Ning

I have had a membership of Ning for a little while now but I’ve never really gotten around to seriously looking at it until this week. Man, I was blown away by it, it’s an excellent site and has so many things to use and configure. I’ve started setting up a social-networking site for my Cambridge students there. I think it’ll come really in handy next semester as a way for the students to link to the school and also to me and also for parents to see a little of what goes on there in the school. I was a little pissed with myself that I hadn’t looked at it earlier but this was really just a lack of time on my part. Working at two schools plus private students and then spending quality time with my wife had me run ragged hehehehe!! Now I have more time after all of the mids I got to see what was what in the site. It has many really cool features, yeah some of them can be found in things like Orkut but the real thing is that in Ning everything is controled by me and not on the whim of someone else. Being able to upload my own mp3s or videos into the site is really nice and also the fact that the people who join the site can too, so long as they have permissions to do this Some of the cool things included in it are:

1. loads of photo space
2. can upload videos, photos etc. straight into the site
3. built in forum
4. groups
5. easy to use setting up of site mainly by drag and drop
6. can customize almost everything exactly how you want
7. users have their own fully configurable pages
8. messages and comments that can be fully admin’d
9. It’s completly free

The list goes on and on hehehe!! I like the fact that everything can be personalized, I think my students will like this a lot. It has more than enough safety features in the site too, I wonder if someone thought of these features with schools in mind? I’ll use it also as a place for my students to find out their grades from their written and oral exams, as the ning requires people to login, only they will see the grade sheet that I created in Google Docs and embedded into the site. I’ll ask the other Cambridge school near me if they want to join in with it too, once i have my students in it and it’s all up and running. I think the teachers from the other schools will like it too and see the benefits and using it with their students too I’ll post more on this as I get it set up.

Hospital 2

This week I had to go twice to the hospital in Brasilia to have blood tests and get hooked up to the electrocardiogram as part of my treatment for the study of deep vein thrombosis. It was a little boring and having a long bus journey to the capital twice in three days was a little tiring. I have been treated for six months more or less now and the treatment is working but very slowly. The doc told us that this happens in some people and in others its really fast and for some people they have to take meds for the rest of their lives. I now am part of the next phase, taking meds for another 15 months to study how well it works. Its more or less the same routine as before, a four-weekly checkup to make sure that I’m taking the right amounts of pills and to alter if its needed. I have to have some more blood tests but the place that will do them requires more info from my main doctors and here in Brasil this usually means piles of paperwork, my doc said it’ll take a week or so to get everything they asked for ready. Theres so much bureaucracy here in Brasil, documents are required – sometimes in triplicate – for everything and anything. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get it all organized.

Hospital

This morning I had to spend the whole morning at the hospital getting some blood tests and an ultrasound on my leg to see how the treatment for my thrombosis was going. It was a long morning, I spent most of it either being prodded for blood or in the ultrasound and I have to have yet more tests over the next couple of weeks. Apparently there has been slow improvement which now means I will take  the drugs for another fifteen months to see how that helps. They told me that its quite possible that I will have to take these drugs for the rest of my life. Tomorrow I’ll start a new regime of drugs, I’ll soon be a walking pill box hehehe!! Monday morning is my next appointment and it’s also in another city, luckily its the same city Roberta’s grandmother lives in so we’ll probably stay over and visit after my exams. Hopefully soon it’ll start improving more rapidly.

We have a private student who has asked me to read from a book and record some of it for him to follow along as he reads the book. I finally managed to get around to playing around with Audacity last night to see how it works. It works very well, it has a strange thing though, you cannot record to the same file twice from what I can tell. I looked in the Audacity forum for help and saw another person asking about this and he got the same reply. Its all about cutting and pasting stuff together. This cutting and pasting it does very well. We couldn’t tell where the join was between the two sounds I recorded. It converts to many file types, I’ll try out the setting it had for standard audio cd quality. From what I heard in the tests last night this should be more than file for whats required by our student. I’ll try to get a chapter done and get it over to him to see how he likes it and if its loud enough for him. Should be some fun, now if I can only find time to do the podcasts I want to do for my students

Online exercises

I’ll start this week to create more online exercises for my Touchstone students. I’ll use the same software as before, Hot Potatoes, Quizlet, etc. I think they will be mainly grammar reviews and stuff as in their last written test this was where they seemed to have problems. To be honest not studying and a small minority who talk all of the time in class probably counted for some bad grades too but it only takes a few minutes run run off the exercises and upload them to the site. After created 400+ exercises and setting up the site making the alterations is very easy. The homepage was created with a Publisher theme so its easy for me to edit and change it and all the main files I don’t have to change, just upload and thats it. I’d like to do more or less the same way I did for my CCAA students, with the Touchstone being beginners though I’ll stick to stuff I know they have a few problems with just for reinforcement. If I get the time I’ll try to upload a few this weekend.

Also I am still trying to find the time to create the podcasts and do something with this, it always gets pushed to the back burner simply because this site isn’t really required as part of my students courses, only as an extra thing that I want to create only for some extra stuff and also for a bit of fun too   I really must find the time to at least start as soon as I get a decent amount of free time.

Our PS2 went on the blink last week and today if we get time we are going to see about getting it repaired. A students father told us about a place in our city that fixes them and we will go see how much it’ll cost to get it up and running again. I like the PS2, I use it at night when Roberta is at the uni to pass the time. We have Guitar Heros 3 and we have never played it hehehe!!

Translations

I had an interesting chat with Roberta’s cousin Samuel this afternoon about the size of books here in Brasil after they have been translated into Brasilian Portugues. It’s very strange that books that have 700+ pages in English only have 500+ when translated into Portugues and we were talking about why this is. I think the main reason for this can be found in film subtitles here in Brasil as they are generally very bad and translated into sometimes what I would call baby-talk. Marshmallow from Sao Paulo are one of the worst companies I’ve ever seem when it comes to translating films here. Whole words are mis-translated and sometimes whole sentences of speech – usually from what looks like a lack of attention when the translators listen to the movie soundtrack. I have to confess I never read books in Portugues only in English and I encourage my students to watch or read on English too. Also it seems that translators here in Brasil seem to think that Brazilians need everything translated very simply, sometimes using baby language to translate from English into Portugues, a 200 page difference in a book i think everyone would have to admit is a lot of words. I know some English expressions get shortened down in Portugues to one or two words but from what my English students have told me this shrinking usually changes the meaning of the phrases or expressions completely, its very weird. I always recommend to my advanced students that they read or watch in English and just ask me to explain what they don’t understand instead of relying on sometimes dreadful Portugues translations.

Volcano

I found some amazing photos of the erupting volcano today on the Daily Mail website. I was blown away when I saw them. You can see them HERE

CTG

Yesterday evening I didn’t have class in the evening so I went to a so-called academic week of presentations (if you can call them that) at CTG in our city. I usually go every year but not to see the presentations as they are terrible. It is usually to catch up with friends I haven’t seen for a long time who study in UEG, the local public university. I have no idea who the guy was giving last night’s presentation but it was bad. On a scale of 1 to 10 with ten being the worst possible it ranked at about a 20. Don’t take my word for it, most people who were there went to watch a soccer match in the room next door instead of listening to this guy waffling on about who knows what. There was a data show available and a decent sound system too, I have no idea why he didn’t try to use it in the presentation instead of just using it to show translations of stuff that he didn’t really understand himself. I would love to have this kind of stuff in my classroom. One good reason for going to these yearly things is that I am always reminded to make sure that my classes never get as bad or boring as this.

As you can see from the photo above, I bumped into a lot of old friends and ex-students too. In the photo with me are Ariel and Larissa, my old MEC students. They are so cute and funny They study Letras at the same uni as Roberta, but a year ahead. We didn’t see anything of the presentation but spent time catching up with other old friends and students of ours

New students

This last week I acquired more students, private classes. I like these students as i get to do something different from the usual classroom stuff. Generally I give conversation classes and this changes depending on what the student wants. Sometimes we just sit around and chat about anything just to practice normal conversations. Its all good for me as I love speaking in my own language

I’ve been creating worksheets with Roberta and we now like to upload a copy straight to Eslprintables so it gets shared with other teachers. After thirty copies of your worksheets have been downloaded you become a premium user which allows you to download thirty of the newest printouts without using any of your point per day   This is excellent but its important to still remember to keep uploading worksheets so as to make sure they all get shared around. I love these kinds of websites, anything Web 2.0 is great as far as I’m concerned. I like trying out new stuff as it comes online – unfortunately I don’t have the time to use everything I would like to with my students   I think my favorite ones are Wikispaces and Quizlet which I use a lot at the moment. I like hot Potatoes as well, all of the exercises I’ve created were made with this program. Everyday I read about something new in sites like Classroom20, If only I had the time to use everything hehehe!!