Google sites

There used to be a website online called Jotspot and well over a year ago Google bought the site and it fell off the face of the internet. I got an email from Google this afternoon inviting me to join the new Jotspot, it’s now called Google Sites. I tried as I was curious to see how it had turned out but found that it wasn’t possible to join it and apparently now it is a pay site instead of the free site from before. you have to pay for a domain name now. The old Jotspot was a wiki site but now I’m not sure what they will do with it. I’ll stick with Wikispaces as Its been great since I signed up for it. I never had a problem with it and the help section is excellent. I couldn’t even find a help section that had anything useful for Google Sites I also have an account at Pbwiki too, I haven’t really done anything with it though as Wikispaces sort of took over as my wiki host when I found just how good it was. I like Google stuff a lot and use many of their sites, etc but this new thing I won’t use at all as it’s too much like hard work. The wiki I’m experimenting with on my server is easier to get into than Googles Sites website hahaha!!

I noticed that the cloud function in my WordPress site is working, very nice. I Turned it on but hadn’t really looked at the site itself until this afternoon and saw it working. Very cool hahaha!! I saw another WordPress site that had podcasts embedded in it, WordPress supports this but you only host the mp3s here if you upgrade the space so I was looking this morning for another place to host the mp3s and tried Odeo but its a lot of work to get the stuff recorded as the site seems to have some links to the studio part of the site missing :-S I’ll have another look around and see if I can find something better to use instead.

New classes…

I will also teach at a new school in our city this semester called Cambridge. It’s a different methodology than the one I’m used to, the CCAA stuff is mainly audio visual and the Cambridge stuff is Books, white board, and whatever I create to make the lessons. The book I am teaching this semester there is called Touchstone, I’ve never heard of it before but it’s full of all kinds of stuff. The teachers book is for a whole semester and has a shitload of cds that come with it. I roamed around their website and found that had some free online exercises that weren’t mentioned in either the student or teacher books. I spent some time playing around with them to see how it all works, its quite nice The first class the books hadn’t arrived even though they said they wouldn’t so it was a bit crap as I hadn’t planned on this happening and had to wait 30mins for photocopies Yesterday’s class was well prepared, Roberta gave me a hand to knock some stuff up and I had some extra stuff just in case but all was well as the books had arrived. Most of my students are youngsters and teens in this group. It’ll be a fun semester I’ll post a group photo as soon as I can

Internet problems…

I’ve been having some problems with my internet provider here in the city. Well more than a little, it hardly works. It took me a couple of days to finally get into WordPress. We’ll call them this afternoon to tell them to get their arses out here to solve the problem.

This week I took on a new private student who more or less learned English by himself and now wants to have someone to practice with. He needs to practice reading and listening to so he usually brings texts with him and we work on them together, alternating between him and I taking turns to read the text and my correcting his pronunciation. I’m going to make some podcasts for him to use as well, At the moment I’m looking for a good place to host the mp3 files and them I’ll link to them in another WordPress blog that I’ll create just to use with him, well with only him just for now. I’ve been checking out Odeo and also Podomatic to see how their service is. I’ll probably search around a few teachers forums to see what they are using as well.

First post…

Today I finally found time to get into WordPress and post my first post I was using Blogger but decided to have a change and also I want to use wordpress with some of my students as part of trying out some Web 2.0 stuff. I’ve been interested in using Web 2.0 sites in class for quite some time, mainly my students tend to use Orkut a lot here in Brasil, but it’s not really a good social networking site – lots of viruses and stuff. In the blogroll I listed a few that I’m really into at the moment. Twitter is one of my favorites, it’s very addictive.

 This afternoon all of the groups of students at CCAA had a lanche (a snack break?). It was a lot of fun – lots of Coca Cola – and I took my camera to take a couple of photos… and forget to use it hahahaha!! Never mind, they have these things quite often. All the classes on Friday afternoons are three hour classes so its nice to have a break and eat something half way through. My class on Friday afternoon is MEC (Master English Course) and mainly teenagers, they are a lot of fun. They’ve been my students for quite some time and we are comfortable with one another. I teach mainly advanced groups, as well as business English and conversation classes. When we have one of these Roberta and I usually bake a cake to take along, this time was chocolate and lemon cream, there was none left at the end so I guess everyone liked it I haven’t eaten anything this evening after all the food from earlier on, I think it’ll just be liquid food like coffee or tea for the rest of the day