Course II reflection

As a language teacher, one of the important factors that we would like our student to learn apart from language ability is the culture embedded in the language. With this in mind I think the changing world right now, I have to learn and design my lessons with social media. I am agree with the article in http://www.ascd.org/ascd_express/vol5/517_newvoices.aspx The language teacher in Argentina stated in this article that “As a language arts teacher in the bilingual St. Andrew's Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I was determined to change my education approach to help prepare my students for our changing world.”

Students can learn Thai vocabularies and sayings from social media network not from the assigned textbooks. With this 21st century learning trend, I do agree that we have to educate and prepare our students with the copyright concept as well as the safety and consciousness in using social network. ISBs AUP takes the above issues issue into account but I think parents should be aware of these issues too.

From this course, I start to have an idea in planning my lessons in using Thai news relate to these two important topics: the social network issues that affect Thai social value, and the issues of copyright concept. Since the political aftermath in Bangkok, there are many social network web-sites such as: http://www.thaireform.in.th where students can read, critize the information and providing their thoughts about the reforming. For the copyright issue, I personally do not think that Thai people give so much value on it. It seems that majority of the Thai students are not realize about this issue because in the Thai market we have so many fake products on sale and the Thai authorities could not really do anything about this.

The problem I have about this course is that how can I implement the social network in order to create language acquisition. Certainly students will be motivated with the on-line information but I am not sure how the language learner will really recognize the vocabularies and expressions used in the social network tools. I need to research more on the activity to enhance the learning through social network. I think more research should be done to really find out whether social network crate the language learning or just being used as a tool to motivate students. As some expert from this web-site discuss about this issue: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/nov96/vol54/num03/On_Surfing%E2%80%94and_Steering%E2%80%94the_Net@_Conversations_with_Crawford_Kilian_and_Clifford_Stoll.aspx