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.

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

Yacapaca

I have been looking at a new website called Yacapaca the last couple of days or so. I Had a few little problems figuring out how to get going with the site but once I understood how it worked I really liked the idea and I’ll try to get some exercises into it probably for my Touchstone students. I probably won’t do any for my CCAA groups as I have loads of online stuff already up and running for them and I think my kids would benefit from having more grammar stuff online. It reminds me quite a bit of hot Potatoes, the graphics are very nice and cute too   If your internet is a little slow it can take a while for the exercises to load and this is where I like HP more as the pages seem to load quite quickly from this suite of programs. I’ll try to get some stuff up and running on it in a few days, just really so I can see how it all goes together and then if my students want to try it out, I’ll get them to test it and see what they think

Also this week I will start recording some podcasts for one of our private students using Audacity. He gave me a few texts to read and record for him so he can then read the texts and follow along at home. I am curious to see how he likes this and will see what he tells Roberta after he’s tried it out. Audacity is an excellent free program and well worth getting if you’re a language teacher for sound or voice recordings and editing.

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!!

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.