Students are divided in to two groups as a “teacher team” and a “student team”. They join in the break out room and the teacher share their screen showing the flashcard in Chinese character. The “teachder” ask the student “汉语怎么说?”, wait for response and then ask “什么意思?”, wait for response. “Teacher” provide feedbacks such as “很好 or 非常好 or 真棒”. After two mintues, students rotate to meet another teacher, and repeat the same procedure. 

Prior to this activity, students create their own Quizlet flashcards based on a study guide to learn about classic Chinese dishes such as 麻婆豆腐, 宫保鸡丁, and so on. Following the activity, all students gather on Jamboard and engage in a competition to circle the word they heard. At the end of the class, students take turns sharing their favorite Chinese dishes with the entire class in complete sentences.

Asynchronous: Weebly/Google site/Screencatisfy 

Students collaborate with a partner to create Chinese restaurant websites using platforms such as Weebly or Google Sites. They use Screencastify to record a video introducing their restaurant, including its name, location, operating hours, and menu. The menu will consist of various sections such as "凉菜", "汤", "主菜", "主食", "饮料" and more. 

Prior to this task, students will have acquired background knowledge on food and drinks, classic Chinese dishes, different ways of naming Chinese dishes, typical menus in China, etc. To ensure clarity and guidance, I will provide students with specific step-by-step guidelines, examples, and a rubric when introducing the task. Additionally, I will offer feedback during class meeting to assist students in their project.  

one sample of asynchronous: using StoryJumper to complete a project for Chinese 1 students. Students will be the director of a TV show “我的家/My Family”, and they will help the main character create a family: fill out the following form for reference, including relationship, name, age, profession, likes/dislikes; use StoryJumper to create the TV show story; record the story in StoryJumper; show and read this story to a friend/parents/classmate and invite them to write down their feedback on the last page. Challenge： Provide more details about each character. Students are supposed to introduce one Character each page and make sure having pictures on each page (character, scene, and other design) and not forgetting the cover page with author’s name and your TV show name. The teacher will show some examples before students start their project. Students enjoyed designing the picture book and creating their own TV show stars. 

Use Storyjumper in the “Family” unit: I divided the students into groups or pairs and assigned them the task of creating a story about a family using Storyjumper. I provided them with a template or guidelines to follow, such as introducing family members, describing their personalities, and highlighting their relationships. Then, I guided the students through the process of creating their digital stories on Storyjumper. They can choose from the available characters, backgrounds, and props to illustrate their family members and settings. Last, the students can present their stories orally in Chinese, describing the characters, the plot, and the key events.

Synchronous: Live Nearpod

Use Nearpod in the “clothing” unit: I created a Nearpod presentation that includes visuals of various clothing items. I used the Live Nearpod feature to share the presentation with students in real time. This will allow them to follow along, engage with the content, and participate in interactive activities such as polls, quizzes, and open-ended questions to practice the vocabulary related to clothing. For example, I showed an image of an item of clothing and asked students to select the correct Chinese term from multiple-choice options.

The asynchronous task I want to include in my class is Flipgrid. The students can film what they want to present in the video and upload them to the website. Their peers can go to the website anytime to watch the video. They can comment on it or like it. Filpgrid gives students and teachers more flexibility and less pressure. Teachers can also limit the time of the videos based on what we want the students to do. If it's just a short dialogue, then they have to limit the time to about thirty seconds to one minute. If the task is to ask the students to present something, then the video can be a little longer. Another asynchronous task I want to include is Gimkit. The students can use this game as a review tool or a pre-class preparation tool. Before real in class activities, the students should already know the basic words and phrases, it could help teachers save valuable class time for more practice activities to better help students improve their language skills.  

One sample for asynchronous activity: Prior to each lesson, we provide students with a quiz set to help them learn and prepare for the class. I recently discovered that Quizlet has a new feature that uses AI to assist students in studying vocabulary. Quizlet now quizzes students using the new vocabulary, creates stories to assess their comprehension, and allows them to practice with sentences. These features are highly beneficial for students to preview vocabulary before attending class.

Edpuzzle is an interactive learning tool that can integrate culture, language, and content.  It can be used both as a pre-task and an in-class task with interactive features.  By watching the video, students can answer questions, fill in the blanks, or record audio to answer the content-based questions. 

Loom is another technology I usually have students use to film a short presentational video.  For example, last semester, in my Chinese calligraphy class, I asked my students to act as a tour guide in the 殷墟博物馆, showing the tourist around and introducing the story of Hanzi origin, the oracle bones, etc.   

I would also like to share another tool “thinglink”. ThingLink is a powerful way to use technology to make education more engaging. The website and app-based program allows for the addition of icons, or 'tags,' which can pull in or link off to rich media. It is a very effective tool that can engage high school students in cultural learning. I organized a field trip to the Chincago’s Chinese American Museum last semester. After the field trip, I had students pick one specific artifact in the museum and explain with embedded video, picture, etc. on the https://www.thinglink.com/videocard/1693693368132961060 

2) Adapt and use age-/level-appropriate authentic materials,

I use WeVideo a lot to edit the authentic video by cutting, merging, and adding different parts to make it usable and fit for classroom teaching. WeVideo has another function of group collaboration.  I have not done it but will ask students to work in groups collaboratively on a specific video project in the future. 

3) conduct performance-based assessments.

Technology tools can assist performance-based assessments. Edpuzzle, Google Form, canvas, Loom, Vocaroo, etc are some of the tools I have been using in my teaching. But most of the time, I still use the traditional paper-based assessment as the summative assessment. I know the test design needs to be improved as most of the test questions are not performance-based tasks, but a check for memorization of structures and grammar.  I would also like to know more technology tools that can help with assessment.  There are some assessment tools, for example, the writing & speaking assessment tools, but most with the Romance languages, such as English, Spanish, etc.  I don’t think there is accurate software that can relieve teachers from grading the speaking and writing tasks in Chinese. Even with some writing/speaking software, teachers still need to go back to verify the accuracy of the assessment made by the technology. 

My favorite synchronous teaching technology tool is Nearpod. Actually it is both a synchronous and asynchronous tool. When students are not able to attend the class, the Nearpod content can be assigned as self-paced homework.  

Most of the time, I use Nearpod for vocabulary and reading purposes. For vocabulary teaching, “matching pairs” is the most frequently used function. I have students match vocabulary with images, vocabulary with their Chinese meaning, measure words with nouns, verb with objects, vocabulary with synonyms, vocabulary with antonyms, and so forth. Of course, “drawing” is a great tool for students to practice hand-writing of  characters, words, and expressions. “Fill-in-blanks” helps students to practice Chinese at sentential and paragraph level. For reading teaching, the “quiz”, “open-ended question”, “collaborative board”, and “poll” are all good functions to check students’ understanding and comprehension.  I also used the “drawing” function for students to annotate between lines of the reading materials. 

Asynchronous Tool 

My favorite asynchronous tool is Story Jumper. It is a good idea to have students create a book after they complete learning a thematic unit.  I used StoryJumper for students to 1) create a skit script with images and dialogue bubbles, 2) introduce a traditional American or Chinese festival, 3)  compare education in the U.S. with education in China, 4) describe their journey of learning Chinese, etc. In a StoryJumper book, students can use their imagination to design characters, scenes, backgrounds, and add music and voice. Students are highly motivated to use what they have learned in class and enjoy collaborating with their peers to create books. 

The topic I am teaching is “Bedroom’s feng shui”. The technology I will use at 小练 practice is Pear Deck. I will put the pictures into the Pear Deck slides and let students to respond to the question of  “which taboo is this bedroom violated”. Students will be able to write, record, or make multiple choice etc to answer the question. This activity involves interpretive, interpersonal and presentational modes. 

Asynchronous class:

For the asynchronous class, I will use Wevideo to create a video of a collection bedrooms. Students watch the video. Then report either in written form or use Flipgrid to record their speaking comments of each bedroom’s fengshui.

The Asynchronous task I want to use is edpuzzle. I could upload my teaching videos on edpuzzle and create interactive questions for students to answer.  Answering the questions on edpuzzle is all about interpretive mode, but I could also implement interpersonal and presentational mode through giving assignments on Canvas discussion.  After seeing students’ scores on edpuzzle, I could ask students to come to check with me if they do not get 100 percent correct. The feedback on both the Asynchronous and synchronous tasks seem to be very important for students’ progress.