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.

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

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

Google sites

There used to be a website online called Jotspot and well over a year ago Google bought the site and it fell off the face of the internet. I got an email from Google this afternoon inviting me to join the new Jotspot, it’s now called Google Sites. I tried as I was curious to see how it had turned out but found that it wasn’t possible to join it and apparently now it is a pay site instead of the free site from before. you have to pay for a domain name now. The old Jotspot was a wiki site but now I’m not sure what they will do with it. I’ll stick with Wikispaces as Its been great since I signed up for it. I never had a problem with it and the help section is excellent. I couldn’t even find a help section that had anything useful for Google Sites I also have an account at Pbwiki too, I haven’t really done anything with it though as Wikispaces sort of took over as my wiki host when I found just how good it was. I like Google stuff a lot and use many of their sites, etc but this new thing I won’t use at all as it’s too much like hard work. The wiki I’m experimenting with on my server is easier to get into than Googles Sites website hahaha!!

I noticed that the cloud function in my WordPress site is working, very nice. I Turned it on but hadn’t really looked at the site itself until this afternoon and saw it working. Very cool hahaha!! I saw another WordPress site that had podcasts embedded in it, WordPress supports this but you only host the mp3s here if you upgrade the space so I was looking this morning for another place to host the mp3s and tried Odeo but its a lot of work to get the stuff recorded as the site seems to have some links to the studio part of the site missing :-S I’ll have another look around and see if I can find something better to use instead.