The ACLL in Osaka
I’ll be at the Asian Conference on Language Learning in Osaka from tomorrow until Sunday. I’ll be manning the JALT ER-SIG table and doing a workshop on extensive reading at 13:30 on Sunday, details below:
“Extensive reading is becoming part of the mainstream of language teaching, but many teachers and institutions are only vaguely aware of it and are not confident of being able to integrate it into their classes. The good news is that ER is extremely flexible and would be a valuable addition to any language program. This workshop will start with a brief overview of extensive reading: what it is, the potential benefits for learners and teachers, several examples of how to implement it in different contexts, and an overview of resources to get more information. The latter half of the workshop will be open for questions about any aspect of extensive reading.”
Would be great to see you there.
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by sendaiben
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Roomba the robot vacuum
A couple of months ago we made one of the best single decisions we have ever made at Cambridge English. It wasn’t a business decision or an educational decision, but rather, we decided to buy a robot vacuum cleaner for the classroom.
Background
Our school consists of a single space divided into classroom and reception area. There are no stairs or different levels. The classroom area is carpeted. Students remove their shoes when they come into the reception and go into the classroom in their socks or bare feet (we don’t provide slippers).
We have 20-70 students per day coming into the school, so we found it was necessary to vacuum the room at least once a day, sometimes twice a day. This would take 10-15 minutes depending on how thoroughly it was done and how dirty the room was.
Eventually we decided to try the robot vacuum cleaner and whether it worked for us.
Model
We choose the iRobot Roomba 770 after reading online reviews that said that the model up (the 780) wasn’t really any different from the 770.
Looking at online reviews, the iRobot 770 and 780 models seem to be much better than previous generations.
Our experience
The Roomba has been fantastic. It runs for 60-90 minutes a day (we set it to run at night when no-one is there), and although it is not as powerful as a regular vacuum cleaner it runs so much longer that it gets the room much cleaner once it has been running for a week or so. It is small enough that it can clean under the sofa and it manages to navigate our crowded classroom without too much trouble. It returns to its charging cradle automatically.
Pros
We don’t have to vacuum anymore. This was huge. It is so nice to leave the classroom in the evening and come back to a spotless classroom the next day.
It works on a timer so can be set to run when the school is empty.
The classroom is much cleaner. The automatic vacuum cleaner is much more thorough than we were.
Cons
It is very expensive compared to regular vacuum cleaners.
You have to empty the dust box every day and clean it (5 minutes or so) once a week -this isn’t particularly onerous.
The floor has to be clear, so things have to be tidied away and chairs put up on tables before running the machine.
It occasionally gets stuck (but this is rare).
*Not a problem for us, but the Roomba cannot navigate stairs or uneven surfaces.
Thoughts
This has been a godsend for us. It has eliminated vacuuming after lessons or before lessons, neither of which I enjoyed. At the end of the day the last thing I want to do is get the vacuum cleaner out, and I find it a terrible start to the day too. The classroom is really clean, which is especially important when you have young children coming in.
I wouldn’t recommend it for a home, unless you have pets, a lot of carpets, or a lot of people coming and going. The real benefit is the fact that it is doing a thorough cleaning every single day. We definitely don’t need one at home, but for the highly trafficked carpeted classroom it works very well.
Anyone else have a Roomba? How are you finding it?
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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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VIDEO: Extensive Reading EFL Class Orientation
I was hoping to post this video yesterday, but I ran into technical problems (three of the students wandered into the shot, and I wasn’t comfortable posting something with students’ faces visible without getting permission from them and the university). Much easier to just try again with another class this morning 🙂
So, this is the first session of one of my extensive reading classes at Tohoku University. This is the orientation class, so we briefly run through what ER is and how our ER program works. After the video ends, the students start reading low-level graded readers. We managed to get about fifteen minutes of silent reading in class.
The ER@TU program is described in our forthcoming bilingual handbook. I will have a few copies of this to give away at the ACLL later this month, the Pan-SIG conference in May, the ER World Congress in September, and JALT National in October -please let me know if you want one or just come and find me at the conference.
Please post any questions below or on the Facebook page.
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