Quizlet

The last couple of days I’ve been experimenting with a website called Quizlet. It is kind of an online flashcard site but also not. It lets a person create lists and then the website allows people to use these lists to test themselves in different ways. To be honest I don’t think my description of the site really does it justice hahaha!! As a teacher I will probably use this site a lot, helping my students learn and remember vocabulary will probably be the number one use of it. I’ll think of some grammar uses for it too, its a very useful tool and very fast to register and get things set up too. I’ll test it out with my TN and MEC groups as I think they’ll find it useful. I love messing around with this Web 2.0 stuff, its so cool   I look at quite a few different websites each week and once in a while you find one thats really neat and simple to use and just seems made to fill a space for something I needed a website to do

Net uptime

Our new modem has been in for over a week and besides a slight problem with the cable connecting the antenna to the modem everything is rocking here. I sent a photo of our new set up to my brother because he was curious to see this notebook modem snuggled away there in the rear of the case and was well impressed with it. It’s probably the best radio connection we’ve had since we signed for it   I’ll have to get the Skype reinstalled and the web cam too, It’s been a while since I last used it to chat with my family back over the pond Also I’ll be able to try out uploading the podcasts to Podomatic and see how it all works with WordPress. I downloaded a few things to check out download speed too and everything works just fine so I backed up the wikis we host over at Wikispaces and had a look at finding a good program to make flash exercises for my English students at Cambridge. I already have plenty for the ones over at the other school, more than 200 or so at my last count   I didn’t find anything good though, not that was free anyways hahaha!! I’ll have another look later on after my Business English class this evening.

Farm

At the weekend we visited our friends John and Lucy at their farm. we hadn’t been since last year so it we loaded up with some stuff for the bbq and headed over there. Was blazing hot all day long, I managed to get my legs soaking in the pool. I have no idea if this was good for my thrombosis or not but it was good for me hahahaha!!! We checked out some new plants john got from Roberta’s family farm too, they were doing okay

Self-recording

I was trying out Odeo last night, it wasn’t very successful though. The site took a long time to load, recording wasn’t all that good and it wouldn’t save afterwards. I thought it was maybe my internet connection but other websites loaded just fine. I switched over to Podomatic instead and found that they had ftp so I could record on my home pc with Audacity ad then upload straight to their servers – a lot better   I set up a new WordPress site that will mainly host the links to the podcasts so that my student can easily find them. I have to type up some questions for the students to read as they listen so they can test their understanding of what they are hearing. I’ll ask Roberta to record a few too, I think it’ll be good fun hahaha!! I was trying to find a good theme in WordPress for the site, I was really looking for a three-column theme so I would have plenty of extra space to add other things outside of the main posting area. I found one that was being used in a WordPress site that Roberta reads/listens to a lot that had a really nice theme. I didn’t really want to use the same one but I couldn’t find one that was similar   I’ll use this one for now and change to another later on.

I have to get the texts from my student that he wants me to record for him next week, in the meanwhile I’ll try out recording myself and see how good/bad I sound   My students from Cambridge get a cd with their student book and if its installed onto a pc you can listen to a model and then record your voice to compare to the original. Some of the children said they sounded really strange after hearing themselves recorded for the first time hahaha!! They still experiment with it though, I think its good for them to want to try out this kind of stuff at home so that they don’t have a fear of new technology.  I1ll have to see if I can find some kind of game or activity we can do where the students get to record themselves, I’ll browse the internet to see what I can find if I have time over the weekend.

Conversation class

I work at two English schools and one of my students has class only on his own with either myself or Roberta. He learned English more or less by himself and mainly our classes consist of conversation classes, one with me and one with my wife. Today he asked if he could give me some texts and if I could record them onto a cd so that he could listen to my voice as he reads along with the text. I like this idea a lot, I’d already toyed with the idea and after the Easter hols I’ll get him to print the texts for me. I already have the program to record the mp3s so I can convert them to an audio cd with Nero. I’m going to use Audacity for this, it’s free and very easy to use. I had a few problems finding how to record in Odeo but a friend of ours uses it a lot and gave me a few pointers. I’ll try both online and with the audio cd too, just because I’d like to try the Web 2.0 side of it as well I have a book of texts and short stories that I’ll record and upload and then use a WordPress site to host them for my students to use. I think it’ll be a lot of fun experimenting with this Although I’m British I speak both British and American English with an accent that seems to float somewhere between the two of them, my students tell me that its easier to understand me sometimes than the Models hahaha!! I’m not sure what my voice sounds like recorded, this should be good for a laugh

Twitterfeed

I have a Twitter account and had seen a few times in the people I follow that their blog postings appeared in their page but I couldn’t figure out how it was done, even though I had already stumbled accidentally on the site they use to do this. The site is called Twitterfeed and I just managed to get it all set up with the rss feed from WordPress. Now I just need to see if it works properly. Also I have Twitbin, an addon for Firefox that lets me post to Twitter without having to login to their homepage first. Both of these are well worth having if you use Twitter regularly

Books

I love to read, I can read a book in a day if I’m really into it. The final Harry potter book I read in seven hours from start to finish, including time to get coffee hahahaha!! I’ve read books as long as I can remember, when I was in school and the other kids were reading Peter & Jane, I was already into Treasure Island, or King Solomon’s mine. My favs are fantasy or sci fi but recently I’ve been trying out others such as thrillers, or crime, etc. In Brasil the price of books is ridiculous, even Brasilian books cost more or less 10-20% of an average poor persons salary. I usually download books from the internet, its easy and cheaper. I prefer books but not at those prices when the same book back in the UK costs something like five pounds. There are some websites now in Brasil that sell second-hand books, but then you can just take a copy of a book to any xerox place in the country and they will quickly run off a copy for you. Its a little hard to balance an A4 copy on your knees when you’re in the toilet though I’ve been looking online for a copy of Sophie’s World to download but haven’t found one yet, it’s only a matter of time

Pepper

This pepper plant has been growing on our veranda for a while now. It started when a seed fell into the cracks on the floor and now has become quite large. I have no idea which type of pepper it is though

Internet problems

My isp came this morning to install a new modem for us that we hope will finally solve our connection problems once and for all. They took our external modem and fitted us with a card modem similar to the kind of slot modem for notebooks. The idea was that our external modem was really heating up and the new one inside the case uses less power and has the benifit of the two big coolers in our case helping the board and modem to stay extra cool. We will test this for about a month to see how it works out. Fingers crossed that it’ll all work out just fine. We prefer the radio internet as we rent our house and when we move its easier to get them to just take down the antenna and move to the new place for us, and this is for free I left the computer downloading when we came here to the school, some podcasts one of our friends has been making about fights that his languages students seem to get into every day at the local uni. Its all in portugues so a little hard for me to hear everything but man this group seem top spend a lot of time fighting or arguing. I’m surprised that they manage to get any work done in their Letras course hahaha!! I’ll have to go visit this class one day just for the fun of it

The hospital

I have been getting treatment for around the last four months from the Hospital in Brasilia for deep vein thrombosis and have to go every four weeks for a check up and blood test. I’m taking part in a study for a new drug to help combat this type of illness and take a mix of drugs, but which drug I’m taking I don’t know, and neither do the doctors. I think it’s called the Double Blind Method. At first there were some side effects to the drugs, I knew all about them but they were still an eye-opener. The worst one was the bleeding of the gums, and I mean bleeding. Waking up with a mouth full of congealed blood all over my teeth, gums, face and pillow was an experience that I’ll pass on next time round hahahaha!! It took more than a month for the side effects to pass as I became accustomed to the meds. The docs told me that in a couple of months I will have to have a full work up as part of the study and this requires many tests that the Brasilian public health service generally don’t pay for. The costs of these tests are very high, and we’re not talking about a few pounds or dollars here, one of the six tests was over R$2000. It’s possible to ask for a procedure here to ask the health service to pay for this for me and we went to visit them this afternoon to fill out the documents required for this. Roberta was with me to find out more about this, although my doctors at the hospital all speak English there was no guarantee that they would at the Ministerio Publico De Saude. It was a few minutes for the consultation and everything was all sorted with the costs getting paid for me. They will do this as my father also has this problem and needs to take medication for thrombosis for the rest of his life. I have to wait now for the hospital to give me that day to go to the hospital and have the exams, should be a lot of fun