Random Quote
Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
---- Author Unknown
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
---- Albert Einstein
it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"
---- Kelvin Throop III
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
Book Review: Moodle 1.9
A while back I was approached by Packt Publishing to review Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development: A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle 1.9, by William H. Rice IV. I was approached to review this book due to my semi-regular blogging about Moodle as well as my extensive experience using it as a teacher of English as a Second Language.
Moodle 1.9 E-learning Course Development is a book that achieves its goal of being a complete guide to successful learning with Moodle. This book will definitely be useful for newbies as well as experienced users such as myself. Rice takes the reader through a tour of Moodle in the first chapter that serves as an excellent summary of its capabilities as well as a roadmap for the rest of the book. A friend who is a newbie to Moodle visited my house and read the first third of the book and expressed how helpful it was just reading it. He was very impressed and bought the book.
I would highly recommend any teacher or site administrator new to Moodle to read this book.To get the maximum benefit out of this book it would be best for the reader to have access to a Moodle installation, preferably as an administrator. However, if you only have teacher access this book will still be highly useful. For those curious about what Moodle has to offer but without access to a Moodle site this book will provide you with the insight you are looking for to decide if Moodle will meet your needs.
Read the rest of this post
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Nov 5, 2008 at 11:37 AM
Teaching | Moodle | Book_Gigilo | Book Reviews | (0)
| 
|
Education Fever
Gord has posted a review of Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth. The title alone makes me want to read it, but after reading Gord’s review this book is now on my must read list.
Gord’s review is well written as one would expect from the quality of his past writings. Read the excerpt below or go read the whole thing, it really is compelling.
This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in Korea. Why? I believe this for a number of reasons…
...As an individual teacher, the themes of the book were quite familiar to me, for I have faced all of them in my own classroom at one time or another: class size issues, the fast-and-loose approach to standards of admission and academic advancement that results in the graduation of effective incompetents, the (to a Westerner) rather extreme zeal with which Koreans regard education, the universally-agreed-upon insanity of the University Entrance Exam and its paradoxical continuation into the present day, the stunning impotence and occasional outright ineptitude of the Ministry of Education, and the puzzling insistence that university studies (and especially English-language studies) are the hope of the nation. All of these are things I have bumped into myself time and time again.
What the book does is snap these issues into perspective, showing how and why they got the way they did, as well as establishing that, no, you — the white foreign teacher who is encountering these things for the first time ever — are not the only person who perceives there is a problem, and that your simple solution probably would work, in Canada, but for some reason — cultural, societal, linguistic, pedagogical, or logistical — is seen by Koreans as inapplicable. Reading this book, you don’t just realize what the wisest of us have intuited or picked up in conversations — that Koreans see many of these problems too — but you also see that you’re far from the first Westerner to suggest the very same solution to these problems. Most of them walked away in frustration, muttering darkly, and though their predictions about Korea’s economic future turned out to be flat-out-wrong (they thought the society would be stuck in poverty forever) many would agree that socially and developmentally, Korea’s developing much more slowly than it could be, and the bottom line is its educational system.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Mar 12, 2008 at 07:49 PM
Teaching | Book_Gigilo | Book Reviews |
|
Textbook Review: Essential Reading
A few weeks ago at the KOTESOL conference I attended a presentation by Scott Miles promoting a new book teaching Reading titled Essential Reading. I walked away from that presentation interested in the book and determined to trial it with my students. I used the material with two different first year classes.
Teachers in Japan attending next weeks JALT conference will want to watch Mr. Miles’ presentation. I have spoken with Scott and confirmed that each attendee will recieve a free copy of the level three book. The entire series is edited by Mr. Miles and the third book was written by him as well. If you do attend please say hi and let Scott know you heard about the book from my blog.
Below is what I wrote about Miles’ presentation:
The next presentation I attended was also done by a friend, Scott Miles. Scott is the author and series editor on a new series of books teaching reading skills. The series is titled Essential Reading and is designed in a unique way. It’s targetting specifically EFL students in an Asian context. The readings were chosen to be engaging and relevant to Asians at the university level, i.e. material that they would be interested in reading on their own. Each of the readings was also written in a way that it would provide information that students were unlikely to know previously despite being familiar wiht some of the topics. Furthermore the readings were selected to elicit an emotional response and as Scott put it, this means that sometimes “they are not entirely safe”. But if they students respond emotionally they are definitely engaged. Finally there is support for ER built in. There are excerpts from graded readers and each book also has 2-3 graded short stories at the back. All attendees came away with a free copy of book 3.
I have the level three book which according to Mr. Miles in his presentation would likely be good for freshmen students in Korea. I chose to do half of unit two (Punishment) and all of unit three (Extensive Reading).Additionally when teaching I did not have access to the teachers book nor did I do anything special to prepare the material. I ran through the material sequentially and alloted time for each section and did not supplement or change anything.
Read the rest of this post
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Nov 17, 2007 at 02:10 PM
Teaching | Book Reviews | Materials |
|
