EFL eikaiwa ES extensive listening extensive reading kids language courses Language learning materials online resources oxford owl Oxford Reading Tree Reading self-study websites young learners
by sendaiben
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Oxford Owl website
This is another post I have been meaning to write for a while. Oxford Owl is a free website created by Oxford University Press. It has a range of useful resources -I’ll briefly list a few here.
The website has reading and maths sections. I haven’t done much with the maths so far.
The reading section has a range of free ebooks from the Oxford Reading Tree series. Most of the books can be read online, and feature the art, text, and audio. This is a wonderful resource for self-study at home or in the classroom.
There are also a couple of online games and a range of printable resources for students.
Finally, there is a lot of advice for teachers and parents on how to teach reading and support students with reading practice. Although much of this is aimed at native speakers, a lot of it transfers quite well to EFL.
Is anybody using Oxford Owl? Any good features I have missed? Please leave a comment below:
curriculum extensive reading graded readers language courses materials online resources school management teaching Uncategorized university websites
by sendaiben
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ER@TU website
The ER@TU (Extensive Reading at Tohoku University) Project now has a website!
Features of possible interest to teachers include the Guide to ER (bilingual page aimed at students explaining extensive reading and this particular program) and the Word Counts page, which lists graded reader titles and word counts only (aimed at teachers and students).
The website has both PC and mobile versions, and is not quite finished yet (to put it mildly!).
The site is a WordPress installation on Bluehost, as explained very thoroughly by Michael Hyatt in this excellent blog post. I paid for three years in advance, bringing the monthly cost to around 400 yen. This works very well, as my contract is also up in three years time, so hopefully this will give me some leverage with the university 😉
Please leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions about the site.
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by sendaiben
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Save Time and Paper with Evernote and Scansnap
This has been in my draft post folder since October 2011 and I am finally getting around to finishing it 🙂
I’ve been using Evernote for a few years now, and I am not entirely sure how I coped without it. I would go so far as to say that it is the most useful computer application after email, calendar, and office software.
Evernote is a web-, software-, and app-based online product. It keeps track of all kinds of data, sorting it and making it searchable. It also syncs across devices (computers and smartphones). You can access it via a web browser if you are away from your own computer. I use it to keep track of class notes, financial information, letters, photographs, travel ideas, recipes, and pretty much anything that comes into my life.
If you are not using Evernote yet, please go and check it out. It’s free and it will improve your life.
I’ve also been using Evernote together with a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner, as described by Michael Hyatt on his blog. Now this is incredible. With my setup, I can scan an entire class’ homework in less than a minute. The data goes straight into Evernote where I can access it on my office PC, my laptop I take to class, and even my iPhone.
This means that I can return essays and homework to the students but still have access to it if I need to check something. Finding things in Evernote is pretty easy, so I can quickly go straight to a specific students homework from a specific day.
I have the big expensive fast scanner in my office (clickable picture below):
and the smaller one at home:
The small one is fine for scanning single documents, and the big one is great for scanning large numbers of documents quickly. I use it to process completed work from my university classes, and it goes through 40 papers in less than a minute.
The nice thing about the Scansnap range from Fujitsu is that you can set it up so scanned documents go straight into Evernote, saving huge amounts of time. Of course, you can also set it up so that documents are saved as pdf files on your computer, but sending them straight to Evernote works much better for me.
Anyone else using Evernote and Scansnap out there?
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by sendaiben
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Udemy online learning platform
I’ve been using Udemy, an online content delivery platform, to learn more about Excel, mac OS, and Windows 8. I think the site has a lot of potential for both teachers and learners, so I am going to do a quick review here.
Content
Right now the site has thousands of free and premium courses, ranging from software to business to self-defence to language learning to automobile maintenance. The cost of a course ranges from free to several thousand dollars, but most are priced between 50-100 US$. There are a lot of software courses at the moment, but it is possible to find other topics.
Delivery
The delivery system is basically video based, with the instructor talking learners though their topic in a series of lessons. In the courses I have seen so far, each video lesson tends to be just a few minutes long, allowing you to study whenever you like and repeat lesson easily.
Potential
The interesting thing for teachers is that it seems to be fairly painless to upload courses to the system. I am very interested in creating some courses, both as a way to diversify my income (I am worried about my future employment due to the recent changes in labour law in Japan, but that is a topic for another day) and also as a way of getting content to my students (by setting the price to zero and telling them to access content through Udemy.
Conclusion
So that is Udemy so far for me: useful for learning things and filling in gaps in knowledge (the basic excel course didn’t have anything groundbreaking for me, but I have learned something in most of the lessons so far), great future potential, and a very interesting player in the field of online delivery.
Has anyone else tried Udemy? What did you think?
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by sendaiben
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Outsourcing design -using online design competitions for logos, websites, and more
(I’m really excited. This is my first post in response to a reader question. I feel like a real blogger now :))
A few years ago, after deciding to get a proper website made for us by a company, we realized we needed a logo for the school.
I originally approached a local designer, but that would have involved paying a high fee (over 150,000 yen) with little recourse if we didn’t like the end product.
Looking for alternatives, I found a website that arranges design competitions: people post their design projects, put up a prize, and designers then submit their ideas. The person who posted the project chooses a design they like, and that designer gets paid. We used DesignContest.com but there are now dozens of websites based on this same model. I recommend doing some research before committing to one.
The advantages for us was a much reduced price (we paid $300 for the design above), a much wider variety of ideas, and a chance to work with various designers to narrow down what we wanted.
My original idea and the final product were completely different, and I am convinced we would not have gotten such a good result if we had commissioned someone in a more traditional manner.
The best thing about the process for me was that the contest lasted for a couple of weeks, and during that time we were able to look at designs, comment on them, and have designers then come back with new designs based on our comments.
We had about 40 people participate in our contest, and it was a very smooth and interesting experience. If you don’t get enough entries or don’t like any of the designs you get your money back, so it’s a fairly risk-free process.
You can do the same thing with logos, website design, blog design, t-shirts, etc.
I’m planning to get someone to redo my blog at some point 🙂
Has anyone else used online design contests? How did it go?