It’s official.  The Japan Times has just reported (a month before the original plan was to come into effect, mind you) that foreigners will not be rejected for visa renewals / extensions or for a change of status of residence if they do not present their cards for national health insurance. So, even if you have such insurance and did not know you were supposed to bring it, this means you won’t have to go home and return to complete business at immigration, either.

Previous blog entry on this topic can be found here.

Sometimes it is convenient to have separate bookmarks for computer links on your home vs. office computers. I mean, there are various links you want bookmarked at home that you really don’t need at work, and vice versa.

But what if you really want to have access to them? You might have spent a great deal of time finding the links themselves, let alone organizing them into various folders. Well, you can now share bookmarks between computers.  Go to the Xmarks homepage. What you will need to do is register (free and fast) for an account (all you need is an account name, password, and email address), and then install the free bookmark sync.

Once that is done, the bookmarks from that computer are stored so that when you install the same bookmark sync on another computer (after logging into your new account), you can open those bookmarks separately or merge them with the existing ones on that second computer.

I usually spend spring break working on upcoming spring semester course plans and reading research on TEFL. If you are wondering how to be a more effective teacher, you might want to read a recent article in The Atlantic magazine “What makes a great teacher?”

It is a bit slow reading at first, not quite getting to the meat of the topic, but then it hits you. It’s not just for EFL or ESL teachers, either. In fact, it’s not made specifically for any teacher. It just shows what some research results has come up with for what teachers have to do to make their students excel.

You can read the text and also see 4 videos on The Motivator, The Tour Guide, The Manager, and The Connector — 4 types of teachers.

Thanks to Micki Y. for bringing this article to my attention.

If you are still planning lessons, and not making or giving or correcting final exams, you might want to take advantage of the Olympics for ideas.  Teacher Planet has a few all ready for you.

Teach students not to say “play ski”, for starters.

A lot of extensive reading’s purported success relies on the use of graded readers. Penguin, Oxford, Scholastic, Cambridge, Macmillan, and others have them. Some include audio CDs to enhance the learning process (and add some fun). But where does one start? What levels are appropriate for students?

This is where the “fun” really comes in. Choosing the right level for each student can be difficult. To read fluently, one needs to understand at least 95% of the words on a page. So, a down-and-dirty technique might be to have students read a page from several levels and tell them to choose the one where they know all except 2-3 words on a page.

That doesn’t always work because the size of the font may put a vastly different number of words on a page, and just going by vocabulary excludes any knowledge of grammar. So, you might want to give your students one of the tests put out by Penguin. They have one for Read the rest of this entry »

Is there a connection?  Well, yes, says Mike Guest. Look at the Groundhog’s Day story in the Yomiuri Shimbun, and you’ll see. Mike says in speed dating one makes judgments in mere seconds whether the person on the other side of the table is compatible, and when we begin our classes, students may react similarly depending on how we present ourselves.

See his tips for what to do and not to do. Newcomers and veterans alike will probably benefit.

Amid all the turmoil and forum discussions on the topic of health insurance, and despite the two articles posted on this blog here and here about the topic as it relates to visa renewal, The Japan Times just came out with the following article:

New visa rule on insurance to be deleted

Some readers may be happy to learn that, according to the Japan Times the new guidelines slated to be released April 1st will be rewritten Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, you still have a couple of lessons to go before final exams. Thinking of how to fill the time (not kill it)? Look at the TeacherPlanet web site. You’ll find some good tips. On their calendar page alone, you can see major dates around the world, so if you’ve forgotten about certain holidays back home, it’s a nice reminder. The site provides lots of activities and ideas to accompany those holidays, too.

Social scientists like us teachers are obligated to use the APA guidelines to publish most of our work. Nobody finds such guidelines easy to follow, and the publisher has just come out with a new (6th) edition of the book. What can we helpless writers do to keep up?

Read the APA book itself, whether you have the 5th edition or 6th edition.

Too hard?  Too expensive? Use the APA online formatting guide put out by the Purdue OWL site.

Another online site that is far more extensive is Read the rest of this entry »

This is a tip I found in the November 2009 issue of English Teaching Professional. An article by Mauricio Shiroma (It’s hip to be square!) talks about a nice feature of Google.

Google Squared (find by typing in www.google.com/squared) allows you to do searches on categories of things (keywords = movies, animals, music, planets, etc.) and then GS will automatically come up with a table of information including pictures. Read the rest of this entry »