EPG

I spent most of my day today giving three-hour classes to my MEC students. These once a week three-hour classes are because my students study all day in their high schools instead of the usual half a day in Brasil and don’t have time for the normal two ninety minute classes.  The little time I had I spent looking for materials I could use with my business English students next week. Although they are beginners they have a small amount of vocabulary and I wanted to give them some worksheets, etc. for them to look over. A quick visit to Eslprintables soon gave me quite a pile of sheets full of vocabulary. I think these guys will really like them   I have also been trying to find some beginner stuff related to agronomy, I have some fruit and veg charts and wanted some others to go along with them. Over the weekend I’ll try to find some other stuff. There are only two of them in the class as their factory isn’t built yet and they are just here for Research and Development and Tech Sales but they are really enthusiastic about their course   They told me that they really like this studying with a native speaker hehehehe!! It’s nice when I get told this but for me if they do well in their exams and get good grades then I really feel satisfied.

Also over the weekend I’ll have a good look at Edmodo. I have registered but haven’t really had the time to have a good look and play with it. I’ve been trying to think about ways I could use it with my students. I’ll look in the forums to see what ideas others are having to see if it inspires me too. Most of my students have net at home and so the only real problem I have is getting them to stay out of sites like Orkut long enough to use the web for something more constructive hahaha!! I’ll see what I can come up with and maybe ask a few of my MEC students to see how they feel about trying it out as well as giving me some ideas as to how it can be used to help them with their courses.

Business English

I have some new students who work for Syngenta and they are in the beginning of learning Business English with me. The course we teach them is EPG (English for Professionals in General) and as a course its really nice. Full of video and multimedia stuff. I like this course a lot and the students that have studied this all seem to like it a lot too. One real problem with it is a lack of any dedicated online resources, the CCAA homepage is really only there to promote the schools to franchisers and has really very little to offer the students with regards to their courses. While i have a lot of sites online with stuff I’ve created myself for the TN and MEC courses, I have more or less nothing for EPG. I have been looking online to see what I can use with them while I work on getting something set up and running. I love the BBC Wordservice site because it has a Learning Business English section that has a lot of stuff on it but not really anything for total beginners. I was playing with Yacapaca too before the other school crashed out and I’m hoping to try to get some stuff into this for them too. They seem very enthusiastic and I’m sure that anything I create there with this they will defiinately try out. My main problem is really time at the moment, I need 30 hours in a 24 hour day hehehe!! I will try to get some free time online tomorrow in the afternoon and see what I can come up with. I was thinking abouyt maybe getting them to use something simple like Twitter with its very short message system as soon as we have a few lessons under their belts, just so they could try simple messages to each other. I’ll talk with them about this and see how they feel about experimenting with it later on in the semester. I have some sheets that I got from Eslprintables too, man that site is excellent for worksheets and stuff. Roberta loves posting stuff she has ran up on the pc there. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have some ideas for stuff for them. Also my web host has a lot of space left where I can upload some stuff for them too. Maybe it’s time to dust off Hot Potatoes again

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

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!!

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

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