"I think I'm turning Japanese."

Teacher Dude in Katakana script. Check out this site to see how your name is spelt in Japanese.And this is Craig in Kanji;

EFL/ESL and films

This idea, like so many great ideas, is so simple that you kick yourself for not having thought of it first.

"Last night in one of the classes that I taught here in the Community College, I put students in pairs and asked them to choose two letters of the alphabet. Then the pair had to use those two letters to make a movie title. For example a team might choose M and T. They could make a movie title like, "Murder Train." Then I told them to make up a story line for that movie."

Thanks to Daniel Kirk, EFL in Japan.

Teaching in Greece - The dark side

While surfing (in vain) for other Greek language schools using blogging I came across a site that, as the saying goes, "Tells it as it is". Although Daniel V is talking about a small, provincial town in northern Greece, most of what he mentions is true for the rest of the country;

"It wasn't just that they were supposed to be get-to-know-you classes. You were supposed to be friendly, while at the same time being strict and imposing iron discipline so that they would respect you, while making it clear that this was nothing personal. You had to entertain them, but get them started in the book and make sure they followed the book in a boring way, so as not to let them get too excited at the fun they were having learning English. Furthermore, you could give them maybe one game, as long as it didn't get out of hand, and then you were asked to throw them out of the class if they got too noisy."

See here for the rest of the article.

A great student blog

Today I had a great lesson with one of my private students in which we worked on a video that we posted on her blog. The idea started off as a quick one minute introduction but as we discussed it more it turned into an interview in which both of us worked on finding the most interesting questions and answers. I then taught her how to use Windows Movie Maker and explained that we'd post the video as a way of letting the world know more about her life.

Check out her wonderful blog and leave a comment, I'm sure she'd appreciate it.



Maybe we've discovered a new internet idea; the video meme?

An ancient Greek computer?

I came across this fascinating article just now at the BBC site.

"The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles.

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses."

See here for the rest of the article.

Email scams - an example

I just opened my email and the first thing that I read was this;

"JULIUS AKIM
FEDERAL MINISTRY OF WORKS & HOUSING
IKOYI LAGOS
NIGERIA.

Dear Sir,

I know that this letter will come to you as a surprise but please regard it with full attention, I am Mr. Julius Akim by name, i am heading the officials from the Federal Ministry of Works & Housing (FMW&H),Federal Ministry of Finance and the presidency, making up the contract review panel(CRP)set up by the Federal Government of Nigeria to review contracts awarded by the past military administration. In the course of our work in the CRP,We discovered that, this fund which resulted from grossly over-invoiced contract executed for the FMW&H during the last administration.

The companies that executed the contract have been duly paid and the contracts commissioned leaving the sum of US$42.462Million floating in the Escrow, I have therefore been mandated as a matter of trust by my colleagues in the panel to look for an oversea partner to whom we could transfer the sum of US$42.462M by legally subcontracting the contract entitlement to your company.

We will be able to discuss a favorable percentage after a positive response from you. All logistics are in place and all modalities worked out for the smooth conclusion of the transaction within ten to fourteen working days of commencement after receipt of the following information from you. your full name, address, details and activities, private telephone & fax numbers. this information will enable us to make application and lodge claims to the concerned ministries and agencies in your favor and it is pertinent to state that this transaction is based entirely on trust as the solar bank draft or certified cheque drawable in any of the Central Bank of Nigeria correspondent Bankers in Europe and United states is going to be made in your name.

Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter through the email for now, you can reach me on juliusakim@mail.md

Regards

Mr. Julius Akim."

However, this is almost definitely a 419/"Nigerian" scam designed to get some poor sucker to part with their money in return for a much larger amount, which never appears. According to Wiki, variations on this con have been around since the 16th century. (see here for more background information)

Thessaloniki - a different view

Teaching My Big, Fat Greek Wedding In Greece

As part of the course book I use in preparing my students for the CAE and CPE exams there is a section on the different ways families work in England and Greece. To make the rather dry exercise a little more interesting, I decided to use My Big, Fat Greek Wedding in class. Not having a DVD player in the school I used my ibook to show the movie.

Lesson Plan

1 Ask the class if anyone has seen the movie. Since it was a popular film here in Greece ask those who have seen it to explain the basic plot to those who haven't (see here for summary).

2 Now outline the background to the scene you're about to show (1hr 02 mins to 1hr 7 mins).

Ian Miller, the only son of a very WASPy family meet Toula's, Greek American one for the first time and much cultural confusion ensues.

3 Ask students to write down all the differences they can between the two families.

4 Students discuss their answers in pairs then as a class.

5 Ask them if they think that the film offers a realistic portrayal of Greek people.

6 Students post their answers in written form on the class blog or video them and post them via YouTube.

This exercise worked very well and we got a lot of very sophisticated analysis of the film's portrayal of Greeks and Americans.

Pulling your hair out

I've been trying unsuccessfully for the last half hour to find a street in Thessaloniki. I'm due to start a new lesson today and it's in an area I'm not familiar with. After failing to find it in the city map in the front of the telephone directory I decided that I'd go on the internet. First, I tried Google Earth, and whilst the city is shown in pretty high resolution there are few place names - forget roads, you'd be hard pressed to find entire neighbourhoods.

Afterwards, I tried to Google "Thessaloniki street map", in both Greek and English with only limited success. The best on offer are scans of map of the centre. Not much use to me as the area I'm looking for is nowhere near there ( the city has over a million inhabitants).

Finally, I came across the University Of Macedonia and Thrace website (it's 1999 all over again) which purportedly gives information about the whole of the city. There I found this;

"Οδικοί χάρτες της Θεσσαλονίκης με εξελιγμένες δυνατότητες αναζήτησης για διευκόλυνση των μετακινήσεών σας:"

- http://www.saloniki.org/
- http://www.driveme.gr/
- http://www.231.gr/ - Χάρτες
- http://www.it.uom.gr/dromoi/

Translation

"Thessaloniki street maps with advanced search capabilities in order to make moving around the city easier."

Of the five links, four are either broken or irrelevant and the one that does take you anywhere vaguely useful shows the scanned map of the centre I mentioned earlier. Annoyed, I decided to send them an email asking the designers to update the information, only to find out that you can't do this without a password!!! Meaning they've sealed themselves off from any outside contact! Welcome to the new "high-tech" primitives. This may explain their total non - appearance on the top 500 universities list.

In the end it took four phone calls and a lot of needless explanation to find out something that you should be able to do in less than 60 seconds.

PS

There is a happy end to this sad tale. Thanks to Kassandra I found a site that has all the information I was looking for. Check out www.navigation.gr.

Putting ideas into action

I thought I'd post gain a teaching idea which I talked about recently so you can see how it panned out in the class (see here for full lesson plan).


Imagine a situation:

You're the head of a refugee camp somewhere in a poor, developing country. The annual crops have failed once again and thousand of people arrive at the camp seeking food and medical help. The problem is that you have supplies enough for, at most 5000 refugees, however another 15,000 have come. As the days pass the death rates, especially amongst the very young and the very old rise dramatically. Despite repeated calls to the international community the aid promised by western governments fails to appear.

At this point a local drugs baron/warlord appears on the scene and makes a proposal; in return for supplying food and medical supplies for the camp you must agree to let him use the place as a cover for his cocaine/heroin/etc production facilities.

Do you agree?

In the future I'll ask all the students to respond to the situations like this on the class blog, either in written form or a video clip posted via YouTube. This way students get to choose a form which most suits them.

The most interesting thing about doing this exercise was how much effort the students in Chris's group made so as to make their announcement as convincing as possible. Also Chris worked especially hard on ensuring that his performance was as good as possible. Now I'm sure that knowing that all this was going on the net, and hence would be seen by others was a major factor

Chris's answer

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno

I think that The 77 Million Paintings is one of the most beautiful sites I've ever come across on the internet. Eno's voice over is especially interesting.

"Light years into the future"

I read a recent interview in Time magazine with Brian Eno;


"Pointing to the popularity of do-it-yourself websites like YouTube and the affordability of video-editing software like Final Cut, Eno sees a parallel with the revolutionary effect the 45 r.p.m. single had on popular culture in the '60s. "It suddenly liberated music because people only had to have one good idea," he says. "And it only had to to last 2 1/2 minutes."

See here for the rest of the article.

I think it can be even simpler than that if you decide to use Window's Movie Maker (it comes with Windows XP as standard) or Photo Story 3 i.e freely available video editing tools. As a proof of concept I decided to make this video mainly using images from Flickr. What I hope to do in the near future is incorporate this technology into my lessons.

Free Abdul Rahman Shaghouri

Syrian Human Rights Committee campaigns to release a sixteen-month detainee for surfing the net. Sixteen months has already elapsed since Mr. Abdul Rahman Shaghouri was arrested for surfing sites with special interests to Syrian current affairs, downloading and distributing some news to friends.

Their contact information is here.

History as now - Teaching history as news

The BBC has a series called On This Day that treats recent historic events as if they were breaking news. This gives some excellent raw material for several possible teaching ideas.For example this exercise focuses on tenses and in particular the changes needed when talking about recent events compared with those which are over and done with i.e. the differences between the use of present perfect and past tenses, I know, it sound very dry but the idea is to make those concepts more concrete to the students by using real examples.

You'll need to have;

1 Two photocopies (no more than one page each, one of which is from the BBC's On This Day and the other a more conventional historical account (Wiki would be my first port of call). The event should ideally, be something that the students are already aware of. In this lesson plan I'm going to use the fall of the junta in Greece in 1973.

2 A photocopy with details from a historical event that student know about.

Lesson Plan

1 Ask students what they know about the 17th November 1973 (which is a holiday for students in Greece). Students work in pairs and write down what they know. Tell them that if they don't something in English, you'll translate.

2 Elicit answers from the class.

3 Ask them what they know about the 25th November 1973. Odds on, they'll not know much. Explain to them that you will give them a handout which gives some information about the event.

4 Divide the class into two groups, give one group this page from the BBC and the other this extract from the Wiki page on the Greek junta (from The Ioannidis Regime to the end).

5 Tell the students that they should read it and it is their responsibility to figure out the vocabulary as a group.

6 Then they form pairs with one person from each group.

7 They compare the different versions on two levels;

a the information given
b the tenses used



8 Now choose an event from history that your students are familiar with e.g. The Fall of Constantinople ( see here for the Wiki entry - The Siege and Final Assault of the City). Explain to the students that they have to imagine that they are journalists reporting from the city on the events mentioned in the photocopy. Make sure that they are clear on the use on tenses in this case.

9 This can either be done in the form of a BBC On This Day style report or you could record it as CNN live report on a digital camera/mobile phone and post it via itunes as a podcast or YouTube video on the class blog.

CAE interview - do's and don'ts

PART ONE

1 Be friendly, be polite. This is a chance to show the
examiners how well you can speak English, not a fight to
the death.

2 Learn some words that may come up, e.g. the name of
the subject you are studying or the job you want to do
in the future.

3 DO NOT learn a little speech by heart. It sounds
unnatural and you'll get even more nervous than you
need to be trying to remember it.

4 Keep eye contact with the examiner. That means looking
him or her in the eye rather than staring at your shoes
or some point on the wall behind them.

5 Remember there are no wrong answers here, only well-
expressed and badly expressed ones.

6 DO NOT give short, monosyllabic answers, nor tell them
the story of your life.


PART TWO

1 Remember that the question you'll be asked will vary.
Sometimes it may require you describe and comment or
you may be asked to compare and contrast.

2 If you don't understand the question ask the examiner to
repeat it. You'll not lose marks for this. However, you will
lose marks for answering the wrong question.

3 DO NOT stop speaking till the examiner tells you your
time is up.

4 Pay attention to what the other person says as you will
be asked a related question when they finish.

PART THREE

1 Make sure you understand the question before you start
speaking. If necessary, ask the examiner to repeat it.

2 Move your chair so that you are facing the other person.
Remember what we said about eye-contact. Also use their
name.

3 Start with a question, not a monologue.

4 Listen to what the other person says, comment on it, ask
them questions.

5 If you can't think of something to add, disagree with the other
person, whatever they say. It's always easier to have
something to say if we disagree.

6 Give the other person chance to speak. You'll lose
marks if you monopolise the conversation.

7 DO NOT stop speaking until the examiner tells you that
your time is up.

PART FOUR

1 Remember the questions asked in this part are always
connected with the topic in part three.

2 Give full answers, not just short, monosyllabic ones

3 Comment on what the other person says, use their name.

4 There are no wrong answers, only badly-expressed ones.

Taken an hour ago

Thessaloniki at night

Now that I have a faster internet connection I'm able to try out various ideas I've written about in my blog over the last year. But before I can teach using these new opportunities I must make myself familiar with them. I created this short video using Window's Photo story 3, which can be downloaded free from here.

One more set of photos then I'm off to bed

Ok, I promise I'll stop now.

Still playing

I'm off work sick today, hence the frenetic photo processing.

More weird effects

A little abstract art, anyone?

Thessaloniki at night

Here are some photos I took last night after work in Aristotelous Square (see here for more on my Flickr page).

Vlogging and EFL/ESL

For those of you unaware of the term a vlog is an amalgamation of the words video and blog. Basically, instead of writing a post, you record it on video. I thought that this might be a good way to spark more student interest in their blogs. I've only just started doing this as I only recently got broadband at home. On a standard 56kps dial - up it's not really feasible to upload large files.

Here is a lesson I did yesterday.

Lesson Plan

I Write on the board or hand out a photocopy with the following situation;

Imagine a situation:

You're the head of a refugee camp somewhere in a poor, developing country. The annual crops have failed once again and thousand of people arrive at the camp seeking food and medical help. The problem is that you have supplies enough for, at most 5000 refugees, however another 15,000 have come. As the days pass the death rates, especially amongst the very young and the very old rise dramatically. Despite repeated calls to the international community the aid promised by western governments fails to appear.

At this point a local drugs baron/warlord appears on the scene and makes a proposal; in return for supplying food and medical supplies for the camp you must agree to let him use the place as a cover for his cocaine/heroin/etc production facilities.

Do you agree?

2 Go through any possible problems with vocabulary.

3 Divide the class into groups of three or four students and ask each one to make a decision. Give them five to ten minutes for this.

4 Go round the class and elicit their decision. Alternatively, set up a debate in which those who agree have to discuss their choice with those that disagree.

5 Explain that now a spokesperson from each group is going to justify their opinion in a statement of between 30 and 60 seconds and that you will record it on video and put it on their class blog. The other members of the group will help the speaker with the wording of the statement.

6 Each group chooses a spokesperson (they will probably need some conjoling for this).

7 Go to a quiet place in the class or better still outside and video the student.

8 Post the videos via, say YouTube on their blog. The other students have to write their opinions on the blog.


See here for yesterday's lesson

You have the right to be beaten, if you give up that right, we will do it anyway.

Thankfully, there is uproar in the Greek press (see here in English here, and here in Greek) over the beating of a Cypriot student outside the ABC hotel here in Thessaloniki. Not only was this caused by the incident itself, which was captured by TV cameras but also by the extremely provocative statements made by the head of the city's police department when interviewed about the event on Mega channel. Rather than ordering an inquiry or condemning the acts of the police officers, he insulted and even threatened the law professor, Vasilis Floridis, who'd witnessed it, even going as far as to defend the police's actions, arguing that the beating of a detainee was in no way excessive.

The official police report says that the students injuries were sustained when he fell over a moped and into a window box. However, according to an interview he gave to the Eleutheroptypia newspaper says that;

"«Ενας με πίεζε να μου σπάσει το γόνατο. Μου έβαλαν χειροπέδες ύστερα από 20 λεπτά. Με χτυπούσαν μπροστά στους καθηγητές. Με κλοτσούσαν και μέσα στο τμήμα. Τα μάτια μου ήταν πρησμένα και δεν έβλεπα τίποτα. Φοβόμουν ότι είχα εσωτερική αιμορραγία, ότι θα πέθαινα. Τέσσερις ώρες ήμουν μέσα στα αίματα».

Ο Αυγουστίνος εξιστορεί αυτά που έζησε και εξηγεί πως κατάφερε να ενημερώσει την οικογένειά του. «Χωρίς να βλέπω κατάφερα να τους στείλω μήνυμα με το κινητό που είχα κρυμμένο μέσα στα εσώρουχά μου. Δεν περιγράφεται αυτό που έζησα».

"One of them forced me to bend my knee and they put handcuffs on me 20 minutes later. They hit me in front of the professors. They kicked when I was in the police station. My eyes were swollen and I couldn't see anything. I was afraid that I had internal bleeding. I was left covered in blood for four hours."

Augustinos described what he had been through and explained how he had managed to contact his family.

"Without being able to see I managed to send them a message with the mobile phone which I had hidden in my underwear. What I went through cannot be described."

It seems that they the police in this city feel that they are not just above the law but subject to no civilian control at all. How else would you explain the seeming lack of concern by the force's highest ranks when making these outrageous claims publicly, even when the evidence is there for the whole country to see with their own eyes.

By a sad irony a similar incident took place inside the UCLA library with an American- Iranian student being repeatedly tazored (see here).