Reading about the new Apple educational push, I was pretty impressed. It seems like they ‘get’ the core issues:

1. textbooks need to be interactive and appealing, and take advantage of pictures, video, and audio
2. textbooks need to be affordable
3. teachers want to make these next-generation textbooks

Their iBook author app looks extremely interesting. Interesting enough to make me look up the price of new Apple laptops…

Perhaps that was the secret agenda ^-^

Happy New Year! I for one am sincerely hoping that 2012 will bring good things.

Last year was one of the toughest I have faced, even more than some very hard teenage years. While the emotional suffering wasn’t up there, I can definitely say that physically and mentally 2011 was the hardest year of my life. I am very happy to see the back of it. I have always subscribed to the ‘whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ philosophy, but after the latter nine months of last year I think there is an alternative interpretation, ie ‘whatever doesn’t kill me makes me very tired and unwilling to do anything’. You may have noticed the distinct lack of blog posts towards the end of the year.

Partly in an effort to put all that behind me, I have a few New Year goals (I hesitate to call them resolutions as that seems to jinx things). One of them is to learn Thai this year, studying by myself using online resources. I’ll report back on my progress throughout the year and hopefully it will give me a new perspective on language learning (I have been lucky enough to learn most of my languages in context, by living there, so this is new). I foresee issues with motivation and consistency, but this is something I have always wanted to do so we’ll see how far I can get in a year.

I’ll be using material from Learn Thai Podcast, in case anyone is interested. They seem pretty good so far (full review later).

Tip of the hat to Parin.

I was having an imaginary conversation with my boss the other day (something that happens a bit too frequently, perhaps), and had just finished telling him what a ridiculous concept it was to judge the performance, impact, or value of a teacher by the amount of time they spent at work when I had a huge revelation.

That is precisely how I evaluate some of my students!

Particularly for extensive reading, vocabulary study (using online tools such as the Word Engine), and listening, I tend to look at how much time students spent doing an activity, rather than how effectively they did so. The student that spends twenty minutes intensely focused on the task will fare worse than the one who sits there daydreaming for an hour, even though they probably got much more out of it.

In my defense, the main reason for this is that it is fairly difficult to evaluate how effectively someone has, for instance, read something, but it is also down to laziness on my part. Just as it would be ridiculous for my boss to judge my performance solely by how long I spent sitting in my office, I need to start thinking about how to assess my students in a fairer and more accurate way.

Part of it, I suspect, is going to depend on me giving up on being a teacher (look out for a post on this next week!).

How about you? Do you evaluate students based on their presence rather than their engagement?

AGO is a card game, similar to UNO or Switchit, that practices simple question and answer patterns. It is ideal for upper elementary or junior high school and above. Students play to get rid of all their cards: the first person to do so is the winner. The game mechanics are easy, and almost all students already know them from playing UNO.

There are eventually going to be three levels: aqua, green, and orange (hence AGO, but I suspect that the pun with eigo was also a factor in naming this product). The first level, aqua, contains very easy questions like ‘do you like…?’ and ‘what season is it now?’. There is some scope for personalization.

The green level just came out at the end of last month, and includes more complex questions, more scope for students to make their own questions, and more ‘game cards’ (‘pick up’, ‘jump’, and so on).

The orange level is due to be released next year.

The production values are pretty good and the cards look and feel great. Well worth the 900 yen, especially if you teach junior high school and up.

Well, I take it all back.

After a couple of weeks of enduring the increasingly frequent delays on my iPhone 3GS with iOS 5, I finally decided to update to the newest model.

Softbank has two fairly nice programs for customers who are updating, so I was happy to stay with them (my wife signed up for an iPhone with AU, and I have not been impressed with their staff training and readiness for the product), namely

1. they will forgive all payments due on a previous iPhone, allowing you to upgrade and just pay for the new phone (you can sell your old one online -a friend got over 12,000 yen for her old 3GS) or
2. if you have already paid off your previous iPhone, they will give you 6,000 yen cashback

The phone arrived in just over a week, and I got it on Thursday evening.

Wow.

The camera, the speed, the… display.

If you are on the fence about the 4GS, do yourself a favour and get one. It’s that good.

For years, I have been looking for a simple, cheap (free?) online tool to allow our younger students to work on their vocabulary outside of class.

Jim George, a friend and fellow school owner, has been going on about Quizlet for a while now, but I didn’t really pay attention until he sent me a detailed email this morning explaining the functionality.

It looks great.

Basically it’s a site that allows people to create and study simple flashcard quizzes online. Free accounts (students) can access content and premium accounts ($15 a year) can create quizzes with words and pictures.

The great thing about it is that as a school we can create study groups and upload content for the students to practice every week. Students can make accounts and join the groups and practice the content for their class. We can also monitor their progress by ‘friending’ them.

It sounds like it has everything we need. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks, then I’ll report back with my impressions.

Anyone else use Quizlet?

The other day I was idly watching one of our teachers working with a couple of our students: two sisters, three and one and a half, who have a play style class with a teacher while their mum has a private lesson with another teacher.

I have to admit, I have always been fairly sceptical about teaching very young children in an EFL context. I’m sure it can’t do any harm, but I hadn’t really seen much benefit either. Basically if the parents were happy to pay us to play with their children for 40 minutes a week, and the children enjoyed it, no problem. It wasn’t something we advertised, but we did consider special requests.

However, about halfway through the class I saw something that completely challenged my assumptions.

The two students rarely speak English, beyond ‘hello’ and ‘see you’ at the beginning and end of the class. Their teacher only uses English with them, and they talk to him in Japanese. The ‘class’ consists of playing together with a variety of toys and objects we have in the classroom. The children decide what to play with, and how they want to play, but we manage that by adding or removing toys.

The teacher was playing with a doll, making it sit down or walk around. At one point, the older sister asked in Japanese “Why is the doll sitting down?”, to which the teacher replied in English “Her legs are tired.” The students then said in Japanese, without missing a beat and completely naturally “Oh, her legs are tired. I see.”

I almost fell off my chair.

The student didn’t have enough to be able to guess that meaning from the context. The teacher did not use any gestures or indicate the doll’s legs. She clearly understood what he said.

I think I’m going to have to rethink the very young learners thing…

What do you think? How soon before we have this kind of functionality in everyday homes and businesses?