How many hours are you contracted for? There’s a poll so if you’re reading in RSS, come on down and vote. I know it’s vacation season for many public school and university teachers so you should vote for how many hours you are contracted to teach during the semester. If you do over time or have something else to say, please leave a comment.

looking forward to your responses.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jul 3, 2008 at 07:33 PM
Teaching | Polling_Station | |

I received a comment about the redesign suggesting that I get rid of the SnapShots preview of external links. I’m not sure how I feel about them right now myself, so I’ll leave this decision up to my readers. Come to the site and vote in the poll.

update

Not many votes, but anyhow I’ve removed the snapshots.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jun 29, 2008 at 11:43 AM
Polling_Station | web_site | |

I’ve completed the redesign of this web site and it is now live. It’s been three years since I had a new look and the last one was a template available that I just modified. This new look I created from the ground up. I hand coded everything, XHTML, CSS and Expression Engine dynamic tags. It’s really been a great learning experience for me and I’ve definitely improved my understanding of CSS.

EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that!EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that! yeah! Personally I’ve gotten a little tired of all the hype surrounding 2.0 web sites and software upgrades to 2.0.51.3.6 so I decided to have a little fun with my blog name.

Before I get into anymore details I’m going to post up a screen shot of the blog as it’s looked for the past three years so I don’t forget. The image is quite long because my monitor is 22” in vertical profile - almost no vertical scrolling for me.

And a screen shot of the current version as i’m sure it will change in the future as well. One thing I’ve done is remove the forums and wiki since no one was using them. If enough interest were expressed, I would bring them back.

I’ve added a few little effects to the site - one that I particularly like is that now any link to a file (.pdf .pub .xls .pdf .zip) will now automatically have an icon appended to the link making it clearer what is a download and what is a web page. You can see it in action on my entry about powerpoint jeopardy.

I’ve also set up comments to use avatars. If you are a member of this site, then you can upload an avatar (100x100) or you can use a gravatar (80x80 - maximum size allowed by gravatar plugin). If you don’t do either than your comment will end up with a generic silhouette avatar. I like avatars because it can really help regular readers to identify each other visually and adds a little style and class to the comment page.

Technical Stuff

I learned a lot by reading CSS Mastery which is co-authored by Simon Collision who just happened to have created my previous look. I also ready Principles of Beautiful Web Design and various web sites. The Expression Engine forums has a very helpful community that I could not live without.

Probably my greatest assistance came from Andy Harris, an active member on the Expression Engine forums - he seemed to be paying special attention to my twitters and posts on the forums and even went so far as to offer me extensive advice via email. Through Andy I came to discovered Firebug (firefox extension) and the IE Developer Toolbar which are indispensable for web development. Andy also ensured that I learned how to add a seperate style sheet to deal with the troubles that come from internet explorer.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with photoshop, but that has mostly been with photo touch up. Making backgrounds for the web was a learning experience. I’m sure I have a lot to learn still - I think my site might be a little slow to load as I didn’t do a particularly great job with optimizing images. The problem I had was that compression resulted in a horrible look. I need to learn how to design so that my images can be compressed without getting destroyed in the process.

There are still a couple of minor changes to be done to the look. I need to add the dynamic comment preview, as well as buttons for HTML code in comments. I haven’t yet decided if I want to go with the show/hide option with extended text that I had in the previous look. For now, I’ll just have a link to the rest of the entry.  I also want to add the ability to edit comments for a limited time after submission.

Please do come and take a look at the site and tell me what you think in the comments as well as vote in the poll.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jun 4, 2008 at 03:46 PM
Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station | Web Design | web_site | |

The latest column is out. It was originally slated to be a two parter but ended up getting delayed and combined into a double length column. The subject is MOODLE - hope you enjoy it and find it useful. If you have any comments or thoughts please share. Read it at the Korea Herald or look below.

update
I just added a poll to this entry. Do you use Moodle?

Korea Herald Readers
Welcome. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on this weeks column. If you would like to learn more about me visit my bio page. I have also been blogging at this site for 4 years so there are a lot of entries if you care to look through the archives. Some of my favorite or more popular entries are available on the classic entries page.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Apr 22, 2008 at 08:21 PM
Polling_Station | KH Column | Moodle | |

I’ve been at my current job for three years now and I haven’t updated my teaching portfolio or resume since I started. Actually the portfolio hadn’t been updated since two years before that. I’ve been updating my resume the last week and I realized that I had a lot of points to add, new skills, new courses taught and created, presentations and now obviously my column on EFL for the Korea Herald.

After updating my resume I decided to give my portfolio a once over. I’m not impressed - it’s time for a complete overhaul. I’m going to pull out some materials that I thought were impressive but now look decidedly second rate. It’s also time to add a few more activities.

I have also spent some time thinking about what should be included in an EFL teaching portfolio. Clearly all the required documents or copies for a VISA, though in Korea I no longer need a work visa. Letters of recommendation, teacher evaluations, and a teaching philosophy. It’s also been a long time since I wrote my teaching philosophy so I’ll be rewriting that as well in order to incorporate new thoughts and ideas that I have learned from books read and conferences attended.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Mar 29, 2008 at 08:15 PM
Teaching | Polling_Station | |

Over at ELT world there’s a thread with a poll asking What qualifies someone as a TEFL vet?. The poll is more about how long one has been in the industry.

Since the thread there doesn’t have many responses I thought I would post it here as well and include a poll of my own (please vote). I don’t think it is really possible to be a veteran of TEFL with less than 5 years under your belt. Any thoughts?

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Mar 6, 2008 at 07:37 AM
Teaching | Polling_Station | |

Long term readers may recall that I started work on a podcast for Korean language learners but that it eventually fell through for a number of reasons. Well it looks like someone has gone ahead and completed the project almost exactly as I envisioned it. If you want to use podcasts to improve your Korean skills be sure to check out koreanclass101 - and don’t forget my long running Korean learning group blog 한국어 연습장 for writing practice.

KoreanClass101 offers the podcasts for free via RSS just like any other podcast. But if you want access to the learning center and pdf’s of transcripts/vocabulary etcetera that involves a paid membership. They do offer a 7 day trial membership which gives you access to all the features of a premium account. I haven’t yet signed up for the trial as I am too busy to take advantage of it fully. However at the end of the semester I will definitely be signing up and trying it out. After the trial you can expect a full review here or over at 한국어연습장.

If you try it before then feel free to use guest authoring to write a review here. Also added a poll about podcasts - vote now!

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Oct 9, 2007 at 10:13 AM
Podcasting | Public_Service_Announcement | Polling_Station | |

Did you know about guest authoring?

Total Votes: 25

Yes

 12% (3)

 

No

 48% (12)

 

I had forgotten

 40% (10)

 

Sometime in the next few weeks there will finally be a guest author on this site. I’ve had a guest entry form available on this site for ages, but no one has taken advantage of the opportunity. That is probably due to my lack of promotion of this option. Just to let you know, any registered member is able to guest author an entry on this blog. Once your entry is submitted it will go to a moderation queue for me to approve. Approval is basically a rubber stamp as long as your post is on topic and the language is clean.

One of my close friends has recently embarked on a distance Masters Degree and has expressed interest in posting here. I’ve had the pleasure of proof reading the two essays that he has submitted so far and must say that he is a better writer than I ever was. He’s got a lot of interesting ideas that I’m sure readers here will enjoy reading and commenting on. As soon as he registers you can expect an entry.

Did you know about the guest entry option? Vote in the poll. I’d also like to hear your thoughts on guests authors and blogging in general.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday May 18, 2007 at 07:44 PM
META | web_site | Polling_Station | |

Will you present at KOTESOL 2007?

Total Votes: 25

Yes

 48% (12)

 

No

 28% (7)

 

I'd like to but the deadline is too early

 24% (6)

 

I recieved an email yesterday calling for papers to present at the 2007 KOTESOL conference. While I’m positive that I’ll be attending, I can’t quite plan that far ahead to have a presentation abstract ready. The deadline has moved from June to March 2nd. I’ve added a poll to this entry, please vote. The email and details are in the extended entry.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jan 25, 2007 at 03:16 PM
Public_Service_Announcement | Polling_Station | KOTESOL | |

I mentioned in the previous entry that I had a breakfast meeting. In that meeting Jeff, the man I was talking with, mentioned an acronym that he came up with for teaching English. EFNAR - English For No Apparent Reason. Sounds like a lot of different teaching programs I know.

I googled EFNAR and found that no one else has used it in quite this way, though the urban dictionary has an amusing meaning that I was unaware of.

Added a poll, vote and tell us if you are teaching EFNAR.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Nov 14, 2006 at 10:01 AM
Polling_Station | Vocabulary | |

Are you going to KOTESOL 2006?

Total Votes: 17

yes, I live in Korea.

 47% (8)

 

yes, I live outside of Korea

 0% (0)

 

no, I live in Korea

 6% (1)

 

no, I live outside of Korea

 47% (8)

 

So are you going to the KOTESOL conference this coming weekend? I’ll be there and am looking forward to several of the presentations. ATTN: RSS readers - there’s a poll, you can vote and tell the world if you are coming or not.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Oct 22, 2006 at 01:49 PM
Public_Service_Announcement | Polling_Station | KOTESOL | |

Did you miss me? Answer the poll and let me know. The break from blogging has been good for me. I’ve learned how to spend less time in front of the computer and I’ve trimmed my RSS subscriptions from 200+ to about 100 some of which are student feeds. I’ve also taken the time I used to spend in front of the computer and used it to lose weight. Today I am wearing a pair of pants I haven’t been able to wear for six years. I’m not done on the weight loss program but figure I will reach my target weight some time before mid-November.

I’ve got a lot to say on teaching and other things which I will continue it in the extended entry.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Sep 17, 2006 at 06:44 PM
Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station | Video | Teaching | Moodle | web_site | |

What are your summer plans? I’ve got 10 weeks of vacation starting next friday, but I won’t be resting I’ll be teaching. I’ve got a 3 week course for multimedia listening that runs 3 hours per day Monday to Friday. The good thing about this class is that it was taught by a friend, who is going to Guatamala for the summer, and he gave me all of his lesson plans and materials so all I need to do is adapt it to how I teach. It’s definitely going to be a fun class to teach. 6 music videos, 1 episode of smallville, audio books and Stand by Me.

I am also working on the Korean podcast for learners which I can’t provide details on at this point but hopefully will be very similar to ChinesePod. Additionally, I’m going to be doing some work on the ESL/EFL Wiki daily. Still looking for other contributors to the wiki as it is going to take a lot of work to make it into an excellent resource. Far more work than one person alone can do. So far two people have promised to contribute but not for a few weeks as they have prior commitments.

And finally because I’m a masochist I signed up for 7 am classes, again! These classes run for the entire summer. At least I can sleep on Wednesdays (no classes).

vote in the poll about your summer vacation.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jun 11, 2006 at 08:49 AM
Teaching | Polling_Station | |

I’ve just added a new poll to the site so vote and tell us how many blogs you read. Currently in my RSS reader I have 163 feeds and subtracting about 12 for all the feeds that belong to my blogs that leaves around 151. Generally I try to keep my subscribed list down to around 120 but periodically it goes up as I find new blogs. I usually only remove blogs if they don’t update for a long time or if they are a new blog I find that they are not as interesting as I had originally thought.

Todays non-language non-teaching post brought to you by the letter P for poll.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Apr 27, 2006 at 07:35 AM
Polling_Station | |

Are you going to KOTESOL 2005?

Total Votes: 25

yes, I live in Korea.

 28% (7)

 

yes, I live outside of Korea

 4% (1)

 

no, I live in Korea

 24% (6)

 

no, I live outside of Korea

 44% (11)

 

So are you going to the KOTESOL conference this coming weekend? I’ll be there and presenting on Sunday morning. Vote on the poll and let me know.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Oct 11, 2005 at 11:47 AM
Public_Service_Announcement | Teaching | KOTESOL | Polling_Station | |

Week one is finished and I must say that I am really enjoying my new school. All of the students are great, the facilities are fantastic. The best part are the nurses that I am teaching - they have got to be the best class I have ever taught. No I am not going goo goo over all the ladies; I am married and have previously taught at a womens univeristy. But rather it’s all about enthusiasm combined with natural talent. The class is a little small, only 20 girls and 2 guys, but so far every student has an overabundance of enthusiasm and a large portion of the class have strong English skills already.

I’ve worked at three universities now and I can see a general trend in quality of students. Clearly at a higher ranked school the students are more motivated with more talent, but more importantly is the major of the student. In Korea English classes are organized by major, so this means that all students in a class will be taking the same major. In my experience students majoring in hard/practical sciences (engineers, nursing, physics) seem to be better more focused students. In the middle are general humanities students and at the bottom are the fine arts students (sculpting, dance, music) as well as physical education. I haven’t taught doctors, but I’ve heard bad things about attitude problems from other teachers. What do you think? vote in the poll or leave a comment.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Sep 3, 2005 at 11:07 AM
Teaching | Polling_Station | |

I asked this in a poll ages ago, but that poll script ended up not working when I moved to EE and now that Ee has a native poll module I can ask it again. So let’s find out where in the world you teach English? Obviously I cannot list every country so I broke the world down into what I think are logical regions.

Feel free to discuss the pros and cons of various regions. For myself I have only ever worked in Korea and would be very interested in hearing about other areas. I have some knowledge of a few countries based on some blogs I read but would like to hear more. If you don’t blog and would like to share your story, this is would be a great opportunity. If you know of any ESL oriented blogs not on my blogroll, let me know so I can add them or at the very least start following them.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jun 28, 2005 at 09:40 PM
Polling_Station | web_site | |

Who says lexicographers have no fun? Obviously not the folks at Merriam Webster (this bloggers online dictionary of choice). Check out their What’s Your Favorite Word (That’s Not in the Dictionary)? I’m thinking I should submit my favorite neoligism that I coined: technotard.

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement
4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway
6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: “My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription.”
7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jun 13, 2005 at 07:42 AM
useful_web_sites | Polling_Station | Vocabulary | |

On Monday Jiri, a long term reader, sent me an email asking a question that I am unable to answer. I wrote back to him and asked if he would like me to post the question here. In his reply email he suggested a good poll idea, so now we have a new poll as well. comments about the poll are in the extended entry - Jiri’s Question:

I was just wondering if you could help me out here with a couple things. I’m a non-native teacher and I realized that’s what I want to do, or am called on to do. I’m reading up these days on pronunciation and for a non-native it can be something of a tough nut, especially things like connected speech. Would you then know of a
dictionary that would provide phonetic transcription for not only infinitive forms, but also other forms and/or even some frequent chunks?

Am sure I had more questions but it all slipped my mind now.

Anyway, would be grateful for any help..

Jiri

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday May 22, 2005 at 08:11 AM
Polling_Station | Readers_Questions | Lesson_Plans | |

I recieved an email from David asking me about an article he found titled Surgery in Seoul The idea that ESL teachers are resorting to cosmetic surgery to get jobs is unbelievable. The article is short and I’m going to comment paragraph by paragraph in the extended entry.

update
poll added

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday May 15, 2005 at 10:22 AM
Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station | Teaching | |