1st day back

Today is the first day of the the new semester, well for the students, that is. I have been back since last week. I have two classes today, TN9 & EPG but only the TN group will go as the others are still traveling as part of their job. They work for Syngenta and are here one day and then I don’t see them for a while. Usually the first class half the class comes so today we might play a game instead of having class and start lessons only on Wednesday night. I have a Taboo game to play with them, advanced groups like this kind of stuff It’ll be my first time of giving these guys class, they were my wife’s group last semester though so I know them all quite well. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, the group is 99% girls. I gave oral tests to some of them and they speak well so we should get along fine.

I wanted to spend the weekend preparing some stuff online for my groups but the radio internet in our city wasn’t working and they only solved the problem this morning. A bit annoying but nothing could be done about it until today. Roberta has a lot of stuff already prepared from last semester so I’ll have a look see whats in her files before I start making any more. She has a knack for worksheets. She loves making them, I like to make them too but she just has the flair for them   I’d really like to try using Yacapaca with my TN6 group, I must try to find the time to get around to setting up some stuff on it. This semester I have more group and less free time at home, plus I’ll try to give some private classes too. I already have material for these classes, both methodology and conversation classes. I’ll try getting students for these at the local uni because a lot of students are taking English letras courses and can’t speak a word of English. It sounds wierd but it is true, they devide the course into people who speak and don’t speak English. They all get the same degree whether they speak or not too, it really is a strange thing :-S  A lot of my old students are studying there so I like going there to catch up with them. Hopefully, I’ll get a group or two from there..

Business English

I have some new students who work for Syngenta and they are in the beginning of learning Business English with me. The course we teach them is EPG (English for Professionals in General) and as a course its really nice. Full of video and multimedia stuff. I like this course a lot and the students that have studied this all seem to like it a lot too. One real problem with it is a lack of any dedicated online resources, the CCAA homepage is really only there to promote the schools to franchisers and has really very little to offer the students with regards to their courses. While i have a lot of sites online with stuff I’ve created myself for the TN and MEC courses, I have more or less nothing for EPG. I have been looking online to see what I can use with them while I work on getting something set up and running. I love the BBC Wordservice site because it has a Learning Business English section that has a lot of stuff on it but not really anything for total beginners. I was playing with Yacapaca too before the other school crashed out and I’m hoping to try to get some stuff into this for them too. They seem very enthusiastic and I’m sure that anything I create there with this they will defiinately try out. My main problem is really time at the moment, I need 30 hours in a 24 hour day hehehe!! I will try to get some free time online tomorrow in the afternoon and see what I can come up with. I was thinking abouyt maybe getting them to use something simple like Twitter with its very short message system as soon as we have a few lessons under their belts, just so they could try simple messages to each other. I’ll talk with them about this and see how they feel about experimenting with it later on in the semester. I have some sheets that I got from Eslprintables too, man that site is excellent for worksheets and stuff. Roberta loves posting stuff she has ran up on the pc there. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have some ideas for stuff for them. Also my web host has a lot of space left where I can upload some stuff for them too. Maybe it’s time to dust off Hot Potatoes again

Busy week

This week has been quite busy, Roberta and I are now co-owners of the Cambridge school and have been doing some promo work in all public schools in the city this week, as well as a couple of the private ones. I was supposed to also be doing this last week but unfortunately I had to spend the week in the hospital so this week was pretty much a rush as most schools here are going on vacation now for a month between semesters. We had some help from Danilo, who specializes in promoting the Cambridge schools. He gave some much needed ideas to us for things we could do and also ferried me around the schools so we could distribute leaflets and speak with the students. I like to do this one to one promo stuff as people love meeting foreign teachers. Some of the schools remember me quite well as I’m always around and about in our city At the beginning of the next semester we’ll have to do this all over again, I’m hoping we’ll get more students for this new semester. Fingers crossed, eh? The franchiser is also printing up some uniforms and tee-shirts for the school. We will probably give away between 50-100 of these, firstly because students love wearing free uniforms and secondly its good promotion to see all those students walking around the streets with our telephone number hehehehe!! I’m waiting for the tee-shirts to arrive now so we can have a look at them and see how they look. There is a place in our city that also makes uniforms and we will use them to create some tee-shirts for the teachers to wear. We have a copy of the graphics but unfortunately they are CDR files and we have no program that can open them. I’ll get a copy of Coreldraw and resave them as jpegs or something more usable.

Also this week I met with a guy from a company here that prints logos on pens and stuff. They have a lot of products, we are going to scan through them and see how much everything costs. Also I’d like to be able to buy some things, such as pen drives, and have the schools names printed on them too. I want to use them for promotional stuff too. I’ll also speak with Luis, the franchiser as he also knows many people that make these kinds of things.

I’ve been playing around a little more with Yacapaca too. I more or less understand it all now, I love the graphics and stuff this site uses   I’ll try to get some stuff in it for the next semester for my students to use. I think they’ll like it a lot

Yacapaca

I have been looking at a new website called Yacapaca the last couple of days or so. I Had a few little problems figuring out how to get going with the site but once I understood how it worked I really liked the idea and I’ll try to get some exercises into it probably for my Touchstone students. I probably won’t do any for my CCAA groups as I have loads of online stuff already up and running for them and I think my kids would benefit from having more grammar stuff online. It reminds me quite a bit of hot Potatoes, the graphics are very nice and cute too   If your internet is a little slow it can take a while for the exercises to load and this is where I like HP more as the pages seem to load quite quickly from this suite of programs. I’ll try to get some stuff up and running on it in a few days, just really so I can see how it all goes together and then if my students want to try it out, I’ll get them to test it and see what they think

Also this week I will start recording some podcasts for one of our private students using Audacity. He gave me a few texts to read and record for him so he can then read the texts and follow along at home. I am curious to see how he likes this and will see what he tells Roberta after he’s tried it out. Audacity is an excellent free program and well worth getting if you’re a language teacher for sound or voice recordings and editing.