Taiwan Blog Feed

The journey began with an early morning train ride on Tuesday from Taichung to Tainan. In Tainan Ben and I got the motorbikes ready and hit the road. We were soon beyond Tainan’s city limits and riding through verdant countryside. After a few hours passing through towns like Qishan, Meinong and Gaoshu amidst the rolling hills,  we reached the edge of much more substantial mountains and the entrance to the Maolin National Scenic Area (茂林國家風景區) in Kaohsiung County.

We had lunch in Maolin before heading further up the valley to the Rukai village of Dona (多納). This village is one of the few places in Taiwan where you can find slate houses. Slate is used as a building material in the village for constructing fences and the walls and rooves of houses. It is a traditional building method of the Rukai and Paiwan peoples.

After exploring the village for a while we headed down to soak in the hot springs for a while. Dinner was at one of the local restaurants that specialised in cooking on a slate BBQ (石板烤肉).

The next day started with a visit to the Dona Suspension Bridge (多納吊橋) which spans the valley at a height of about 100 metres. It is a very impressive bridge and I was surprised to see the locals riding their motorbikes across it. It obviously makes a good shortcut for them.

The next spot we visited was the Meiya waterfall (美雅瀑布). The bridge across the river was destroyed by a typhoon in 2005. However, it was possible to hike along the riverbed to get to the base of the waterfall. The pool at the base of the waterfall wasn’t really suitable for swimming so we went for a swim lower down.

After that we headed out of the Maolin Valley to the Hakka area of Meinong. There we visited the Meinong Hakka Museum (美濃客家文物館). The museum had plenty of interesting and informative displays and was a good place to learn some more about the local area. After a nice hearty lunch of Hakka food we went on to Liugui (六龜). Here there is a series of tunnels that were built by the Japanese for harvesting camphor. The tunnels run parallel to the main road and are all passable by motorbike. There were signs in the area saying “Little Guilin” (小桂林) but the scenery actually reminded me more of Thailand.

The trip came to an end with an early morning motorbike ride from Dona village back to Tainan. It took about three hours to cover the distance. From there it was a train to destinations further north.

*more photos in the Maolin set at flickr.

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Related posts:

• Trip to Xinzhu and Miaoli
• Yellow jerseys and yellow dresses
• Tour de Taiwan in Taipei County
• Tour de Taiwan final stage
• Tour de Taiwan 2007

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Copyright © David Reid 2008
This feed is from the blog David on Formosa. Please respect the copyright of the author. Any questions please contact me. (Digital Fingerprint:
96ce0efd4c72536e61bdc1f9d92ff829)

We r ready?



Is the wind fair to Java?
All clear, no storm on the horizon...

Today I got an email entitled "Copyright permission request from Oxford University Press". My first reaction was here comes another spam. After reading the email I decided to give them the permission to reproduce the photo requested. So you might be able to see my photo in the coursebook when teaching English next year.

Dear Hanjie,

I am writing to ask whether you would be able to grant us permission to reproduce a photo from your gallery at www.pbase.com, details of which are listed below. The photo will be reproduced for educational purposes, in a secondary English coursebook series. It may also be reproduced in print and non-print formats, for example, photocopiable worksheets, electronic books, website, as additional teaching aids for teachers’ free use.

The following is the description of the photo needed:

File name: (Dalat) DSC09761 (Small).JPG
Location: http://www.pbase.com/hanjie/image/68831409

Details of our secondary English coursebook series are as follows:

Working title: Progress Now 1
Print run: around 7,000
Territory: Worldwide
Publication date: Summer 2009

To express our gratitude for your granting us the permission to use the photo, we shall put your name on our acknowledgment list. As such, please kindly inform us how you would like to be acknowledged. We would appreciate it if you could provide a high-definition version of the photo, with a resolution of 300 dpi or more, in order to ensure the quality of the printed material.

If you need further details, please do not hesitate to contact me... Thank you in advance for your kind assistance. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Maggie Pak
Assistant Editor
English Language
Teaching
Oxford University Press ( China ) Ltd

My latest article for the Korea Herald is now out and it is on web 2.0 in the classroom. Read it at the Korea Herald site or look in the extended entry.

Hope you find it useful. I know there are many many more sites that could be introduced but due to space constraints I had to limit myself.

My Last Column

This is also my final column for the Korea Herald. I notified my editor when I submited this lasted column. I’m just too busy to continue writing this column. I’ll be watching the Expat Living section to see who my replacement is and I’m sure I’ll be linking to it in the future.

Korea Herald Readers

Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

What does web 2.0 offer the language teacher? Your first thoughts will probably be of sites like YouTube (http://youtube.com) and Flickr (http://flickr.com), but web 2.0 is much more than that. Using web 2.0 applications and web sites will allow you to extend your lesson beyond the walls of the classroom and give learners the tools they need to continue learning on their own.

Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) is receiving a lot of attention from language teachers due to the high level of interaction between participants. There are several groups of teachers involved in promoting Second Life in language teaching. One of these is Second Life English (http://www.esl-secondlife.blogspot.com/). Using second life you could bring classroom roleplays to a whole new level. This may be difficult for some teachers to implement due resource requirements such as computer labs, but it is worth a look.

Chinswing (http://www.chinswing.com/) offers more structure than second life and provides learners with an opportunity for listening and speaking that is a little more controlled. Essentially Chinswing is a message board where you record your voice and listen to other people talk. Instead of reading threads you listen to them. The site is organized into channels allowing learners to more easily find discussions of interest to them.  With this site, you could have a thread devoted to your class where students talk about an assigned topic and respond to each other. Another simple assignment would be to have students choose their own discussion and participate in it and share the link for homework.

I have used Bubbleply (http://www.bubbleply.com) with students. This a great way for students to interact with a video on YouTube. Last September I introduced Bubbleply on my blog (http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/bubbleply-revisited/)
Bubbleply takes a youtube video and allows you to add a variety of speech, thought, narration, or subtitle bubbles to it. Clearly this gives the teacher opportunities to annotate a video, add English subtitles to aid in listening comprehension, add thought bubbles for comedy or even have students find a video of their own to bubblply for task based English use. My students will be finding their own youtube video to bubbleply and then adding it to their class blogs.

Kantalk (http://kantalk.com/) requires the use of Skype (http://www.skype.com) for recording voice or actual live chatting. One feature that I think is useful is the transcribe a youtube video option. Simply add a link to a YouTube video and the video will be embedded on the page with a place to transcribe the video. More than one person may transcribe the video and other users are able to comment as well as rate the transcription. This is definitely a good listening exercise for learners.
Last semester I used BitStrips (http://www.bitstrips.com/create/comic/) as a make-up homework assignment (http://eflgeek.com/index.php/eflgeek/comments/bitstrips/) for one student and will probably use it with all students this semester.

FaceYourManga () is an avatar generator. Using this site you could have learners create avatars of themselves, print them up and bring them to class.  You can then redistribute the avatars so that learners have to find the person whose picture they have using language learned in class. This is also useful if your students are blogging or using Moodle and you want them to have avatars.

There are too many web2.0 sites to use with classes to be able to fully introduce all of them here, but others to consider include: Voice Thread (http://voicethread.com), Flickr (http://flickr.com), Chuala (http://www.chuala.com/), Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/), and Word Learner (http://www.wordlearner.com/).

Two excellent blogs that will keep you informed of useful web sites for the classroom are Larry Ferlazzos Websites of the Day (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/) in particular check out The “Next Best…” List (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/08/25/the-next-the-best-list/). The second site to watch is Langwitches (http://langwitches.org/blog/).

If you have other sites to share, please leave a comment on my blog (http://eflgeek.com).

Michael Turton’s blog, The View from Taiwan, has been nominated for the Best Taiwan Politics and Economics blog in a competition run by Hi-on. There is a big prize on offer and it would be a well deserved reward for the amazing amount of time and effort Michael puts in to his blog.

To cast your vote for The View from Taiwan go to this page and find The View from Taiwan. Click the 投票 (vote) icon on the right, input the given verification code and then click 送出 (send) to cast your vote. It will only take less than a minute of your time.

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Related posts:

• Recommended website #4: Teaching English in Taiwan
• Betel nut girls galore
• Links 27 August 2007
• Links 7 May 2007
• Links 17 September 2007

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Copyright © David Reid 2008
This feed is from the blog David on Formosa. Please respect the copyright of the author. Any questions please contact me. (Digital Fingerprint:
96ce0efd4c72536e61bdc1f9d92ff829)

Shot in a Tainan parking garage.  You know what to do!

I've taken the big leap and gotten professional hosting and a nice wordpress installation for this blog. This will be the last post here; all further posts will be made on the new blog at:

http://www.expatintaiwan.net/

Please update your links and bookmarks.

Hello,
Does anyone know the easiest way to get to the Chiang Kai-Shek Mausoleum from Taipei? Does anyone know exactly where it is, when it is open to tourists etc.??
Thanks,
Logan

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