Positive feedback from students is always welcome.

There are times as an ESL/ Literacy teacher when you begin to wonder if your students are making any progress but this week has been rewarding. It is the last week of semester 1 2008 and I have been assessing my students intensely for a couple of weeks and I am satisfied with their results.

More satisfying is the fact that I was sincerely thanked by a lady who has been living here in Australia from Vietnam for 20 years who said she thought she had made more progress in 4 months in my class than the last 20 years. I'm not telling you this to blow my own horn but to demonstrate why I love teaching is because it is extremely rewarding to help people to achieve their goals.

James Warren

Exercise 2.2.5 the end of LIN8016-reflections into the future

Make a plan for using and managing your Web site in your classroom or online community. Share your plan with the class.

During this course I have become confident enough to start publishing on the web which is a good feeling to have finally started after being a user of other people’s material for so long. Now I can use an html editor and I have published my website and the URL of the homepage is http://1english1.googlepages.com/home I also have started a blog which you can find at http://1english1.blogspot.com/

My plan for managing these two sites involves first learning a little more HTML at so of the sites I researched in the beginning of this course. After that I will add more content and pages because I want to tailor the site to my students’ needs. This will involve adding more links to the resources page and making more lesson plans for teachers to use. I would also like to add a commercial element to the site in the future with resources like e-books and e-workbooks for students and teachers to purchase and perhaps the ability to conduct synchronous web based teaching using CMC technologies like SKYPE. However I may eventually need to find another website host apart from GOOGLE and pay for my hosting.

I will keep publishing my thoughts in my blog and also use it for my students needs encouraging them to contribute and also give feed back on the site and blog.

Finally for the rest of this year I am going to finish a vocational course I am studying at TAFE called “Facilitate e-learning”, which will give me practical experience using the TAFE learning content management system (LCMS) called “Resource bank” and the learning management system (LMS) called my.tafe. By the end of the year I hope to be quite competent as an e-learning facilitator and teacher of ESL.

Lastly are my reflections on the course LIN8016 Internet Based Language Instruction at the University of Southern Queensland. This is my second course with DR Jeong-Bae Son the first being Computer Assisted Language Learning LIN8006. I would recommend both of these courses to my colleagues as being good for learning about using new technologies to teach and hopefully accelerate the process of second language acquisition.

James Warren: Language Literacy and Numeracy Teacher in English as a Second Language, Metropolitan South Institute of TAFE, Brisbane Queensland, Australia.

R U OK wth Chat spEk

What about chat speak???
Hi, how r u? When r u next @ wrk? Can u pick me up? Car #$%. Broken down agen. LOL. c u @ 8. Thanx -
Chat spEk has a legitimate place in our language just like the f-word. We just have to be discriminate as to where and when we use it. I think for synchronous computer mediated communication (CMC) it's OK. However, when you have time to ponder and reflect there is no reason why you wouldn't always aspire to using YR vry bst nglsh Rfta all shall you not be writing for the purpose of ensuring the most thorough comprehension by the broadest possible audience.

I am loathed to soliloquize but enormously eloquent uncommon
vocabulary also reduces the volume of the audience LOL.

So to finish my forum entry I'll use a normal kind of English most of the readers of this forum can understand

cu
James

Getting easier and more complex at the same time

I am relatively new to blogging and web site creation however once the initial steps are taken everything seems to get easier. The basics of web site creation are especially easy when you use a html editor. I have decided to go with Web 2.0 tools for my web sites in the beginning because I prefer to use some of the newer technology and web 2.0 tools available and hence selected www.blogger.com and www.pages.google.com Both of these sites allow you to publish and edit everything online in a reasonably easy to use format for a beginner like me and as I do more publishing and editing it feels like it is getting easier because my confidence is growing.

At the same time I am beginning to find as I do more publishing and research that there are many more layers of complexity for my to explore. These include gaining a functional working knowledge of html and associated programming languages, meta tags, copyright and privacy statements and most importantly standards compliance. For a novice like me I could seem overwhelming but I am giving it a go and making progress.

James in South Brisbane.

Reconciliation

As this is my second only posting I would like begin by acknowledging the Indigenous Custodians of the land on which I live and work.

Australia originally had more than 200 language groups speaking a total of more than 650 dialects. Many of these languages no longer exist, however there are over 200 new languages that have been introduced to Australia. Our government insists that everyone can speak and is literate in just ONE language....... ENGLISH.

From Little Things Big Things Grow or Blog Feng Shui

Welcome to the first blog post of 1english1.
I'm relatively new to writing a blog but my goal with this blog is to educate, entertain and inspire you with all kinds of STUFF that I personally find interesting.

Educate: Using the World Population Clock at http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html
I deduced the precise time that the world population will reach 7 billion people as being "November 30, 2012 02:26:56" Go check this website out I will entertain you for a full 60 seconds while you type in your birthday and check the projected population then. You may even be inspired to do more for the environment and start to reduce the size of your ecological footprints.


Please step lightly on the Earth we only have one and all breakages must be paid for.