Brasilia book fair

Roberta and I went to the book fair at Patio Brasil in Brasilia yesterday. I like going to the fair, it only happens once a year and normally its very good. This time they didn’t seem to have so much stuff, there seemed to be a few empty spaces where no stands were too. We will go again at the end of the week, maybe it’ll have more people selling by then. We managed to get a copy of the newest Dan Brown book, it’s been selling like hot cakes and we had problems getting a hold of a copy. They are only selling hard back versions of the book in English though, not really sure why this is. Every person we asked yesterday said they were only importing the hardback copies. Maybe it is cheaper to import? Usually we bring home three or four bags full of books but this time it was just a couple of books. There were quite a few bible selling stalls, for me this was a complete waste of space, they could have put some more book sellers in these spaces – someone like Cambridge or Oxford publications. A lot of the grammars books we already have copies of, I didn’t see any conversation material either, but then this didn’t matter so much as I already have a bookshelf full of this material. I think Roberta would have liked to see more stalls selling fiction books, we both love to read and usually load up on books at the fair. Next weekend, we will see if there are more things to look at and hopefully more deals as they start to wind the fair down.

New semester

The new semester will start for me next week sothis week was actually pretty busy. Yesterday I had training with some people from Cambridge for the newest of their coursebooks and the day before that was a teachers meeting at CCAA. Since the start of last semester when I started to work for more than one school I haven’t really been having much of a good time working for CCAA, the terrible training a few weeks ago was probably the lowest point of the semester for me. The teachers meeting this week wasn’t really any improvement from this, I didn’t really expect it to be though. My allotment of groups is now at my lowest ever since I started working for the CCAA group 8 years ago, there’s been a lot of asskissing by newer teachers to get more groups and seeing as they suck up to the person who makes the schedule a lot of people have noticed these few getting more and more of the available groups. It’s probable that either me or Roberta will leave this semester to spend more time on other projects. I was only at the school less than an hour and got to hear other teacher’s complaining about the situation there too, but they won’t do anything about it as most of them are only really there to make pin money. As the only native speaker I expexct to get a lot of shit thrown at me and this last semester there was definately a lot of shit hahahaha!! With the Cambridge school all set to start now and the franchiser all set to do some major promo work in the city to give us a boost I’m not really all that worried about what happens during this semester. It’s a little sad though that they let things get so bad As they say, all good things must come to an end…

As I said above, Roberta and I attended a training course that lasted the whole morning with some reps from Cambridge Uni press. They were talking about the new Touchstone coursebook and giving some ideas about how to use the book and stuff. Also they were talking about their website and things that had been added to the Touchstone pages in the Brasilian version of the site. It was a lot of fun and very relaxed, I got to meet some of the other people from the other Cambridge schools too. It turns out that we had missed a Cambridge Day in Brasilia which was shame as I like to attend these events and seminars. The presenters took a list of all emails so we could be added to their database and get mailed when events are going to happen in our areas   I took some time to chat with our franchiser at the end of the meeting about the start of this coming semester and picked up some stuff for the school including Hippo. Hippo is a teachers aid that gets used to work with small children in the Hippo and friends books that we will use this semester from the supplier. He’s actually very cute, I think Roberta would keep him if the had half the chance hehehe!! I’ve never seen a puppet used in a classroom before so this should be interesting, I wonder how the kids will take to him

Nearly

It’s nearly the end of the semester here, I’ll finally manange to get a little more rest   This week more or less all of the schools are on vacation now so most of the promotion work for our new school will stop for a couple of weeks while we get new leaflets printed up and wait for the schools to reopen. My students are a little late and yesterday made their unit exams with Roberta and I’ll do the oral tests on Monday before their break starts. This afternoon I will give my MEC students their final exams while I’m waiting for Roberta’s class to end. It should be relatively easy for them, its their final exam of their English course and after this they will more than likely move to other cities. I took a few photos of them to add to my Facebook account and also in my Orkut account so they could get copies of the photos for themselves. I’m not really a big fan of Orkut as it’s full of viruses and stuff and I only really use it to send messages to the students. Hopefully they’ll drop in from time to time and visit with us at either one of the schools I’m at now

Next week I’m hoping the new material for the  Cambridge school will arrive. All the children’s material should be here including the puppet that goes with the youngest levels. I think his name is Hippo or something like that and the teachers will use him to help teach class to the youngest students between 3 to 6yrs of age. I’ve never seen a puppet used in English class here so I’m very curious to see how Luiza or Roberta are going to use him in their classes   Also the Spanish material should arrive so we can look through the books. The new tee shirts for the school also started to arrive, we will give them away for the first fifty or so students that register for the new semester. They are very eyecatching, the franchiser designed them and they will be good free publicity for the school. The students from this semester were really interested in getting one of these hehehehe!! The teachers shirts we will design ourselves, there are a few places here in the city that print tee shirts and we will see what they can come up with. Hopefully we will have quite a few students starting next semester, building a language school here always takes time, unless you are the only school   Word should get around this semester and we are hoping in maybe a year that we will start to see significant numbers of students arriving. The material from Cambridge is very good and we are using their newest books so things should be fun next semester.

Busy week

This week has been quite busy, Roberta and I are now co-owners of the Cambridge school and have been doing some promo work in all public schools in the city this week, as well as a couple of the private ones. I was supposed to also be doing this last week but unfortunately I had to spend the week in the hospital so this week was pretty much a rush as most schools here are going on vacation now for a month between semesters. We had some help from Danilo, who specializes in promoting the Cambridge schools. He gave some much needed ideas to us for things we could do and also ferried me around the schools so we could distribute leaflets and speak with the students. I like to do this one to one promo stuff as people love meeting foreign teachers. Some of the schools remember me quite well as I’m always around and about in our city At the beginning of the next semester we’ll have to do this all over again, I’m hoping we’ll get more students for this new semester. Fingers crossed, eh? The franchiser is also printing up some uniforms and tee-shirts for the school. We will probably give away between 50-100 of these, firstly because students love wearing free uniforms and secondly its good promotion to see all those students walking around the streets with our telephone number hehehehe!! I’m waiting for the tee-shirts to arrive now so we can have a look at them and see how they look. There is a place in our city that also makes uniforms and we will use them to create some tee-shirts for the teachers to wear. We have a copy of the graphics but unfortunately they are CDR files and we have no program that can open them. I’ll get a copy of Coreldraw and resave them as jpegs or something more usable.

Also this week I met with a guy from a company here that prints logos on pens and stuff. They have a lot of products, we are going to scan through them and see how much everything costs. Also I’d like to be able to buy some things, such as pen drives, and have the schools names printed on them too. I want to use them for promotional stuff too. I’ll also speak with Luis, the franchiser as he also knows many people that make these kinds of things.

I’ve been playing around a little more with Yacapaca too. I more or less understand it all now, I love the graphics and stuff this site uses   I’ll try to get some stuff in it for the next semester for my students to use. I think they’ll like it a lot

Been busy

I’ve been quite busy the last few days and have hardly had the time to get online to post anything. Seeing as now Robert, Zelia and I are in charge of the school we have been busy organizing stuff and planning out the new school promotions for the new semester. I had the flu the last few days so I haven’t really been doing a lot of the running around. I’ve been looking over some proposals we had from cell phone companies that offered to give us cell phones to use in the school to save on using the land line to make expensive calls to cell phones. A company called Vivo gave us a quite good offer and we will call Claro to see if they can better it. At the beginning of the semester we will sign up with one of these as its handy to be able to make cheap calls between the teachers and the school. Although at the start will be just three teachers unless we get totally swamped the first week. This would be nice if it happened but somehow I don’t think so hehehe!! Then again, you never know..  Roberta has been in touch with a few people here about giving English classes for their employees at a discount price, we had a good response to this, which was nice as the girls had spent time on the promotion prices to make sure they were nice   Of course, we’ll only really know how good when the next semester starts and we see how many students register for class. There’s still quite a few things to do on the list but we are getting through them slowly

Roberta has been giving class on Fridays for the students at Cambridge seeing as her afternoon is free. My students really like this class a lot, they are always asking me if she will give the Friday class over and over again. This week she was working with phonetics, we got some really nice worksheets for this from Eslprintables. The students also spent time solving their doubts with her too, this class is only 90 mins or so but its becoming quite popular

I will try to find some time this weekend to create a phonetics alphabet display for the classroom wall. Roberta is going to work with this with the students and although they get a lot of worksheets and printouts as well as the work in their coursebooks, I think it will be nice to have some kind of display for them to look at too. Hopefully I’ll get most of it done this weekend and then print and cut it out to mount on the wall

I got some feedback from my student who had asked me to record some texts for him this week. He asked me to try to record them slower for him as he had a few problems with the speed of the others ones. I thought i “had” spoken slowly when I recorded these texts hahahaha!! He’s going to give me some more texts to record and I’ll try to make them a lot slower still using the Audacity program because it rocks

Schooling

This week was an interesting one for us, I started working for Cambridge this semester and I liked it a lot. The freedom to plan the class and add more things as I went along plus the first time I get to work with youngsters too. Last Thursday was a meeting with the franchise owner and he doesn’t live anywhere near the school and asked me, Roberta and Zelia (who also works at the school) if we would be interested in taking the franchise on permanently. This is a great piece of news for us, although it will be the first time either of us have administrated a school before. Luis, the franchiser will be on hand to help us get set up and organized. He has done this many times and is going to give us his full support and of his other schools so we don’t get swamped straight away. Roberta and I are looking forward to this, it’s going to be one of those challenges that I think will be really enjoyable. Whether I will carry on in the other school too I don’t know. I think if we get a lot of students from the beginning of the semester I will only work in one place as I will get tired and also having thrombosis limits the amount of standing my doc will allow. Next week will be the start of getting organized for this move. I think Roberta will probably not work for CCAA next semester as she will need to be full-time in our new school along with Zelia to help out and get things sorted out. Looks like I might have quite a bit to blog about in the near future

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…

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

Trying…

I’ve been more or less playing around with stuff online for my students for over three years now. My online exercise website I started over three years ago and it has around 350-400 exercises on it based mainly around the CCAA methodology and student textbooks. I wanted to make sure that I had quite a few for the students to use as review exercises before the two exams they take each semester. I’ve also got quite a few wikis at Wikispaces now, plus one that I’m helping Roberta to make to host mainly links for exercises we created for her TN5 group. My online presence is growing hahaha!! About 18 months ago, during a teachers meeting at the school, I had tried to get some of the teachers I work with interested in making some online activities for their students that could all be hosted in my website. The result of this was that they weren’t really all that interested and nothing really came of it Now, 18 months or so later there is still really very little interest in the internet as a serious tool for teaching language in the school. The Cambridge school has a lot of online resources that exist as part of the Cambridge site and the CCAA one is just mainly for franchise promotion so I thought that the teachers would be quite interested in getting something going that would be interesting not only for the teachers but for the students too. I think that this is mainly because of two things, one is just laziness and the main reason is that here in Brasil the courses at the universities, both public and private, only teach the same old boring stuff that probably existed at the conception of the Brasilian education system. I’ve visited three universities near to our city and in all of them its exactly the same My students seem genuinely interested in all the online stuff I uploaded and I’m sure that if the other teachers tried a little that their’s would be as well. In the teachers meeting though usually they prefer to change the subject quickly to anything that isn’t related to the school :-S I decided that there is no real point to my trying to point out new stuff online to them, even when the website is actually very useful and timesaving. Such sites as Quizlet create many great exercises from a small list of vocabulary, shithot for a language teacher but it would really be a waste of time mentioning it in the teacher’s meeting Roberta says she will try thinking of something but I wouldn’t hold my breath about any ideas she has succeeding.