I just watched your keynote again. It really is fantastic! I had to edit my post to include the entire ‘Lessons from Culture Shock’ section rather than the shorter clip I had mentioned. Your lessons section is brilliant and I’m tempted to edit just that section out to send out to every educational leader I know. I think it would make a great stand-alone video:
‘Globalizing Education: Lessons from Asia’!

Thanks again!

Thanks for your comment.
I wrote 3 posts when I first got here about the challenges and insights of moving to China:
Destinations and Dispositions

Variable Flow

Bubble Wrap

There are certain things that are quite embarrassing about being illiterate in a country in which I live and work:
• I can’t say the name of my school in a way that is consistently understood by taxi’s so I just show them a piece of paper with the name on it.
• I know the name of my complex at home but don’t know the name of the street I live on.
• I often end up with something I wasn’t expecting when ordering food from pictures.
So I can just imagine what some of the newer ELL students in our classes feel like when they arrive in our classes.

You are so right about the diverse needs of these students and what I’ve learned over my years in the classroom is that many of the tools and strategies that we choose to help these learners often end up helping all learners.

Regards,
Dave.

I just finished listening to Kim’s presentation and I found it interesting and timely in many ways as well. I certainly found a lot touch me personally, although perhaps I’m not exactly the 3rd culture person she referred to (I’m air force brat who is linguistically but not necessarily culturally bilingual so perhaps I’m 1 and a half). I was just wondering about how you felt after moving to China and trying to figure out how to live. I remember moving to Japan and finding myself illiterate and it is not an experience I will soon forget (humbling is one word I use to describe it). I found this extremely timely when thinking about the students I was dealing with today in class. I was working with our ELL teacher to provide the students with a digital opportunity to learn English outside of class time, and it is interesting to compare the students I was dealing with today with the one’s in Kim’s presentation. The ones I saw were ones that desperately need more consistent one to one work and I am now convinced that the only way that will ever happen is through technology. They are so diverse in their needs and backgrounds, some being extremely computer savvy but without English skills, others being very life savvy but without necessarily the skills to be ’successful’ by our definition of the word. These are the students that we (I) am trying to figure out how to help. Kim’s presentation helped me refocus on a lot of thoughts that have been running around in my head all day!