I’m Free(er)!

I thought I was going around the bend with everything that I was supposed to be doing. Saying ‘YES’ all the time is not a terribly good habit to get into and makes for a very full plate! I had to take control. First thing I did was blog about it. You can read that post here if you like. I got some really nice comments back on that post which I was pleasantly surprised about. Thank you to Sue Waters, Kate Olson, Anne Mirtschin and Sue Wyatt for your support! It was just the little bit of encouragement that I needed. I’ve been a bit out of the blogging loop lately (when my plate gets too full and I get a bit stressed about it I tend to do nothing and so the pile just grows) but it is so nice to be back in the groove and remember the nice feeling of having someone take the time to comment on what you’ve written.

Next thing I did, after reading the comments left and thinking about things for the next day or so, I got a bit more of a grip on reality and have just now sent 2 emails. One to say I am no longer able to write those units for the Dept that I was avoiding, and another to a family I tutored for last year to regretfully inform them that I’m not available for tutoring this year. I’ve also decided that my Webcast Academy assignments are just going to have to wait a little bit longer too. I still have every intention to complete that, it might just take a little longer than expected.

So, phew, I’m a bit more free than I was a day or two ago. Thankfully! I feel like now I can focus much more attention on what I am really inerested in (such as a project to lay the ‘ePlanks’ of Web 2.0 at my school, general planning, and much more testing of and using more Web 2.0 tools) - so look out bloggosphere… never fear, Jess is here! (Oh, sorry, that was really bad :-))

distort

Image is Suzann & Tim by Puja

My Week in Preview

Disabled in love, Paris 06.jpgIt’s Week 5 already!!! Did you hear that? WEEK 5! Now, I knew this year would go quickly, just like all the other ones do, but Week 5?! I was sooo supposed to be organised by now.

My colleague, Anne wrote a post about her Week in Review last week and I thought I should do the same. Although, rather than adding to the list of things I’m meaning to do (all with the best of intentions of course), I am going to write about what I’m going to do NOW. That way I get a blog post written, I get to think about what I really want to get out of this coming week which allows me to focus my planning a bit more. I’ll be able to check back at the end of the week and see how I’ve gone and then start all over again for the following week. Hmm, could be a good process!

So, rather than starting another week feeling a bit lacking in the focus department and ending up with some ordinary lessons because of it, here is what I hope to achieve this week:

1. I want to use the SMART Board in three different ways

2. I want all of my students in Years 4 - 11 to know how to and leave a comment on the technoChinese blog and to actively use it to learn some Chinese. I’ve got 3 lessons on there for them at the moment, and will be adding another this week.

3. I want to reiterate to most of my classes why Chinese is a good thing to learn. The need reminding every now and again, especially if they are in Year 8.

4. I want to make sure each lesson contains some intercultural knowledge. One of the things we are reviewing this week is how to introduce yourself. The intercultural information I want to add in with this is about how the Chinese name people and how English names are translated into Chinese. I’ll get the kids to blog about this too. (Every student from Grade 4/5 - 8 and some 9/10s have their own blog which they will be using for many different subjects. Links to their blogs can be found on technoChinese).

The intercultural aspect of language teaching is very important and can often be a good way of engaging those students who are not necessarily interested in the language itself. I don’t think I do enough of it in my class, so I’m going to up the ante a bit!

5. Last of all this week, I think I’ll give most of my students an ongoing assignment - to find anything around them - newspaper and magazine articles, pictures, souvenirs etc that feature China or something Chinese and bring it into class. That’s one way I’ve thought of to show these kids that China and Chinese does not just exist in Room 14. I think I might also get the students in a few of my classes (I teach all levels from Prep to 11) to take turns at presenting something (in any way they see fit) they have found out about China or the Chinese language. 1 presentation per class per week will keep it going for a while and hopefully generate some good discussions and blog posts!

Hang on, I’ve thought of something else…

6. Bring the school set of video iPod into my class and load them up with Chinese lessons!

Hmm, lots to do! The more I write about what I want to accomplish, the more things I find to add to the list. Bring it on.

Image is ‘Everlasting’ by *Cati Kaoe*

My Day in the Twittersphere 2008-02-23

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My Tweets for Today

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T-weet T-weet T-wooo

http://www.twitter.com/jessmccullochOh, I’m trying to get back into this crazy Twitter world. I’ve been out of it for a few weeks - overwhelmed with start of school year and having too much on my plate. Sorting that out now, and spending my Friday night learning about some more cool things, mostly to do with Twitter. Well, I had heard of some of these things before, but never got around to trying them out. Tonight was the night!First, using Twitter Karma I checked out who was following me and followed a few of those people back. You can of course, do this on your Twitter page, but Twitter Karma puts people into groups of ‘Friends’, ‘Followers,’ ‘Mutual Friends,’ making it really easy to see who is in what group.

Then I checked out Twitter Feed and added my blog feeds so that each new blog post that I write generates a tweet to let my Twitter network know of my news posts. I was able to add the RSS feeds for the four blogs I work with so I was happy about that. (Those four blogs are this one, technoLOTE, technoChinese and Friday Vox Pop).

After that I checked out Tweet Scan and Terraminds (thanks to @dswaters and @theother66 tweeting about it). The idea of these apps is that you put in your key search terms and they scan tweets for them, showing you who is tweeting about the things you are interested in. Very handy for finding new people to follow and following conversations all around the world. I added the RSS feeds for these terms into my reader.

Other applications I know about are:

Twit Pic - which allows you to share photos on Twitter. I haven’t tried this one out yet but will. Need to sleep first. :-)

Twitter Vision - shows you a world map and random tweets from everywhere as they are happening. I read a blog post somewhere (can’t remember now) of a teacher who used Twitter Vision with her class and got them to tally how many tweets were in English and how many in a foreign language. Being a language teacher, I think that’s a great idea and I’m going to try it with a few of my classes.

Flickr Vision - similar to Twitter Vision, but showing photos from Flickr instead. I think these two pages are fantastic - live, authentic information from all around the world.

Ok, bed now!

Image: Twitter / jessmcculloch via kwout

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