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.

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!!

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!!

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.

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

Conversation class

I work at two English schools and one of my students has class only on his own with either myself or Roberta. He learned English more or less by himself and mainly our classes consist of conversation classes, one with me and one with my wife. Today he asked if he could give me some texts and if I could record them onto a cd so that he could listen to my voice as he reads along with the text. I like this idea a lot, I’d already toyed with the idea and after the Easter hols I’ll get him to print the texts for me. I already have the program to record the mp3s so I can convert them to an audio cd with Nero. I’m going to use Audacity for this, it’s free and very easy to use. I had a few problems finding how to record in Odeo but a friend of ours uses it a lot and gave me a few pointers. I’ll try both online and with the audio cd too, just because I’d like to try the Web 2.0 side of it as well I have a book of texts and short stories that I’ll record and upload and then use a WordPress site to host them for my students to use. I think it’ll be a lot of fun experimenting with this Although I’m British I speak both British and American English with an accent that seems to float somewhere between the two of them, my students tell me that its easier to understand me sometimes than the Models hahaha!! I’m not sure what my voice sounds like recorded, this should be good for a laugh

Classroom 2.0

I have been a member of Classroom 2.0 for a while now. It’s a website dedicated to teachers who are looking for other teachers using Web 2.0 stuff to pass on information and share new ideas. I like this site a lot. I always discover something interesting in it that gives me a lot of ideas for things to do with my students. I have been thinking about using WordPress with a few ideas I got from the Classroom20 forum to create a kinds of podcast site for one of my newest English students. My main class with him usually consists of the two of us reading a book together, first I read and then he reads so that he can listen to my pronunciation so he can correct this. The second class he has in the week is with my wife, Roberta. This class is mainly because my Brazilian Portuguese sucks and they cover all kinds of things that we don’t include in the class with me. I am toying with the idea of creating some podcasts of short stories for him to listen to, either online or to download, as well as some questions about the podcast story to see how much he understood. I have downloaded a program to use to create the mp3s, I decided on Audacity. It’s not a big download and is easy for me to use without any complicated setups, etc. I think it will be a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll expand this to use with my other students later I’m going to look again for a site to host the mp3 archives. I tried a couple but wasn’t too impressed with them hahaha!! I’ll have a look during the week to see what I can find.

Web 2.0

I’ve been trying out a lot of Web 2.0 sites for a while now. I really like this idea of using the internet as a tool to teach my English students here in Brasil. My biggest problem here is that most schools in Brasil only really teach stuff that is geared to towards the vestibular (uni entrance exam) and most of the stuff they actually teach will never get used for anything or by anyone if they manage to get into either a public or private uni here. Also a lot of teachers here have this fear or laziness of anything new. Sadly a lot of them are just in it for the salary, nothing else. I have a lot of websites online that I created for my students, seven or eight wikis as well as a site that hosts exercises and stuff for my students to use. Some of my favorite Web 2.0 sites that I use a lot are:

1. Wikispaces - I really like this site a lot. 90% or more of my sites online are created using this website. Its fast and easy to use, you need just some basic word processing skills and the registration and setup is easy. They have a good help section and forum too. An email sent out gives a lot of information about new features in the site. I use the free version of it and have no complaints, a few more themes would be nice though but other than that Wikispaces is great.

2. Classroom20 – I like this site a lot, its run by teacher for teachers. It has a lot of postings about Web 2.0 stuff on it. I heard about sites there I’d never heard of before. If you’re a teacher its well worth joining. It has it’s own wikis related to different parts of the site as well as members posting some of their wiki addresses.

3. Twitter - This site is pretty new to me but it is very addictive. You can use it as a messaging service, sort of sms for the web. You post messages about what you are doing at that particular moment and get to read what everyone else is doing at the same time. There are some nice firefox addons for this site so you can read and post without having to go to the site and log in. I use Twitbin a lot.

4. Orkut - A popular social-networking site here in Brasil owned by Google. Its full of links to viruses and stuff but almost all of my students use it. I mainly use this just to send messages to remind them of things or wish them Happy Birthday. I have Myspace and Facebook too but I don’t use them very often, I don’t have the time hahaha!!

There are others I use and I’ll list them here when I get a little more free time

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