Passing time

I’m sat here at Wizard with nothing to do, waiting for my next group of students to arrive. After spending more than 8 years with 90 min classes, these hour classes take a little getting used to at first. Of course, it helps that the students do all the preparation work at home   Having shorter exercises helps too, I get to spend more time with my wife hahaha!! The reason for the shorter exercises is mainly because the students are constantly evaluated each class, mainly leaving the written part to be done as homework. I’m still thinking how to set up a blog/wiki to use with my students. I usually use Wikispaces, but this time I was thinking of trying out something like Pbworks. The reason for the change is just to try out a different site, I’ll still keep the other wikis updated too as Roberta uses them all of the time. I’m trying to come up with a list of vocabulary so I can create some stuff to use with my students at home, Wizard don’t let people to take home their teaching materials. I’ll see if someone here has already created a book by book list of vocabulary and grammar to save me the time of having to make some myself. It should make things a lot easier for me with regards to making exercises with Hot Potatoes, etc. I might still make some kind of interactive cdrom thing, I was all setup to create for my now defunct groups at the other school so to switch over to the Wizard vocab and material is just  a matter of  changing a few logos, etc. I’ll see how much time free I have to do this.

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!!

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.

Net uptime

Our new modem has been in for over a week and besides a slight problem with the cable connecting the antenna to the modem everything is rocking here. I sent a photo of our new set up to my brother because he was curious to see this notebook modem snuggled away there in the rear of the case and was well impressed with it. It’s probably the best radio connection we’ve had since we signed for it   I’ll have to get the Skype reinstalled and the web cam too, It’s been a while since I last used it to chat with my family back over the pond Also I’ll be able to try out uploading the podcasts to Podomatic and see how it all works with WordPress. I downloaded a few things to check out download speed too and everything works just fine so I backed up the wikis we host over at Wikispaces and had a look at finding a good program to make flash exercises for my English students at Cambridge. I already have plenty for the ones over at the other school, more than 200 or so at my last count   I didn’t find anything good though, not that was free anyways hahaha!! I’ll have another look later on after my Business English class this evening.

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.