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.

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!!

Games..

This afternoon I spent the first half over at the other school I work in  – Cambridge – giving class to my beginners. A good friend of mine, Tim, had given me a few ideas for games to play with the group and I wanted to put one of them into action to see how they would respond. The group generally tries more or less whatever I throw at them, usually with a lot of enthusiasm   The twenty minutes of running around collecting vocabulary and sentence stems from different rooms was fast and energetic, even though i had told them several time that it wasn’t a race hahahaha!! I have a few more games lined up for them that I’ll spread out through the semester, all of them designed with the basic idea of the kids burning off some energy at the start of the lesson   I was going to take some photos of them during the activity but unfortunately I left it on the sofa at home   Never mind, I’ll try to remember for the next time..

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