Busy Busy!!

I haven’t really had a lot of time to post here, even though I’m only working in one school now I’ve got quite a few things to do. I’ve been showing my students some Web 2.0 sites they can use as part of their English courses and looking for some other stuff that looks fun and interesting for them to use too. Mainly the last week or so I’ve been trying to get my students interested in using Quizlet more. I really like this site a lot, it fits in just fine with my ESL classes. Some of the students have already started using it and like it a lot. Others I haven’t really had the time to sit in front of the pc with yet and demonstrate it but I’m slowly getting around to it. Roberta’s students also seemed interested in using it too so I added the vocabulary for her to try with them and next week we’ll see what they think of it and try to encourage them to use it more as part of their home learning. I also chatted with my students about things like blogging. I’d already tried to get some EPG student’s involved in this but although we got their WordPress accounts all set up, they moved to another part of Brasil and I have lost contact with them   Some of my advanced students liked the idea a lot but their time is limited as they are studying at uni at night and working in the day. I chatted with the about maybe using something like Twitter. I like this site a lot too and the idea of small text message like postings might be easier and more appealing to them. I have extra class with them over the weekend so I’ll demonstrate it to them in the break. It would be better if the other teachers were also more interested in using Web 2.0 more in their classes but generally they haven’t really shown much interest in it. I have quite a bit of stuff online for my students in wiki’s, blogs, etc. Most of it is for advanced or MEC groups but it could be easily added to for beginners if they tried it out. Sometimes I get the ‘If you do it for me I’ll use it’ impression from people but I don’t really have a lot of time for the things I have online for my own students and Roberta’s too. I’ll have to see about getting some of them to spend some time looking at what is already there so they can see how much it would help them out. I think for the beginner teachers they really need to look and see what else is out there because we seem to lose quite a few students after the 1st semester whereas I haven’t lost any of mine and I think this extra online stuff shows that the teacher is interested in help ing them to get as much of of their classes as they can. Hopefully as my students start to use the online sites more and more, the word will get around and the students might ask their teachers for more online resources for them to use too.

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!!

New students

This last week I acquired more students, private classes. I like these students as i get to do something different from the usual classroom stuff. Generally I give conversation classes and this changes depending on what the student wants. Sometimes we just sit around and chat about anything just to practice normal conversations. Its all good for me as I love speaking in my own language

I’ve been creating worksheets with Roberta and we now like to upload a copy straight to Eslprintables so it gets shared with other teachers. After thirty copies of your worksheets have been downloaded you become a premium user which allows you to download thirty of the newest printouts without using any of your point per day   This is excellent but its important to still remember to keep uploading worksheets so as to make sure they all get shared around. I love these kinds of websites, anything Web 2.0 is great as far as I’m concerned. I like trying out new stuff as it comes online – unfortunately I don’t have the time to use everything I would like to with my students   I think my favorite ones are Wikispaces and Quizlet which I use a lot at the moment. I like hot Potatoes as well, all of the exercises I’ve created were made with this program. Everyday I read about something new in sites like Classroom20, If only I had the time to use everything hehehe!!

Rushing

This morning was a bit of a rush from the moment I woke up. As soon as the coffee was made and the computer booted up and online I started correcting some small spelling mistakes I had made in the Quizlet vocab sets I have been adding over the last week or so. It only took a few minutes and everything is all shipshape again. I created some that my EPG students can use while they are on vacation for the next three weeks so they can play with the activities in the Quizlet site and practice a little even though they won’t be coming to the school. I find more uses for this site every day, it really is quite handy. I’ll spend some time Wednesday night with my students to get the up to speed with it so they’ll know what is what as we’ll be out of touch during the vacation. I added some sets from the next book too, it’ll give them a chance to familiarize themselves with some of the situations and vocabulary before we get started when they both return.

This week is full of reviews for the upcoming midterm exams all the students have to take. All the teachers were required to create some review exercises for the students – some teachers a lot less than others – and I used Quizlet as the workhorse to do 95% of the work as my groups mainly needed vocabulary reviews. My MEC groups will probably do two classes of review as they have so much new vocabulary to remember, I don’t know if they will use the online stuff I’ve been posting to my site to help with their review and studying too. Hopefully they will as it has a lot of exercises that I created just for their books, etc. I spent an hour yesterday creating an answer key for these reviews and finding any typos I had made so that I could just sit around and read a book during the review class hahahaha!! Should be quite an easy week with a bit of luck

Midterms

This week my students will make reviews in preparation for their midterm exams. The midterm covers more or less the first five-six lessons from their course books and for my class today (MEC4) I’ll just do vocabulary review. The grammar parts of their lessons were only punctuation and as its easy there’s no need to spend time on this that I would rather spend on vocabulary – they learn a hell of a lot of it in half a semester. I used Quizlet to create the test online from all of the new vocabulary they had learned along with the definitions and then extended the amount of questions quizlet would put in the test to something more reasonable like70+ words so it created a decent sized quiz. Then I copied and pasted each section into a Word document and altered the formatting until it looked ok and saved it and emailed it to myself so I would have a copy in Gmail all of the time. I’ll print it off and xerox it at the school and I’m guessing it will take them a good 90 minutes of class to do the review plus correction and doubt solving with me. And by using Quizlet to do the brunt of the work it took only fifteen minutes to get it all made – not counting the short amount of time I took to add the sets and definitions into Quizlet’s site. Man, I love Web 2.0 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.

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.

Quizlet

The last couple of days I’ve been experimenting with a website called Quizlet. It is kind of an online flashcard site but also not. It lets a person create lists and then the website allows people to use these lists to test themselves in different ways. To be honest I don’t think my description of the site really does it justice hahaha!! As a teacher I will probably use this site a lot, helping my students learn and remember vocabulary will probably be the number one use of it. I’ll think of some grammar uses for it too, its a very useful tool and very fast to register and get things set up too. I’ll test it out with my TN and MEC groups as I think they’ll find it useful. I love messing around with this Web 2.0 stuff, its so cool   I look at quite a few different websites each week and once in a while you find one thats really neat and simple to use and just seems made to fill a space for something I needed a website to do