aids like score bar charts or pie charts to visually represent scores.

Finally, with regard to constructivism, they believe that knowledge is not abstract, but is related to the context under study and the experience that the participants bring to that context. My example is that in class, the teacher asked us to discuss the issue of inequality between men and women and express different views. These discussions made my learning process consider different explanations and think about different assumptions.