Blogs & Wikis for Class?

Last week I was handed an intensive 3-week writing course that will begin in December. Forty students meeting three times a week adds up to a lot of writing to review. In search of an online alternative, I spent the afternoon searching for a way that students can post their homework to a blog or wiki, revise it as the course proceeds, and view and comment on their classmates' work.

wikispaces.com may be a solution but I'm a bit concerned that it involves too much tech and tech English for my students. I don't want to have to spend a week training them how to navigate a site just to be able to turn in their homework -- especially since we don't have computers in the classroom. Of course, emailing it is one solution and we've used it successfully in the past, but I like the idea of them being able to see their progress, work together with their classmates and show off their work to others by sending them a link.

Any suggestions? Anyone know of any sites out there that might work? And students -- do you think this would work or is it too complicated? Would you like to do assignments online?

Typing IPA symbols in Word 2007

fə'netɪks

Since switching from Word 2003 to 2007, I've been trying to find a simpler way to type IPA symbols than Alt-N-U-M and then searching through all the symbols. Uniqoder worked fine in 2003, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work in 2007. There's an online editor where you can type and then copy & paste, but I was looking for something to use offline.

After a bit of searching, I found several options in this document on the website of Professor John Wells at University College London. I've opted for the AutoCorrect method. It took a while to set up, but I think it will be the easiest to use. I set up some easy-to-remember shortcuts for common IPA symbols (\sw\ for ə, \ch\ for ʧ and \sh\ for ʃ -- not exact, I know, but easy for me to remember). For the more esoteric symbols, like ʊə, I used example words (\tour\). It may take a while to get them down, but at least I'll always have an example word ready when I need one in class.

Since the CELTA course I've become more comfortable using IPA and this should help me get them into my printed lesson plans.

I Love Fan Mail

Here's something, lightly edited, from my inbox today:

Hi Mr. David,
im one of ur student keen on every single post on Facebook as well blogspot. as u know, [it's helpful that you] spend time on blog or give useful english techniques to students, u r the respected teacher i have known

 One of my past professors, Dr. Wendell Price, said he used to keep a file of encouraging letters he received and read them after a bad day. Maybe I should start collecting them.

Christmas can be weird here too.

The newspaper article quoted below is about Ho Chi Minh City, but it's similar in Hanoi - if you take out the religious part because about the only thing you see up here are lights, trees and Santas. It's kind of depressing.

The festivities climax on Christmas Eve, when it seems that half the city's 9 million residents take to the streets for something akin to a holiday rave. Churches overflow for midnight Mass while Vietnamese outside drink beer and spray each other with fake snow. It can take two hours to travel a few miles in District One as everything comes to a virtual standstill.

"Vietnamese want to integrate the country with the international society," said Che Huyen Bao Vy, wearing reindeer antlers and angel wings at a holiday display outside another shopping center in District One. The 21-year-old college student, along with two other reindeer angels, stood next to a blue Santa.

"I don't practice the religion, but I enjoy the Western culture a lot," she said. "Christmas Day, the Christmas spirit, is happy. It's a Christmas-spirit thing."

from "Vietnam Catches the Christmas Spirit."

John Howard

I'd be surprised if he's still alive - he'd be in his 90's. Though it's not unusual for someone to live that long, the "old Sea Daddy," as he sometimes called himself, was a former Marine who was among the first to enter radioactive Hiroshima at the end of WW II. He was also my high school science teacher.

Specifically, Mr. Howard taught me chemistry when I was in 11th grade and physics in 12th. Somehow knew how to get the most out of his students and, after nearly failing me in chemistry with a D in the first quarter, my marks gradually rose to a C, a B, and then a 92 on the final exam and an A for the last quarter.

Then came physics and another rough start. Once we got beyond vectors, it began to make sense. One of the most helpful things Mr. Howard did was to teach us one basic formula and then show us the steps to get from there to the other formulas we would need. With a few simple steps, we could get from an easy-to-remember formula to a more complicated one. It was so much easier, and made much more sense, than simply memorizing a one formula after another.

I thought about Mr. Howard when I was lesson planning for my reading class this morning. The units we teach are incredibly difficult for second-language learners - next week is a 2007 article from The Economist about the West's unfavorable response to the Hamas-Fatah coalition government in Palestine. My students frequently come across words and expressions that they may never see again, like "poster child" and "self-defeating machismo." Still more important from their point of view, is that they will likely be handed a final exam with words and concepts they never saw in class.

So, instead of just teaching them concepts and vocabulary from each unit, I've been trying to teach them how to look at a brand-new article and work, step-by-step, toward an accurate understanding of the most important parts. My goal has been to help them apply simple steps to reach a complicated goal.

The translation of this blog's header is "like teacher, like student." The old Sea Daddy apparently rubbed off on me. I don't know if he knew the concept of "teach others so they can teach others also" but I'm reminded again of how important it is in so many ways.