Been busy

I’ve been quite busy the last few days and have hardly had the time to get online to post anything. Seeing as now Robert, Zelia and I are in charge of the school we have been busy organizing stuff and planning out the new school promotions for the new semester. I had the flu the last few days so I haven’t really been doing a lot of the running around. I’ve been looking over some proposals we had from cell phone companies that offered to give us cell phones to use in the school to save on using the land line to make expensive calls to cell phones. A company called Vivo gave us a quite good offer and we will call Claro to see if they can better it. At the beginning of the semester we will sign up with one of these as its handy to be able to make cheap calls between the teachers and the school. Although at the start will be just three teachers unless we get totally swamped the first week. This would be nice if it happened but somehow I don’t think so hehehe!! Then again, you never know..  Roberta has been in touch with a few people here about giving English classes for their employees at a discount price, we had a good response to this, which was nice as the girls had spent time on the promotion prices to make sure they were nice 🙂  Of course, we’ll only really know how good when the next semester starts and we see how many students register for class. There’s still quite a few things to do on the list but we are getting through them slowly 🙂

Roberta has been giving class on Fridays for the students at Cambridge seeing as her afternoon is free. My students really like this class a lot, they are always asking me if she will give the Friday class over and over again. This week she was working with phonetics, we got some really nice worksheets for this from Eslprintables. The students also spent time solving their doubts with her too, this class is only 90 mins or so but its becoming quite popular 🙂

I will try to find some time this weekend to create a phonetics alphabet display for the classroom wall. Roberta is going to work with this with the students and although they get a lot of worksheets and printouts as well as the work in their coursebooks, I think it will be nice to have some kind of display for them to look at too. Hopefully I’ll get most of it done this weekend and then print and cut it out to mount on the wall 🙂

I got some feedback from my student who had asked me to record some texts for him this week. He asked me to try to record them slower for him as he had a few problems with the speed of the others ones. I thought i “had” spoken slowly when I recorded these texts hahahaha!! He’s going to give me some more texts to record and I’ll try to make them a lot slower still using the Audacity program because it rocks 😀

Recordings

This past couple of days I’ve been playing with audacity and recording some mp3s that a student had asked me to record of texts. He wanted this so that he could listen along as he read the texts and practice listening and reading together. It was a fun experience, but hearing my own voice recorded was a little weird. Roberta told me that it sounded exactly the same but for myself it was a lot different. Using the program is easy and once setup with the headset it’s really only a matter of setting the recording levels and playing the record and stop buttons. The sound quality was good and I burned off the files onto an audio cd to give to the student so he can listen and give me some feedback on it. Hopefully he wont find any serious problems with the sound quality itself. Really I was more concerned with the speed of my voice and how easily he could understand me. I’ll find out what he thought about it when he has grammar class with Roberta next week.

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.

Hospital

This morning I had to spend the whole morning at the hospital getting some blood tests and an ultrasound on my leg to see how the treatment for my thrombosis was going. It was a long morning, I spent most of it either being prodded for blood or in the ultrasound and I have to have yet more tests over the next couple of weeks. Apparently there has been slow improvement which now means I will take  the drugs for another fifteen months to see how that helps. They told me that its quite possible that I will have to take these drugs for the rest of my life. Tomorrow I’ll start a new regime of drugs, I’ll soon be a walking pill box hehehe!! Monday morning is my next appointment and it’s also in another city, luckily its the same city Roberta’s grandmother lives in so we’ll probably stay over and visit after my exams. Hopefully soon it’ll start improving more rapidly.

We have a private student who has asked me to read from a book and record some of it for him to follow along as he reads the book. I finally managed to get around to playing around with Audacity last night to see how it works. It works very well, it has a strange thing though, you cannot record to the same file twice from what I can tell. I looked in the Audacity forum for help and saw another person asking about this and he got the same reply. Its all about cutting and pasting stuff together. This cutting and pasting it does very well. We couldn’t tell where the join was between the two sounds I recorded. It converts to many file types, I’ll try out the setting it had for standard audio cd quality. From what I heard in the tests last night this should be more than file for whats required by our student. I’ll try to get a chapter done and get it over to him to see how he likes it and if its loud enough for him. Should be some fun, now if I can only find time to do the podcasts I want to do for my students 😉

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.