PersonalBrain

I found a new site for a program called PersonBrain the other day. It looks really good, I downloaded a copy of it to see if it’s as good as it looks. I really liked the idea of being able to make a homepage from using this program, it looks so cool on the website. I don’t really have any time to play with the program yet, I have the instructions downloaded in a pdf file to have a look at once I get home later. The way it organizes things looks really nice with a nice way of showing links and relationships between things. I’ll try it out and see how easy it is to use, the website comes with a lot of help and videos to show how to get things moving. It should be a lot of fun

Busy..

Man, I’ve been running around like a crazy person the last few days. I have some private students that I was preparing stuff for and also my students switched their exam day to last Saturday so I had to find time to go give that too. The tests went ok, the LCT caused a few problems as there really isn’t any way to review or practice before hand   Not to worry though, I think they can do the test again to increase their grades. My Cambridge students are also getting ready for their unit test, probably a week or so to it. It shouldn’t be a problem for them, it’s pretty easy. I have to give some extra classes for a student who missed his first few, I’ll squeeze them in after his regular class. It’ll give me some time to correct some pronunciation mistakes he makes too.

Busy busy

Man the last weekend and this week so far has been so busy. I’ve been trying to get some small updates done on the wikis I have as well as finish the review classes before the midterm exams start. I have also been adding some new worksheets to the eslprintable site as it’s well worth supporting it because it provides so much for so little and as well as letting teachers download you also get to see how others created theirs so you can make your own sheets better. I found some nice ones that will go well with stuff I’m teaching to my EPG students as well as my Touchstone students once they catch up. I have to create some still for some grammar for my kids group for possessives and stuff but it’ll only take a few minutes to knock that one together

Tomorrow I will watch a movie with my TN9 students, they have been busy this semester and seeing as we are a class ahead of the schedule I decided to watch a movie with them. I was going to watch the new Jason Statham movie with them but it’s all British English and Roberta thinks it might be a bit hard for them to understand so I might change it to another one, maybe a comedy or something. The students are going to take some food and soft drinks to eat while they watch, I’ll have to remember to take the camera to get a few photos I like to do this once in a while with my students as its a nice way to relax and have a bit of fun and they get to practice listening to the movie in English. I’m sure its going to be a lot of fun

Worksheets

Today I spent the evening making a few worksheets for my students. I like doing this although I don’t have Roberta’s artistic flair for this kind of thing lol. I have beginners and like to give a lot of extra vocabulary to them on top of the new vocabulary from their books. Seeing as I found Eslprintables I like to upload a copy there so other teachers can also use it too as well my sharing theirs. At the moment the site is having uploading problems but I’ll upload the files tomorrow if I can’t today. I want to have a look and see what extra vocabulary sheets they have their about weather as a lot of my private students are agronomists and work outside a lot. For these students I like to give a lot of extra vocabulary in the form of worksheets, I stumbles on a site called WiZIQ that looks quite interesting, I’m going to see if it can be used to also give some extra support for me students.  I like experimenting a lot with stuff online, for me this is a good way to get to teenagers as they live online and i like to have stuff in place so they can use it if they want to. I try to make sure they don’t feel pressured to use the online stuff, I think they won’t really feel like using it if I do this and make sure I tell them if I update or change anything – such as adding the Quizlet activities – so they can go look in their own time. This week is midterms so hopefully they’ll use the sites to help revise for the exams both this week and next.

Remember a while back i posted about making some podcasts and hosting them online for my students to use? I’m feeling a little disappointed that I haven’t gotten around to starting on this yet. The website is ready and I’m all signed up at a podcast host site but just haven’t had the time to get anything done with it yet   My time seems to run away before I get around to doing anything with it, I have everything ready and just need to get started. It’s coming just as soon as I can find some free time to get some stuff done

Rushing

This morning was a bit of a rush from the moment I woke up. As soon as the coffee was made and the computer booted up and online I started correcting some small spelling mistakes I had made in the Quizlet vocab sets I have been adding over the last week or so. It only took a few minutes and everything is all shipshape again. I created some that my EPG students can use while they are on vacation for the next three weeks so they can play with the activities in the Quizlet site and practice a little even though they won’t be coming to the school. I find more uses for this site every day, it really is quite handy. I’ll spend some time Wednesday night with my students to get the up to speed with it so they’ll know what is what as we’ll be out of touch during the vacation. I added some sets from the next book too, it’ll give them a chance to familiarize themselves with some of the situations and vocabulary before we get started when they both return.

This week is full of reviews for the upcoming midterm exams all the students have to take. All the teachers were required to create some review exercises for the students – some teachers a lot less than others – and I used Quizlet as the workhorse to do 95% of the work as my groups mainly needed vocabulary reviews. My MEC groups will probably do two classes of review as they have so much new vocabulary to remember, I don’t know if they will use the online stuff I’ve been posting to my site to help with their review and studying too. Hopefully they will as it has a lot of exercises that I created just for their books, etc. I spent an hour yesterday creating an answer key for these reviews and finding any typos I had made so that I could just sit around and read a book during the review class hahahaha!! Should be quite an easy week with a bit of luck

Midterms

This week my students will make reviews in preparation for their midterm exams. The midterm covers more or less the first five-six lessons from their course books and for my class today (MEC4) I’ll just do vocabulary review. The grammar parts of their lessons were only punctuation and as its easy there’s no need to spend time on this that I would rather spend on vocabulary – they learn a hell of a lot of it in half a semester. I used Quizlet to create the test online from all of the new vocabulary they had learned along with the definitions and then extended the amount of questions quizlet would put in the test to something more reasonable like70+ words so it created a decent sized quiz. Then I copied and pasted each section into a Word document and altered the formatting until it looked ok and saved it and emailed it to myself so I would have a copy in Gmail all of the time. I’ll print it off and xerox it at the school and I’m guessing it will take them a good 90 minutes of class to do the review plus correction and doubt solving with me. And by using Quizlet to do the brunt of the work it took only fifteen minutes to get it all made – not counting the short amount of time I took to add the sets and definitions into Quizlet’s site. Man, I love Web 2.0 hehehe!!

Scared of technology

I read an interesting post in Classroom20 this morning about technology in the classroom and how teacher do or don’t use it or are afraid, etc. of it. I really like trying out new stuff with my students, not all of it tends to be tech or Web 2.0 based. I experiment with it a lot though and have many exercises online and these grow more each semester as I discover new things and sites to use. I have spent the last nine or ten days adding some links to most of my sites from Quizlet, the exercises it creates make some exercises that are similar to stuff I print out at the school for my CCAA students to use to revise for their mids and finals. I think there might be more than 400+ exercises online now plus some other extra sites like wikis. I tried a few times mentioning these to people I work with as well as sites like Quizlet or programs like Hot Potatoes to try to get them to create some stuff but I didn’t have a lot of success Its not so much fear I think, here in Brasil unis tend to teach Letras in a way that tells people there is no need for any new ideas, that the old ones are just fine that there is no need for any new fangled stuff. Its more or less the same ideas as people here believing we don’t need an English newspaper just because we don’t. Some of it is also laziness too, if i pretend i didn’t hear it’ll go away, very sad. A lot of students spent time online as part of their studies and its a natural progression for teachers to put stuff their for their students to use. I think also that students like this idea that their teacher took the time to create something just for them to use In the schools I work in only Orkut (a very boring social networking site) seems to hold peoples attention, They’ll spend hours playing around with it but not ten minutes to add a couple of lists of vocabulary to a site that creates everything for you from them. It’s very weird and at the same time very sad too. As teachers I think we have to try to take advantage of new things to help ourselves as well as our students to grow. I like to work at CCAA but I love the extra freedom I get at Cambridge to experiment and try out new stuff. I don’t really have a lot of online stuff for my students there right now but then again the Cambridge site already has a lot of stuff hosted on it that supports the students workbooks. They also provide a program that creates more online exercises based on the Cambridge corpus, I’ll def have to get ahold of a copy of this Good job my host gave me plenty of space Now if I could just get some of my collegues to make some stuff for the lower levels…

Haiku

I’ve been a bit lax in posting recently, I was busy setting up some stuff for mine and Roberta’s groups in Quizlet ready for the coming mid-term exams. This week i decided to try out Haiku with my TN9 group. I have done this activity with a previous MEC1 group and it went really well. I got this activity from a team work book I picked up in SBS and it only requires a few photocopies and cut outs to prepare. It went quite well although on the day of the class one set of photocopies went missing and I couldn’t find them I like this Haiku activity as the students get to think not only of words but also syllables in order to create their poem to form a kind of photograph for the other students to try to guess. We had some fun with this and an interesting discussion arose about whether the amount of syllables changed if you spoke faster or slower hahahaha!! I have no idea where this idea came up from. If I get the time, I’ll do this activity with my MEC4 group too. I think they’ll also enjoy this activity a lot too. I like trying out different stuff in the class if i can find the time, its nice to have a break from the regular class methodology.

I found an interesting website called eslprintables the other day and joined up for it. The idea of the site is simple and also great. You send in worksheets you’ve created to share with the members of the site and then you get to share the worksheets already hosted on the site. You score points for each time someone downloads your sheet and these points determine how many downloads you can make. A nice idea and a nice site too

Extra online activities

I was giving conversation class this afternoon and after the class decided to have a look through the Touchstone book and see if I could get a few extra exercises made up in the time I had left waiting for Roberta’s TN8 class to end. I got three or four of them done quickly in Quizlet but I want to create some more at home using with Quizmaker or Hot Potatoes. The exercises weren’t heavy stuff, just for the beginners to try out such as: contractions of the verb to ‘be’, numbers, formal greetings, etc. I need a place to put the links and although I have many spaces at Wikispaces, I thought I might try out Pbwiki to see how their Pbwiki 2.0 upgrade is. I really liked the look of their new stuff and would like to try it out just to see how it all works and the Touchstone stuff looks like a nice way to try it out. I’m waiting for one of the other Cambridge teachers to email me to see what kinds of Web 2.0 stuff he uses and to see if he might feel like uploading some stuff and posting the links in a wiki too. It would be nice to have someone to work on some exercises and other stuff that also uses the same Cambridge books as I do. I’ll have a quick play with Pbwiki and see whats what later on before I watch ‘Penelope’ with Roberta.

testing, testing..

I finally got quite a few exercises up and running in Quizlet and created the links for them in the students wikis or I created a new Wikispace wiki as in the case of my EPG groups. I got them to take a quick look at the site this morning during the coffee break so they could have a quick look see and ask any question they might have about how to get into the site, using and configuring, etc. The Quizlet site is very simple to use and setup, the students only need is to register in the site to use the learn function. I will find out next weekend how they got on with it. They have my email and phone no just in case they want to call me about it. I think it’ll be a lot of fun for them to try it out. I have some to create for my MEC2 group this weekend, it’ll only take a short amount of time though. The site is really fast and does all of the hard work for me so by Monday morning I’ll have it all sorted out and ready to give the links to my students

Also this weekend I have to remember to pick up the stuff to make a cake for my kids group at Cambridge. I thought I’d get Roberta to give me a hand to knock one out Sunday night to take there Monday with some soft drink, just for a surprise   They have been working hard recently so I think it’ll be a nice treat for them. I’ll try to remember to take the camera with me to get some snaps of them, if they aren’t camera shy, of course   I like baking cakes and stuff for the students, it’s a nice way to relax with them after they’ve been working hard during the semester. Sometimes if we are ahead of the schedule we watch a movie in English and have a lanche or snack. This always goes down really well, students love watching movies hahahaha!! Usually we watch comedies or action movies, although I’m sure the girls would watch romance if the boys would let them