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!!

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.