Wow! Cannot believe it has been almost four years since my last post. So what have I been up to?

Lately, I am have been exploring lots of FREE online learning management platforms. From Edmodo, Schoology, Google classroom and Microsoft learning communities, I tried a little bit of everything.

So far, Edmodo takes the prize for my latest consulting job. From the ease of setup to ready-made instructions for students and families, Edmodo the entire experience super painless. I plan on using this with a new group of students this upcoming fall. Stay tuned as I update the portal and share my experiences. 🙂

This year, I have decided to try a new presentational tool called “EMAZED”. Frankly, I was not amazed by the user-ability, however, the pre-designed interface templates did caught my attention at first.

I will be presentation on the topic of FLIPOLOGY. Due to time limitation of the workshop (only 3 hours), we will only be focusing on the technology aspect of Flipped classroom. However, there are so much more resources on the presentation, so be sure to try it out. 🙂 #KWLA2014

http://app.emaze.com/779679/flipology

Dear Louisville Community:

You are cordially invited to the first ever Confucius Institute 10th Year Anniversary celebration “Love for China” on Sept. 24th, 2014, 7pm at the Kentucky Center of Art, Bomhard Theater.

The Confucius Institute at Western Kentucky University have generously sponsored all ticket costs for the event, however, due to limited seating, we can only honor the first 500 reservations. So please email learning@jannachiang.com by Sept. 20th to secure your seats. Or you can submit your request here:

This special event will be filled with traditional Chinese music, instrument and beautiful dancing performances. A detail list of program can be found at this link: http://wku.edu/ci/ci_day_2014_love_for_china_en.php .

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone in the community. The event is great for all ages, and we especially encourages students to join us for this amazing performance.

We look forward to meeting you on Sept. 24th at 7pm!

Dear Me…

Edutopia has teamed up with SoulPancake and did a project for teachers to write a letter to themselves on “My First Day Teaching”. What would you tell yourself on your first day of teaching?

I often tell people, it is not which world language to learn, it is to open your mind to another culture and learn another language. Sure one would argue some language is more “important” than others, but I do not believe that is the case. I firmly believe that we need to provide opportunities for students to learn ANY language. Monolingualism in 21st century with all of the resources we have is just simply not acceptable. ACTFL has team up with an awesome campaign, call “LeadWithLanguages.com”. I am super excited with this even there is not much about it yet. For now, I am going to advocate and continue talk about world language, because I know for a fact that together we can “LEAD WITH LANGUAGES!”

So tonight I decided to try to create an infograph instead of just reference on, and I realized that it is not nearly as easy as it seems. 😦 I tested out several tools: pikochart, infogr.am, Visual.ly, and finally decided on easel.ly. All are pretty similar, some give more templates while others provides quick ways to share final product socially. I decided to follow one of the infography on top trending dogs and created on for my personal use. Here is the final product:

TOPTRENDINGDOG

So many of you asked me if Powtoon is another good tool to use. Here are two examples from my daughter Jacquelyn. She found this tool last year on her own and decided to create her French project with it.

Here is her first one: Chez-Le-Medecin
And second one: Body Parts

She had a lot of fun with it, you can also download a transcript of the video.

I have just signed up the free account, so I know it is still available. The free code is on my second image. Definitely worth it to check it out! Here is the direct link to Powtoon promotion: http://www.powtoon.com/lp/toonup/

In order to take courses at Chinese university, one must pass HSK 6 Chinese proficiency exam, so far everything is fairly easy, except 语病 section. I cannot figure out if it is asking just simple grammatical error or error in sentence expression? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!