Hey, Chinese Language Resident!!
I’m so happy that you would like to take a look of the resource below and share your ideas with me regarding teaching resources and teaching ideas! If you find other cool website or resource, please feel free to contact me via maggie.ding86@gmail.com and I would love to share inspirations with you and improve teaching!
Here is the resource I often use for teaching when I worked as the Chinese Language Resident at Pomona from Fall 2009 to Spring 2011.
Tool website:
1. This is a really cool website that you could make a more dynamic presentation! It’s kind of like Keynote on a Mac but it is free. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Chinese characters, but you could still use it for showing pictures or videos to students and hopefully it will get updated soon and support Chinese characters eventually.
Prezi
2. Voki is a really cool British website and you can create a figure online to make him/her to talk in the target language. If you also like to play the Sims, you will know what I am say:) The tricky part for Chinese figures is that there is a difference between Taiwanese Mandarin and mainland Mandarin, and Taiwanese Mandarin doesn’t recognize some characters. So you may want to switch between the two versions.
Voki
3. Mylo is also a British website that have lots of mini language related games. It has “I need the basic” and “Challenges” two levels. It maybe a little bit too easy for Claremont students, however, it works pretty well for intermediate class as a part of their beginning classes and also works well as icebreaking games.
Mylo
4. Tagxedo is a cool British website that you can use to generate awesome brainstorm vocabulary picture. It doesn’t support Chinese characters, however, you can generate the English brainstorm vocab picture first and ask students to work on the translation by themselves.
Tagxedo
Fun websites for teaching topics and news about China
5. It is a pretty fun website that created by students of Chinese. It has up-to-date fun Chinese music videos, news and other fun stories that happened on students doing study abroad programs in Chinese speaking countries.
Studymorechinese
6. Youtube also has tremendous resources that could be used and actually it is the website that I used most. There is a girl whose name is Fiona Fung and you can subscribe her videos on youtube. She basically translated lots of Chinese/Taiwanese songs into English and make pretty nice video with lyrics. It is a good practice for intermediate or even beginning students at Mason to get a glimpse of Chinese pop songs.
7. On youku and also probably tudou, there is 郝云与乐队，or Haoyun and his band. They sing lots of light Rock n’ Roll and Rap in Chinese regarding Beijing, love and life in general. I found some advanced students are into these and you may also find it is interesting.
8. The long time well known chinaSMACK! It has the most ridiculous yet funnies news regarding China and it is really up-to-date! Students are interested in not only language but the cultures behind and this website made lots of the conversation classes vivid and filled with laughers!
chinaSMACK
9. There are other resources such as 一日一囧 and 日和. Some of these are pretty funny and can provide students with an authentic taste of young Chinese pop culture. Some of them, however, might be a little bit too difficult for students and the humor is of great difference.
Skit Design
10. This website has lots of short comics that are pretty funny. I usually used it to make students work in group to translate or design their own skit based on a story from the website.
xkcd
11. Theoatmeal!! Yes!! It’s one of my favorite websites not only for teaching but also for procrastinating uploading lesson plans:P Student of all levels love this website and you can get tons of great ideas in teaching from using this website.
12. Stumbleupon. It’s a website that generate random funny or subtle pictures/lines/videos and other things based on your own interested. And you can just use it for a whole conversation class to talk about various things and also find out students’ interests.
13. The onion. Get tired of serious news? Here are news that you may find both entertaining and “genuine”. So how about ask students to make their own news regarding Chinese speaking countries?
These are the websites I often use for teaching conversation classes, and of course, you will find even better resources! And if you find some, please share your awesome ideas with me via maggie.ding86@gmail.com and I would love to listen to and learn from you!
Good luck on your teaching and I’m looking forward to talking to you!
Xiaoying (Maggie) Ding