This is a follow-up on the March 28 blog entry, “Immigation reform has pluses and minuses“.

The Japan Times has recently published a couple of articles on the topic.  You should take a look at them if you haven’t already seen them. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you teach students how to create presentations?  We have all probably seen the mess that they (and, sadly, many instructors) leave on their slides.  Too much text, too many graphs and charts and tables, too small font, etc.  I am involved in a course on scientific presentations, and recently I gave a lesson on the dos and don’ts of that topic.

I’ve spoken to a few people who have recommended that students look at video presentations by Apple’s Steve Jobs (see YouTube).  With his enormous screen behind him on stage, it’s not easy to compare with what a typical scientist would present Read the rest of this entry »

I just ran across an interesting site (Map Tools) that allows you to plug in 2 locations anywhere in the world, and then you can see the distance in kilometers or miles between them.  That’s distance without considering roads, and the map shows an airborne trajectory as if one were flying.  Although the route is curved, it is meant to be the shortest line between the two points, hence the expression “as the crow flies”.

Providing that you choose the right cities (I have not tested all countries), it may also show a land route in a different color.  This worked well even for my small hometown in the USA and another American city.  But it didn’t work for Japanese locations; it only showed the shortest route.

The site has other related tools, and a cool one is called map tunneling.  It allows you to choose a location on Earth, and then see where you’d be if you tunneled through the center of the planet and ended up on the other side.

With summer break just around the corner, perhaps you’ve been thinking of overseas trips, whether to visit friends & family or to go elsewhere for festivities and recreation.  What about the problem of jet lag, upon landing in that faraway land or upon return to Japan?  What can be done?

Well, The Japan Times has an article on this, if only a brief one to plug a New Zealand product (No Jet Lag). Read the rest of this entry »

In the May issue of English Teaching Professional magazine, Simon Brown has a list for all teachers.  It’s an A to Z list of classroom management and relationships, and I found it to be very useful, if not a simple reminder of things to do from time to time.  Simon is a CELTA tutor, trainer, and assessor, in case you’re wondering.

He presents this list during CELTA training, but finds no reason to keep it from experienced teachers as well.  I agree, and here it is.  (I don’t understand some, but I never took Simon’s course.  However, I especially like B, K, N, O, P, R, T, and X.) Read the rest of this entry »

The 147th TOEIC will be given soon. Test takers should have already registered.  The test is scheduled for 28 June, and it will be held in Sapporo (but not Obihiro).

For those people who did not register but want to take TOEIC soon, the next exam is scheduled for 26 July.  Registration is on currently, but it ends on 17 June, so hurry!  As with the other test, this one will be in Sapporo but not Obihiro.

If these times are ever inconvenient, you might want to consider asking ETS or your institution whether they can set up a special time to administer the institutional TOEIC.  They will need a certain minimum number of guaranteed test-takers, of course.

In case you didn’t know, June 30 is the deadline for Americans to let the U.S. Treasury know what money you have in your foreign bank accounts.  A recent discussion group message cited a newspaper article in the South China Morning Post (otherwise available only through subscription).  Essentially, the Feds are clamping down on knowing where you keep your money if it’s over $10,000 overseas. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wanted students to use a web site, but even though the site was free, students still had to register?  That little task can often be a daunting one for non-native English learners.  Heck, I have similar problems understanding the fields on Japanese sites where I need to register, so I can empathize!

I can’t offer advice on teaching students to learn what fields mean on registration forms; that’s something you have to teach yourself.  However, when it comes to another aspect of the registration process, I can offer a couple of potential fixes. Read the rest of this entry »

Star Tech.  That’s probably as good a name as any for this jewel of a site I found, courtesy of the ETJ listserv on Yahoo.  Check out what Russell Stannard has put together on his site modestly and unassumingly entitled Teacher Training Videos.

These are all “how-to” vids he made to help us teachers learn to use many of those technological sites, programs, and other assorted goodies that involve more than chalkboard and paper.  In his site, you’ll find such topics as:

• How to use Twitter, Audacity, Flickr, Blogger and more.
• Mind-mapping tools Read the rest of this entry »
  Tags: technology, training, videos

Once again, the JLPT exam is coming up (July 5th).  Whether you’re prepared to take it or not, here is some assistance from an article in The Japan Times.

Basically, it’s a listing of 7 web sites.  The article calls them the “best free Web tools”.  Judge for yourself.  The categories are as follows:

• writing/vocabulary (smart.fm [formerly "iknow", it offers flashcards even for cell phones], lang-8 [a journal writing site])
• listening (eduFire [classes of 1-100 students via webcam], iTunes [with its collection of Japanese podcasts])
• reading/grammar (Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar [in 11 languages], JGram [a wiki of sorts], Rikaichan [a program to let you run your cursor over Japanese words to get their definitions])

Got any more that you like to use?  Leave a comment!