New students

I had a new private student start today, he was previously a CCAA student but became disillusioned with the school and decided he would rather just have private classes with me or Roberta instead. He had already seen the material we use and decided he wanted to use Touchstone instead of Interchange, for us this is great as we already have all the books, cds, etc. ready to go, as well as the extra material I have from the Serve Bem girls   He was telling us that he has other people who want to join his group too and that he’ll get them to come visit us next week to chat about the classes, materials, and also about the TOEIC exam. I like private classes a lot as I get more free time to try out different things with the students. As our newest student has already studied before the first few classes were mainly review and passing through earlier lessons from the book so that he could pick up the new vocabulary, expressions, etc. That way he got to warm up with the easy stuff he already knew before moving on to the lessons with words, grammar, and expressions that he hadn’t yet encountered. I like both Touchstone and Interchange as they are both popular books, have a lot of extra material available for them from CUP, have a dedicated website with activities created solely for lessons from the books, and there are a lot of sites that people have created with materials freely available to download if needed. Both of the books have a lot of conversation sections, for me this is great because being a native it gives my students the chance to practice their spoken English with me on a one to one basis. Using the online material requires that our internet is running properly, sometimes at the weekend it is so overloaded with users that it loads pages so slowly but to get around this I might create some Hot Potatoes exercises that can run independently on our pc. Also my students can copy them to their pen drives and take them home to use. I must try to find the time to get around to creating the blog/wiki I want to try using with my Wizard students and them I can create a offshoot for my private classes from this. What we really need is two computers instead of sharing this one but I’ll wait till the end of the year and then see about getting a notebook as its easier to lug around and take with me to classes. Need to get Roberta’s monograph out of the way first.

Busy Busy!!

I haven’t really had a lot of time to post here, even though I’m only working in one school now I’ve got quite a few things to do. I’ve been showing my students some Web 2.0 sites they can use as part of their English courses and looking for some other stuff that looks fun and interesting for them to use too. Mainly the last week or so I’ve been trying to get my students interested in using Quizlet more. I really like this site a lot, it fits in just fine with my ESL classes. Some of the students have already started using it and like it a lot. Others I haven’t really had the time to sit in front of the pc with yet and demonstrate it but I’m slowly getting around to it. Roberta’s students also seemed interested in using it too so I added the vocabulary for her to try with them and next week we’ll see what they think of it and try to encourage them to use it more as part of their home learning. I also chatted with my students about things like blogging. I’d already tried to get some EPG student’s involved in this but although we got their WordPress accounts all set up, they moved to another part of Brasil and I have lost contact with them   Some of my advanced students liked the idea a lot but their time is limited as they are studying at uni at night and working in the day. I chatted with the about maybe using something like Twitter. I like this site a lot too and the idea of small text message like postings might be easier and more appealing to them. I have extra class with them over the weekend so I’ll demonstrate it to them in the break. It would be better if the other teachers were also more interested in using Web 2.0 more in their classes but generally they haven’t really shown much interest in it. I have quite a bit of stuff online for my students in wiki’s, blogs, etc. Most of it is for advanced or MEC groups but it could be easily added to for beginners if they tried it out. Sometimes I get the ‘If you do it for me I’ll use it’ impression from people but I don’t really have a lot of time for the things I have online for my own students and Roberta’s too. I’ll have to see about getting some of them to spend some time looking at what is already there so they can see how much it would help them out. I think for the beginner teachers they really need to look and see what else is out there because we seem to lose quite a few students after the 1st semester whereas I haven’t lost any of mine and I think this extra online stuff shows that the teacher is interested in help ing them to get as much of of their classes as they can. Hopefully as my students start to use the online sites more and more, the word will get around and the students might ask their teachers for more online resources for them to use too.

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