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!!

Worksheets

Today I spent the evening making a few worksheets for my students. I like doing this although I don’t have Roberta’s artistic flair for this kind of thing lol. I have beginners and like to give a lot of extra vocabulary to them on top of the new vocabulary from their books. Seeing as I found Eslprintables I like to upload a copy there so other teachers can also use it too as well my sharing theirs. At the moment the site is having uploading problems but I’ll upload the files tomorrow if I can’t today. I want to have a look and see what extra vocabulary sheets they have their about weather as a lot of my private students are agronomists and work outside a lot. For these students I like to give a lot of extra vocabulary in the form of worksheets, I stumbles on a site called WiZIQ that looks quite interesting, I’m going to see if it can be used to also give some extra support for me students.  I like experimenting a lot with stuff online, for me this is a good way to get to teenagers as they live online and i like to have stuff in place so they can use it if they want to. I try to make sure they don’t feel pressured to use the online stuff, I think they won’t really feel like using it if I do this and make sure I tell them if I update or change anything – such as adding the Quizlet activities – so they can go look in their own time. This week is midterms so hopefully they’ll use the sites to help revise for the exams both this week and next.

Remember a while back i posted about making some podcasts and hosting them online for my students to use? I’m feeling a little disappointed that I haven’t gotten around to starting on this yet. The website is ready and I’m all signed up at a podcast host site but just haven’t had the time to get anything done with it yet   My time seems to run away before I get around to doing anything with it, I have everything ready and just need to get started. It’s coming just as soon as I can find some free time to get some stuff done

Haiku

I’ve been a bit lax in posting recently, I was busy setting up some stuff for mine and Roberta’s groups in Quizlet ready for the coming mid-term exams. This week i decided to try out Haiku with my TN9 group. I have done this activity with a previous MEC1 group and it went really well. I got this activity from a team work book I picked up in SBS and it only requires a few photocopies and cut outs to prepare. It went quite well although on the day of the class one set of photocopies went missing and I couldn’t find them I like this Haiku activity as the students get to think not only of words but also syllables in order to create their poem to form a kind of photograph for the other students to try to guess. We had some fun with this and an interesting discussion arose about whether the amount of syllables changed if you spoke faster or slower hahahaha!! I have no idea where this idea came up from. If I get the time, I’ll do this activity with my MEC4 group too. I think they’ll also enjoy this activity a lot too. I like trying out different stuff in the class if i can find the time, its nice to have a break from the regular class methodology.

I found an interesting website called eslprintables the other day and joined up for it. The idea of the site is simple and also great. You send in worksheets you’ve created to share with the members of the site and then you get to share the worksheets already hosted on the site. You score points for each time someone downloads your sheet and these points determine how many downloads you can make. A nice idea and a nice site too