Internet crazy

I’m a member of many sites, including, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Google Groups, etc. Most of my students old and at Wizard are members of these sites so it makes it easy for me to add them all, once I can find them, that is   Also I have this blog here, but I am struggling to find to post to it at the moment. Every time I try to sit in front of a pc to blog, something else comes up and I end up forgetting about it for days, or weeks hahaha!! Twitter I use the most as it takes very little time for me to update and Orkut when I get an email telling me somone has posted something there. Facebook is my main social networking site, Orkut is unheard of by my friends in the UK. I like Facebook the most as it links to every other site I use and I can access them all from the facebook site. Recently a lot of my students asked me if I had a Formspring account so they could add me and post things there. I had seen the links to some of my students Formspring accounts, but had never gone to look at them. Formspring is mainly a site where you go to post questions for your friends to answer, to learn more about you. I signed up for an account so I can try getting my students to post questions there in English for me to reply to, another way for them to practice their English I hope   In Facebook, you can simply add the site and it appears in your profile so that people can just click on the tab and post questions and read replies to other question already posted there. I’ll add the links to my other accounts so that my students can easily find the links and then sit back and see what happens. Hopefully, it will turn out to be something fun to do and I’ll get to discover a little more about my students, to go with the little things they told me about the 1st class in the ‘toilet paper game’ hahahahaha!!

Dia do trote

I can’t believe how long its been since I last got the time to post here Very sad, I must try to get a bit more time organized. A new semester and the school has a new director too, things have been busy. Last week was promotional week for the school which meant the teachers visiting the local schools to drum up a few more students. The other day we visited the local public uni here n the city to talk with the letras classes. I think this visit to UEG was a bit of a waste of time though because most students in letras don’t speak a word of English and don’t want to either. For them the degree is just a way to get a public job and knowing that they can teach terrible classes and receive a government salary with all the trappings. They have changed the rules for English teachers since I’ve been in Brazil, such as, having the interview entirely in English which weeds out 99% of the bad ones. But not all public teaching jobs require this and nepotism gets a lot of cousins, brothers, etc jobs in public schools. UEG suffers from this quite a bit. One English teacher last year was given her job by some relative that already works there and her classes were so bad that the students used to email me to ask me things and to get me to help explain things to them because their teacher didn’t have enough knowledge to do it in class. Luckily for the students this teacher only lasted one semester thanks to a change of coordinators but since then the students told me they have had two more that were just as bad. It’s quite sad really that the students are so excited when they find out the have passed the public exam to study for free in the Public uni only to be so sad and depressed a year later at how bad the classes are   I tried to teach there last semester buy didn’t get back to me about this because of some documents they said they needed but some of the students there told me that this wasn’t the case. Some of the students from my wife’s class come to our house so we can help them out with their projects, etc. so at leas they get some decent support from somewhere.

As the title of my post says, this week is Dia de trote. Well, actually its from today till Sat this week. The new director came up with the idea of having the students do something funny or unusual once a month, just for fun. This week is the first time we have tried this at the school and it was decided to do something simple for the first one like wearing Havaianas to class. Most if not all people in Brazil wear some kind of flip flop so this one was easy for the students to do. I’ll take a few photos of my groups completing this task to post in Facebook and Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see what other ideas they come up with for this day

We moved house recently and in the promotion we have been advertizing conversation classes. I have been digging throught all of the boxes for the material we have for this and I came across some books that were packed and had been hidden away for quite some time. I was really pleased I found them because they have many interesting conversation activities I can do with my MEC students that require very little setting up. I’ll have a good look through them over the next few days to see what I can find to use this coming semester with my students. they are mainly teenagers and love doing different things

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.

Nearly

It’s nearly the end of the semester here, I’ll finally manange to get a little more rest   This week more or less all of the schools are on vacation now so most of the promotion work for our new school will stop for a couple of weeks while we get new leaflets printed up and wait for the schools to reopen. My students are a little late and yesterday made their unit exams with Roberta and I’ll do the oral tests on Monday before their break starts. This afternoon I will give my MEC students their final exams while I’m waiting for Roberta’s class to end. It should be relatively easy for them, its their final exam of their English course and after this they will more than likely move to other cities. I took a few photos of them to add to my Facebook account and also in my Orkut account so they could get copies of the photos for themselves. I’m not really a big fan of Orkut as it’s full of viruses and stuff and I only really use it to send messages to the students. Hopefully they’ll drop in from time to time and visit with us at either one of the schools I’m at now

Next week I’m hoping the new material for the  Cambridge school will arrive. All the children’s material should be here including the puppet that goes with the youngest levels. I think his name is Hippo or something like that and the teachers will use him to help teach class to the youngest students between 3 to 6yrs of age. I’ve never seen a puppet used in English class here so I’m very curious to see how Luiza or Roberta are going to use him in their classes   Also the Spanish material should arrive so we can look through the books. The new tee shirts for the school also started to arrive, we will give them away for the first fifty or so students that register for the new semester. They are very eyecatching, the franchiser designed them and they will be good free publicity for the school. The students from this semester were really interested in getting one of these hehehehe!! The teachers shirts we will design ourselves, there are a few places here in the city that print tee shirts and we will see what they can come up with. Hopefully we will have quite a few students starting next semester, building a language school here always takes time, unless you are the only school   Word should get around this semester and we are hoping in maybe a year that we will start to see significant numbers of students arriving. The material from Cambridge is very good and we are using their newest books so things should be fun next semester.

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…

First post…

Today I finally found time to get into WordPress and post my first post I was using Blogger but decided to have a change and also I want to use wordpress with some of my students as part of trying out some Web 2.0 stuff. I’ve been interested in using Web 2.0 sites in class for quite some time, mainly my students tend to use Orkut a lot here in Brasil, but it’s not really a good social networking site – lots of viruses and stuff. In the blogroll I listed a few that I’m really into at the moment. Twitter is one of my favorites, it’s very addictive.

 This afternoon all of the groups of students at CCAA had a lanche (a snack break?). It was a lot of fun – lots of Coca Cola – and I took my camera to take a couple of photos… and forget to use it hahahaha!! Never mind, they have these things quite often. All the classes on Friday afternoons are three hour classes so its nice to have a break and eat something half way through. My class on Friday afternoon is MEC (Master English Course) and mainly teenagers, they are a lot of fun. They’ve been my students for quite some time and we are comfortable with one another. I teach mainly advanced groups, as well as business English and conversation classes. When we have one of these Roberta and I usually bake a cake to take along, this time was chocolate and lemon cream, there was none left at the end so I guess everyone liked it I haven’t eaten anything this evening after all the food from earlier on, I think it’ll just be liquid food like coffee or tea for the rest of the day