New semester

The new semester will start for me next week sothis week was actually pretty busy. Yesterday I had training with some people from Cambridge for the newest of their coursebooks and the day before that was a teachers meeting at CCAA. Since the start of last semester when I started to work for more than one school I haven’t really been having much of a good time working for CCAA, the terrible training a few weeks ago was probably the lowest point of the semester for me. The teachers meeting this week wasn’t really any improvement from this, I didn’t really expect it to be though. My allotment of groups is now at my lowest ever since I started working for the CCAA group 8 years ago, there’s been a lot of asskissing by newer teachers to get more groups and seeing as they suck up to the person who makes the schedule a lot of people have noticed these few getting more and more of the available groups. It’s probable that either me or Roberta will leave this semester to spend more time on other projects. I was only at the school less than an hour and got to hear other teacher’s complaining about the situation there too, but they won’t do anything about it as most of them are only really there to make pin money. As the only native speaker I expexct to get a lot of shit thrown at me and this last semester there was definately a lot of shit hahahaha!! With the Cambridge school all set to start now and the franchiser all set to do some major promo work in the city to give us a boost I’m not really all that worried about what happens during this semester. It’s a little sad though that they let things get so bad As they say, all good things must come to an end…

As I said above, Roberta and I attended a training course that lasted the whole morning with some reps from Cambridge Uni press. They were talking about the new Touchstone coursebook and giving some ideas about how to use the book and stuff. Also they were talking about their website and things that had been added to the Touchstone pages in the Brasilian version of the site. It was a lot of fun and very relaxed, I got to meet some of the other people from the other Cambridge schools too. It turns out that we had missed a Cambridge Day in Brasilia which was shame as I like to attend these events and seminars. The presenters took a list of all emails so we could be added to their database and get mailed when events are going to happen in our areas   I took some time to chat with our franchiser at the end of the meeting about the start of this coming semester and picked up some stuff for the school including Hippo. Hippo is a teachers aid that gets used to work with small children in the Hippo and friends books that we will use this semester from the supplier. He’s actually very cute, I think Roberta would keep him if the had half the chance hehehe!! I’ve never seen a puppet used in a classroom before so this should be interesting, I wonder how the kids will take to him

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!!

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.

New classes…

I will also teach at a new school in our city this semester called Cambridge. It’s a different methodology than the one I’m used to, the CCAA stuff is mainly audio visual and the Cambridge stuff is Books, white board, and whatever I create to make the lessons. The book I am teaching this semester there is called Touchstone, I’ve never heard of it before but it’s full of all kinds of stuff. The teachers book is for a whole semester and has a shitload of cds that come with it. I roamed around their website and found that had some free online exercises that weren’t mentioned in either the student or teacher books. I spent some time playing around with them to see how it all works, its quite nice The first class the books hadn’t arrived even though they said they wouldn’t so it was a bit crap as I hadn’t planned on this happening and had to wait 30mins for photocopies Yesterday’s class was well prepared, Roberta gave me a hand to knock some stuff up and I had some extra stuff just in case but all was well as the books had arrived. Most of my students are youngsters and teens in this group. It’ll be a fun semester I’ll post a group photo as soon as I can