Net uptime

Our new modem has been in for over a week and besides a slight problem with the cable connecting the antenna to the modem everything is rocking here. I sent a photo of our new set up to my brother because he was curious to see this notebook modem snuggled away there in the rear of the case and was well impressed with it. It’s probably the best radio connection we’ve had since we signed for it   I’ll have to get the Skype reinstalled and the web cam too, It’s been a while since I last used it to chat with my family back over the pond Also I’ll be able to try out uploading the podcasts to Podomatic and see how it all works with WordPress. I downloaded a few things to check out download speed too and everything works just fine so I backed up the wikis we host over at Wikispaces and had a look at finding a good program to make flash exercises for my English students at Cambridge. I already have plenty for the ones over at the other school, more than 200 or so at my last count   I didn’t find anything good though, not that was free anyways hahaha!! I’ll have another look later on after my Business English class this evening.

Internet problems

My isp came this morning to install a new modem for us that we hope will finally solve our connection problems once and for all. They took our external modem and fitted us with a card modem similar to the kind of slot modem for notebooks. The idea was that our external modem was really heating up and the new one inside the case uses less power and has the benifit of the two big coolers in our case helping the board and modem to stay extra cool. We will test this for about a month to see how it works out. Fingers crossed that it’ll all work out just fine. We prefer the radio internet as we rent our house and when we move its easier to get them to just take down the antenna and move to the new place for us, and this is for free I left the computer downloading when we came here to the school, some podcasts one of our friends has been making about fights that his languages students seem to get into every day at the local uni. Its all in portugues so a little hard for me to hear everything but man this group seem top spend a lot of time fighting or arguing. I’m surprised that they manage to get any work done in their Letras course hahaha!! I’ll have to go visit this class one day just for the fun of it

Web 2.0

I’ve been trying out a lot of Web 2.0 sites for a while now. I really like this idea of using the internet as a tool to teach my English students here in Brasil. My biggest problem here is that most schools in Brasil only really teach stuff that is geared to towards the vestibular (uni entrance exam) and most of the stuff they actually teach will never get used for anything or by anyone if they manage to get into either a public or private uni here. Also a lot of teachers here have this fear or laziness of anything new. Sadly a lot of them are just in it for the salary, nothing else. I have a lot of websites online that I created for my students, seven or eight wikis as well as a site that hosts exercises and stuff for my students to use. Some of my favorite Web 2.0 sites that I use a lot are:

1. Wikispaces - I really like this site a lot. 90% or more of my sites online are created using this website. Its fast and easy to use, you need just some basic word processing skills and the registration and setup is easy. They have a good help section and forum too. An email sent out gives a lot of information about new features in the site. I use the free version of it and have no complaints, a few more themes would be nice though but other than that Wikispaces is great.

2. Classroom20 – I like this site a lot, its run by teacher for teachers. It has a lot of postings about Web 2.0 stuff on it. I heard about sites there I’d never heard of before. If you’re a teacher its well worth joining. It has it’s own wikis related to different parts of the site as well as members posting some of their wiki addresses.

3. Twitter - This site is pretty new to me but it is very addictive. You can use it as a messaging service, sort of sms for the web. You post messages about what you are doing at that particular moment and get to read what everyone else is doing at the same time. There are some nice firefox addons for this site so you can read and post without having to go to the site and log in. I use Twitbin a lot.

4. Orkut - A popular social-networking site here in Brasil owned by Google. Its full of links to viruses and stuff but almost all of my students use it. I mainly use this just to send messages to remind them of things or wish them Happy Birthday. I have Myspace and Facebook too but I don’t use them very often, I don’t have the time hahaha!!

There are others I use and I’ll list them here when I get a little more free time

Internet problems…

I’ve been having some problems with my internet provider here in the city. Well more than a little, it hardly works. It took me a couple of days to finally get into WordPress. We’ll call them this afternoon to tell them to get their arses out here to solve the problem.

This week I took on a new private student who more or less learned English by himself and now wants to have someone to practice with. He needs to practice reading and listening to so he usually brings texts with him and we work on them together, alternating between him and I taking turns to read the text and my correcting his pronunciation. I’m going to make some podcasts for him to use as well, At the moment I’m looking for a good place to host the mp3 files and them I’ll link to them in another WordPress blog that I’ll create just to use with him, well with only him just for now. I’ve been checking out Odeo and also Podomatic to see how their service is. I’ll probably search around a few teachers forums to see what they are using as well.