To begin with, I am not aware of any reliable statistics. I can only draw on my personal experience and summarize a number of related Google search results. It is obvious, I hope, that it is impossible to spend more than 3 clock hours talking without a break. I guess that’s the maximum. As for the minimum, an online lesson can be as long as a regular phone call, i.e. it can last for as...
‘Spent the day contemplating Clarke’s e-note-taking advice. Isn’t it amazing? They’ve got it all online but for proper note-taking tools. I mean Moodle doesn’t have such a module or activity as a notebook. Nor does Blackboard Vista. Well, they do have blogs and notes sections, but they’re so-o badly designed that I do not want to comment. What would one want...
Whenever I come across a book on web-based learning tools and technologies that seems remotely relevant to my current objectives, it talks about tools and technologies that are either as old as the hills and ever so often do not exist any more, or have been replaced by or evolved to to be something completely different. And that makes the whole experience rather painful, because it is certainly...
I wonder whether it is really that necessary to be able to read and describe graphs in a foreign language. I have been teaching this skill for several years now, always going into minute detail, and can say that very few people actually need it in their jobs. They usually spend a few weeks learning all the possible collocations with synonyms of increase and decrease and the degrees of comparison...
I am teaching elementaries this year – this is very unlike me for I find this level somewhat tedious to teach. To make matters worse, instead of two nationalities, I’ve got four – it is a real challenge, for I do understand what sort of problems Russians and Estonians might encounter in terms vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation, but I am at a loss when it comes to...
I guess everyone has got a few pet peeves. Mine are marking creative writing assignments submitted by my students and having to take a smelly tram home (the latter can only be avoided if I choose to walk or take a taxi instead, both of which I quite often do, especially the latter when it’s freezing cold outside). Another thing that drives me up the wall is that I can’t make myself...
