Self helpers

Yesterday we had to suffer watching one of those videos made by some self-help guy. It was terrible, probably the worst one I have ever seen in my life hahaha!! He droned on, making these stupid voices on and off all the way through the first hour, I was amazed that someone actually paid to see this guy. I think they were probably after some kind of certificate with the amount of hours they spent there being tortured printed on it to show to their bosses. In typical Brasilian fashion, mid way through the slow sad weepy music started and he comes out with a story about some boy with no arms, and, seeing as its being filmed, you get close up shots of women pretending to be crying just because they know for sure they will be on the video. Their acting was so bad that they would’ve immediately qualified as a soap opera actress. Sadly we will have to suffer the other half of the video   I’ll miss some of it though as my students are coming to class, merciful thanks for review 2 hahahaha!! This guy didn’t really have anything useful to say, mainly that to be successful you need to have a lot of money and pretend to care about poor people so that people believe that you are some kind of saint. Him quoting Jack Walsh did little to liven up or improve his presentation either. I could’ve been doing something useful like correcting my students exercises and homework I’ll take a book to pass the time during the second half showing, there is only so much that a sane person can take before their brains get fried.

Today, I also spent some time prepping some tests for my Sat student. Although we are burning through the Touchstone book at a fair speed, we haven’t done any of the unit tests. So, this afternoon before going to give class, I ran around the corner to the xerox store go get them all run off. Although my student has been doing photocopies that we already had prepared, the ones that goe with the book are nice as they are graded and it’ll give him a good idea how he is progressing and what he needs to read up on at home from the earlier units. I like the cds that come with the students book, but it only contains some of the audio tracks from the lessons, to solve this problem, I gave him a copy of all three of the teachers audio cds so that he can listen and practice with everything at home. It only requires that I give him the track number for the relevant cd so that he can jump straight to the track without having to search around for each one. Once he gets his laptop, he’ll be able to take advantage of the books online portal, complete with interactive activities for practice using the vocabulary and grammar from the units I just have to pick up the workbook copies for the next class.

Collocations

This weekend I had an interesting discussion with some students I was giving extra class to about groups of words. They were trying to translate words for word collocations and getting nowhere with it. With some expressions and collocations it is impossible for them to do this and what they end up with with word to word translation is usually unintelligible in Portuguese. I was talking about this problem with them and about them maybe trying to learn and remember chunks of vocabulary, collocations, word groups, etc. The main problem with this is that some Brasilian teachers like translating and the students get used to it. Trying to break them of this habit is not easy. I’ve seen teachers at the university giving an entire English class in Portuguese and this is for a university diploma   I told them I would look for some ideas for them to use to help them with this problem and hit the internet as there are usually hundreds of ideas there for both students and teachers. A friend of mine, who is a teacher trainer for Cultura Inglesa, Brasilia, had posted something that looked just the business in the Teachingenglish.org website. He had posted something in the site about using ‘lexical notebooks’. It looks more or less perfect for what they need   I might try it with my students too, I will have to modify it a little to fit and firstly see if my students show any interest in trying this out. Also in the site was a couple of postings from another teacher about collocation classroom activities, I have already used some activities with my advanced students but it is always nice to have a few more to use. All three of these activities can be easily found at the teachingenglish website. I’ll definitely try out some of these activities as soon as I get the chance   They give suggestions for text analysis activities, preparation activities, speaking activities, dictionary/matching exercises, etc. As I try them out, I’ll post about them here

Passing time

I’m sat here at Wizard with nothing to do, waiting for my next group of students to arrive. After spending more than 8 years with 90 min classes, these hour classes take a little getting used to at first. Of course, it helps that the students do all the preparation work at home   Having shorter exercises helps too, I get to spend more time with my wife hahaha!! The reason for the shorter exercises is mainly because the students are constantly evaluated each class, mainly leaving the written part to be done as homework. I’m still thinking how to set up a blog/wiki to use with my students. I usually use Wikispaces, but this time I was thinking of trying out something like Pbworks. The reason for the change is just to try out a different site, I’ll still keep the other wikis updated too as Roberta uses them all of the time. I’m trying to come up with a list of vocabulary so I can create some stuff to use with my students at home, Wizard don’t let people to take home their teaching materials. I’ll see if someone here has already created a book by book list of vocabulary and grammar to save me the time of having to make some myself. It should make things a lot easier for me with regards to making exercises with Hot Potatoes, etc. I might still make some kind of interactive cdrom thing, I was all setup to create for my now defunct groups at the other school so to switch over to the Wizard vocab and material is just  a matter of  changing a few logos, etc. I’ll see how much time free I have to do this.

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.