Learning Chinese Using Google Doc Collaboration

Just a little technology aside, about something that we are doing in my class - perhaps if you are also having face-to-face lessons you might find the same dynamic useful.

In the classroom everyone takes their own notes. There are a number of problems with this:

1. The inevitable mistakes we make are never corrected (and practice makes permanent, not perfect).
2. The work of taking notes is divided, duplicated but never shared. We all pick up on the things that we find interesting, but while these are intersecting sets, there are always things that one person will have taken note of that will have gone over another's head.

Enter Google Docs. I've already pointed out that I'm a nerd, but Google Docs is very usable by anyone who can use a computer. You can create and edit documents in the same way that you might do so for a Word document, but of course it's saved on Google's servers, not your own machine. The magic begins when you start to share the document with others. You can either make your document readable by others, or indeed editable by others.

My class's use of Google Docs has evolved to the point that we take notes directly onto our laptops - and directly into a Google document if we have connectivity. Typically we take pinyin notes and add the hanzi afterwards, before adding our classmates and teacher as editors.

The result is what one might expect from the Wisdom of Crowds - the documents get checked by teacher (and corrected where necessary) and the contents are shared amongst classmates so each can pick up what the other has missed.

As a result, the Google Doc notes become another online resource for the class to use.

Chinese for the Classroom

For those who are studying in classrooms or with a tutor, here's some vocabulary that you might find useful (on my teacher's site). As is often the case, I've made flashcards out of this for those of you who, like me, suffer from bad memory.

As well as suffering from a bad memory, I suffer from a lack of opportunity to use chinese. This means that very often, during classes, I (and my classmates) are slow to speak. What I really like about this particular vocabulary is that it allows us to stay in Chinese for longer, without resorting to English at the first hurdle. While this might not seem very important, but the impact is tremendous. Staying "in charactor" as one of my classmates buts it, makes Chinese seem much less like a thing to be studied and more like a language to be spoken.