Itchy Feet Syndrome Strikes Again

Or perhaps I've just been bitten by the insidious travel bug. Either way, subject to my blood tests etc etc being good, ie, not dying of anything more serious than life, I am off to South Korea in January.

I must say I am looking forward to it in many ways. Actually I am going out of financial necessity; because teaching ESL in Brisbane is more like a subsidized volunteer effort.

I love teaching my students but I am not getting any younger - 57 next January - don't have any Super to speak of and just cleaned out my savings doing and extension at home.

So it's Hi Ho Hi Ho off to Jeju I go once again. The upside is that I have decided to finish my Masters. Can't re-enrol straight away because the cost per unit at QUT is absolutely overpriced. I will have to work for at least 6 months to get some money together to continue. However, that doesn't stop me commencing my research... :)

Well must go, I am assisting my brother with his website... This will complete his Masters... diligent little fellow... of course he's not paying up front so there you go.

A Distant Light

Thanks to Debra's comment, left on my blog over the weekend, I feel there is a faint glimmer of direction out there.

I've been rather slothful lately using all my free time to indulge in a reading orgy... all pure escapism of course. However, I will give Debra's comment some structured thought. As reading is my preferred option, at the best or worst of times, I'll start with a smorgasborde of readings. There is so much out there on TESOL, ESL, EFL etc etc that I am bound to find something of interest that will hopefully prod me into action regarding some definitive and worthwhile research.

Anyone stumbling on this blog who has read something recently that really enervated them feel free to leave the info in my comments section. [err something related to ESL preferably :)] My blog automatically notifies me if someone places a comment there.

A good result but what now?

Finally got my mark for this subject and was very pleased that all my hard work produced such a pleasing result.

Initially I was looking forward to the break from study but now that it's mid July the euphoria has faded and I'm left asking "What now?"...

Perhaps I will go ahead and get my Masters in TESOL after all... but I'm giving myself until Christmas to decide. The thing is I'd like to do some useful research rather than simply work my way through another four set units. I just don't feel excited enough about any aspect of TESOL to want to do detailed research on it. Let's hope this changes before December...

Blogging is less daunting than before ...

I have decided to make blogging a compulsory weekly event in my combined class, i.e., the afternoon when I must teach both the IELTS and SSPP class together. My hope is that they will eventually fly solo with this concept and generate their own discussions - although a cyber bulletin board might work better. I'll have to give that one some more thought.

For the moment I am posting tasks to the class blog that I moderate and getting the students to follow the instructions re postings etc from it. Half of my class are not comfortable with computers which is a huge surprise for me as the majority of them are teenagers. So much for the concept of the young running ahead of us in the techno-stakes.

Perhaps there is such a thing as tech-overload with our younger users after all.

Traffic might not be the death of me but it certainly may be the death of my career...

It would appear that there is a major accident on the Ipswich motorway between Fernvale and Gailes at least once a fortnight. No big deal as long as you are not in the subsequent traffic gridlock. Today was my best effort. I heard the traffic report; opted for an arduous trip through Ipswich central and out to Blackstone Rd... Half hour wasted as it was gridlocked. Doubled back to Dinmore only to find that I could have come straight down the highway and cut out at Dinmore... did my usual back way only to find that it is no longer a secret... 40 minutes where I usually take 10... I nearly rang in and resigned... The dole is looking good... or a job in the local bakery... cleaner at the local school.... teachers aid... road sign nazi!!! The options are endless.

Moving On

In some ways it's very nice to be moving on but in others there's always that feeling of loss. Now that I have my weekends back I feel slightly rudderless.

However, some good news on the techno-ESL front - This week I introduced my new IELTs class to Blogs and blogging. I hope to encourage them to generate their own discussions via their individual blogs. At the same time I was pleased to see that my SSPP class has moved to the next level in blogging with all students now cross-commenting on the various group blogs.

One small step for woman etc...

Trial by Fire...

Yesterday, ten of my SSPP students engaged in a reasonably successful sortie with my Health and Nutrition page. I'm happy to say casualties were low. They had been forearmed with two previous 'face-to-face' lessons on Health and Nutrition - "Dietary Guidelines for Australians" and "How to Prevent excess Weight Gain". These lessons were based on the information published in the "Dietary Guidelines for Australians - A Guide to Healthy Eating" put out by the Australian Government.

As this was simply the first skirmish in a protracted campaign (i.e. 6 computer periods of approximately 1.4 hour duration) no definitive results are yet available.

After their foray, the students were debriefed. They were asked to give their impression of the two activities they had time to trial. The feedback was both verbal and in writing. [Individual student comments are attached to this posting] Nine out of the ten students managed to attempt two activities in the limited time frame. All ten students successfully completed activity one which was a reading comprehension exercise on "Enjoying a Wide Variety of Foods Every Day". Four of the remaining nine completed the Crossword. We had to return to base earlier than planned to allow others time on the battlefield. [A study tour group teacher asked me to give up part of my allotted computer room time so that her homesick students could contact friends and family. Owing to the fact that I felt it politic, at that particular juncture, to re-establish my reputation as a benevolent despot I acquiesced.]

We had some serious technical hiccups that clouded the trial. All of the students' computers are linked to the same server on the same line and therefore are abominably slow... and for some unaccountable reason they were even slower yesterday; much slower than the staff computers which aren't as fast as they could be either... the page took too long to download.

Because I am going to be using this teaching resource quite often at this particular (though unsatisfactory) location, I will have to forego some of the fancier elements like 'flash buttons' for basic hyperlinks in order to speed up access. Just as well I haven't loaded this page to my public website. I'd like to iron out a few more kinks before taking that particular plunge.

Also, some students tended to rush ahead without thoroughly reading the instructions which I feel is detrimental to the learning process. I am going to have to include a few more checks and balances on the way through. It's fine if there is a teacher present at all times but if for some reason this material was to be used in a 'distance education' capacity, i.e. most of the work being done online, this could cause unnecessary frustration on the part of the learner and be a demotivating factor in the learning process.

Interestingly some students felt the comprehension questions were easier than those they had done in class and perhaps they were. Because this was the first activity in the series and the whole concept of doing this type of work on the computer is so new to my students I didn't want to make their first attempt too daunting. I'll monitor this with future students and make any necessary adjustments when I have a little more feedback.

A couple of students had problems finding their place on the page when clicking through to answer the questions. Perhaps a split screen activity might be more workable or a few more sub-headings in the text.

I was relieved, though a little surprised, to find that all of the students who attempted the crossword enjoyed the process, despite the fact that they found it very difficult to do. Also, none of them pressed the solve button for the quick answer. Despite this pleasing outcome I think that I will rebuild the crosswords with some easier hints in them; probably some hyperlinks or pictures would be the best option because the object of the exercise is to build or reinforce vocabulary. I don't want them to be tempted to go the easy fix and just press the solve button in order to finish the exercise.

Watching the students work through the exercises I realized I needed to add a hyperlink to an online dictionary/thesaurus which I will now do.

The above hiccups/technical glitches notwithstanding, I am pleased with the webpage and excited at the prospect of refining it to improve students' learning outcomes.

Back from Paradise...

North Queensland was a lovely break. All that green was a bit depressing... My partner was going to take a photo of the lush grass just so we could all remember what it looks like but I dissuaded him. :) It rained on and off for the entire time we were there! Coming back to clear blue skies after promises of rain on the forecast was very depressing. Let's hope they get it right for later this week.

The Whitsundays are lovely but I have to say you really can't beat South East Queensland for the variety. We've got it all... well we usually have it all and will again once the drought breaks. Our beaches are lovely. Our hinterland is exquisite. Our holiday accommodation is much more affordable and a lot more up you go than up North. They really need to check a dictionary to find out what 'deluxe' is supposed to mean. :|

Went to Bowen... hmmm was underwhelmed. Saw the movie set whilst I was there. They just blocked off a small section of one city street, covered the asphalt with dirt and plopped a few WWII army vehicles there. I was amazed how authentic it looked.

Still it was nice to take a break for a couple of days. Leaves one reluctant to return to the classroom but I am sure once I see my students' expectant faces I'll be right back into it.

Drawing to a close...

Fortunately for me I am not a 'true' obsessive compulsive; therefore I can leave my final draft alone... as the final draft even... instead of the semi final draft...

Perhaps the fact that I have to dye my hair, handwater the garden, pack my bag, go to the doctor etc before I get on that plane tomorrow morning may have a leeeetle bit to do with this newfound strength of character.

Free At Last ... Free At Last... Almost...

Okay so it hasn't been 28 years since I began this project but if a 'thousand years is but a day unto the Lord'... reverse that and you get my drift!

I am excrutiatingly happy to say that I have finally finished my first draft of the Rationale!

As prescribed by all writing gurus, I shall now leave it for a full 24 hours before reading it again!

Now to more serious matters...

I'm sick of reading!!! I've consumed the entire of Egbert, Hanson-Smith's "CALL Environments" +++ reams of downloads from the CLN618 site and don't feel any closer to putting my 'Rationale' together for the final assignment. Well that's not quite true.

I'm okay with most of it... It's the 'reference to literature that's bogging me down. I know why I do what I do. I know why it works in my classes. It's finding the recognised experts to quote that I find a tad wearying. Oops I think I just joined Ruthie again... Triple that Tad, add expletive pain in the wherever, plus multiple yawns and why not throw in those steak knives while you're at it.



On the flip side... there is so much more I want to do with the second assignment... but time doesn't permit, so it will have to wait until after this unit is over. As I fully intend to use this Health and Nutrition online work in the teaching module I'm putting together, I know that what is assessed will not actually be the final product that my students will be using... That's why I intend to keep this blog going long after this unit is over... as a true reflection on the final product.

Yet another week has flown by...

... and what a week it's been. Four full days teaching, a student birthday celebration followed smartly by my grandson's 4th birthday celebration. I can't believe it took me nearly two hours to buy his birthday gifts; which ended up being 3 boxes of leggo - which he loved,
a Times table book with a singalong CD - which my daughter thought was highly inappropro - hmmm
and Thomas the Tank Engine sliding number cards - another gift which underwhelmed my daughter... hmmm

Actually Conor (Mr now 4) is very interested in his numbers, always wanting to join in when his big sister is doing her homework... this will,hopefully, rearrange the power ratio as the Times Table book and the Thomas the Tank Engine number cards are HIS!

You know you're a Cyborg when...

... your computer doesn't boot up and you feel you've lost a vital organ!

Which is just what happened yesterday... My very young... only 14 months since it was built... computer turned into a tin box yesterday when upon poking and prodding at the start AND reboot buttons no blue or red lights came on! What fun... finding a computer mechanic on a Saturday who would even look at it! Fortunately for me an old friend of a friend said... "Bring it over and I'll take a look at it." The fact that I live miles from anywhere gives "bring it over" a whole new look and feel! However, one frantic car ride later I was a much happier cy - bee...

Double fortunately he had a spare power box lying around his workshop that actually worked... (They usually have all these discarded bits from old computers that should have been thrown out years ago.) Triple fortunately it fitted my computer and in two shakes of a mini screwdriver the lights came back on in my not so little 'black box' (I knew it was ominous that my new computer's shell was black - just asking for a major crash for sure!)

Being of a curious bent my computer saviour and I pulled the old power box apart and sure enough it had blown a capacitor! So here's hoping the new one can take the workload I impose upon it.

The sad news is I lost a vital day so my schedule is

Can't Believe It's Friday AGAIN!!!

The past week has whizzed by. I've been adding, editing and fiddling with my second assignment before and after work... This morning I spent 3 hours trying to work out why the pop up feedback messages on one of my quizzes remained transparent. Finally fixed it but still don't understand why it happened in the first place which is very annoying. Also, everytime I adjusted the wretched thing it erased any changes I made in Dreamweaver... it's the HotPotatoes software... Imagine the joy of continually adding 'Flash Buttons' - uploading them and then doing it again... Okay so some days I am very slow on the uptake.

That said, I still think it was worth it because I also sorted out the problem with the images not showing once I had transferred the file... I do hope my students appreciate all these little nuances when they are doing the exercises... :(

Sorry no piccies today... maybe next time.

Zee good news is...

That I have uploaded my entire website onto the QUT H Drive... though it's still a work in progress. Being such a huge file it took 50 minutes to load... but there it is and I am sooooooooooooooooooooo relieved.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh

Just tore my finger nail whilst trying to put the magnetic insert into my woollen underblanket. It's really been that kind of a day...

An Expensive Lesson

It turns out that not only did the dreaded zipfile not go anywhere... it kept trying to upload all night. It would get half way and then crash... then automatically try again... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! When I got up the next morning I found it still trying to load... when I got to work I got 3 emails from Telstra telling me that I was progressively eating up all my allotted usage for the month... by email three I had gone 136megabytes over... and this only the first week of the current month. Never again will I try to send such a huge file and especially never through Outlook!

They are ONLY a bunch of machines connected by wires and optic fibre cables after all...

Well after working most of the weekend on adjusting my Quest as well as working on assignment 2 and then getting home from a full day's teaching last night to spend another 3 hours at it... plus rising before the Kookaburras this morning... zipping my file and emailing my lecturer with my new you beaut updated version of the WebQuest before heading off to another full days teaching - I get home to find that the email hasn't gone and in fact is still trying to go this minute as I type... errr the file, though zipped, is huge... because the WebQuest is now attached to the new website I'm building and all the other things I'm putting together for the second assignment. No wonder Debra didn't answer my email... she hasn't got it yet... Oh well they are only machines after all ... connected by a tissue of optic fibres... what do we expect?

Zorba Lives

As does his dilemma. Experimenting is time consuming ...

and then... if you don't experiment how will you learn new things... and then if you do experiment how then will you get everything done... but then if you don't you may end up with something very ordinary...

What the hey ... Let's dance...

Dizzy but Delighted

I really can't believe how long I spent at the computer yesterday. At 8:45pm I decided to close it all down. It's the size of the task I have set myself that is the problem. But I really can't downsize now as it would defeat the initial purpose.

However having spent a mere 5 hours tidying up a friend's Quest I realize just how complicated mine is. I really won't know how effective it is until I trial it in the classroom and I don't want to pre-empt that just to fit into the time frame of this subject. I have planned that the WebQuest will be the major task in my Health and Nutrition module that I am currently writing to use at UIL. I don't want to spoil my current students' learning outcomes just to appease other goals.

Well needs must away as I have a full days work to do on my own assignment and it is now after 10am.

The Pilgrim Progresses

A little progress in Dreamweaver... hence the size of the type... Embarrassing as it is to admit - I didn't know how to load a Word file into Dreamweaver. After battling with the Dreamweaver Help menus off an on for the past hour I decided to simply save the Word document as a Web Page into the relevant Dreamweaver folder and make a link...


Well must get back to it... a woman's etc ....

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhhhh

I'd like to say that after that display of frustration I felt better but it's just not that simple. Have been up since dawn trying to sort out my Hot Potatoes exercises to put into my new module.

After spending hours last weekend creating a couple of half way decent and also pedagogically reasonable exercises in the Old Hot Potatoes program because the New one doesn't work well unless you have the latest in Java... and not everyone will right? That was another couple of hours wasted but we won't go there right now... BACK to the grumble at hand... I put in these lovely little images that I had painstakingly doctored in Photoshop so that they would load quickly and they wont show once I drop the file into Dreamweaver and load it with the rest of my files.

I even went into the html codes and rejigged them... still no go. So I thought I'll just delete and reload the images from the folder I have for the entire site... and still no go. The URLs work but not my little piccies... I am miffed I can tell you as I hate anything to beat me. But I really have to stop wasting time on this or I will never get it all done. I shall just have to come back to it another time and fly without pictures for now. It's not as if they are essential after all. It's only for us visual learners who just LOVE pictures in everything. We'll just have to be satisfied with all the nice piccies on the websites we click to from my Quizzes.

Leaving Now...

Into The Valley

Today is our last Workshop. I hope I can absorb all the necessary data to come away from this suitably enlightened and prepared for the final assignment.


There is so much scope in this unit that one often feels like a child on Christmas morning wondering which present to open first... or worse a child in a lolly shop with limited funds.

There is simply not enough time to do this subject justice. My concern is that when the time frame is lifted so will the urgency of accumulating new knowledge. I guess that's why we do formalised study rather than plodding on in splendid isolation.


Must away and get ready for the battle...

Looks Like I'll Have to Practice On Myself

Oh Dear... I think that First Aid course has hoo dooed me. I am so ill... migraine nausea the works!
Alas today is my study day and I can no longer sit at the computer to read. I have an all day workshop tomorrow and having missed the last one must go to this one dead or alive. I would have preferred to have gone all read up and ready to go.

However, I think I had better just rest in a dark room so that I can go at all! What a pill. I am truly sick of being sick this year... enough grumbling ... am off to try and get rid of this headache.

It's Okay To Pass Out Near Me Now .... Maybe

Well let's say it's a lot safer than it was before. This week 8 of our staff did a First Aid Cert course. For some it was a mere refresher. For others like myself who have not done anything even similar for over 20 years one could hardly call if a refresher; more like a resuscitation.



Amazingly I blitzed the final test... hmmm maybe that says more about the test level rather than my first aid knowledge. I really think multiple choice questions are not an accurate assessment of your knowledge but they are an easy out for those who must mark them. I took the opportunity of passing this observation on in the "Do you have any comments?" section.


Anyway, the good news is that I am up to date on CPR. They've changed it! It's now 30 firm presses to the chest and 2 breaths which you have to do 5 times in 2 minutes. Boy aren't you glad they made it more simple?

However did they save anyone before!?!

Another Week Has Flown By

I can't believe another week has gone. I just can't seem to get everything done I'd like to with this subject. I have spent a deal of computer time working on my Hot Potatoes quizzes for my next Task. But like Moon I am feeling pressured to get some subject specific reading done. Trouble is there's just so much of it out there.

You could get swallowed up by this stuff if you're not careful.

On that note I am going to shut down this computer and do some recreational reading for the rest of the day.

Onwards Into the Valley of...

After my 'drop-in' session on Friday I was inspired to tackle Hot Potatoes BUT not Friday night as I wanted to watch the Australia vs NZ rugby league match. Poor New Zealand what a drubbing! I found myself praying they'd get one try so that they didn't go home a bunch of zeros.

Anyway Saturday morning early but not so bright I downloaded the latest Hot Potatoes and commenced teaching myself how to use the various portions of the program only to be stopped mid type by the fact that I hadn't registered. I have sent several emails trying to get them to waive the fee because I will be using it for education purposes only with no commercial gain... still no joy just another confusing email. I did manage a couple of mini quizzes which I dutifully saved as html docs as well as the other.

Today I loaded them into my new website in Dreamweaver. They worked well as did a crossword I built with another program I bought a while back. I tried to link my Webquest to the new site and had no joy... In the end I binned it all. I'll think about it for a few days and have another go. I really need to rest now as it is nearly 5pm and I must look fresh tomorrow for my poor students. Can't go in suffering from Compu-lag can I? I feel I have achieved quite a bit this weekend but realize I have loads of work to do this coming week. Thank goodness it's Anzac Day on Wednesday. I'll be able to do a bit more in Dreamweaver and also start catching up on my readings.

That's it for now.