Professor CCAA

Although I’ve been working for CCAA in Brazil since I arrived here, I have never really found a good site for teachers from this franchise. The main CCAA website is really only for franchisers and not teachers or students.  Recently though I have been really interested in a site created by a teacher called Zailda who created an excellent Google Group for CCAA teachers. It’s ran by CCAA teachers for CCAA teachers and provides a lot of support, information, files and material that other teachers have created specifically for lessons, etc. It’s free to join and helps out a lot. I mainly work with advanced or MEC students but also teach EPG and I like having a look to see what extra materials are on in the group. I like posting my own stuff there too, mainly extra activities or conversation materials. Our Spanish teachers were asking me about it and I gave them the links to go look see as I saw quite a few people posting there about Spanish materials. The site provides links to other sites of interest and hosts discussions to help teachers try to solve and problems or queries they have. I really like this site a lot, I just need to try to find a little more time to post things there

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

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