Blind Cricket

Here is a clip about how the visually impaired can still play cricket.

Re PowerPoint

On Saturday I did an advanced PowerPoint course at CityU. I was unable to do a basic PowerPoint course, I guess I will have to pick that up from somewhere. I did not realize how much you could do with PowerPoint. At Christmas I switched from Open Office to MS Office and started using MS Word. In January I was required to work with Excel, and now PowerPoint. They are all from the same stable which means a lot of the buttons do the same thing. I thought that text dancing across the screen was pretty cool. However, animations, music to suit, the occasional drum roll, the odd movie popped in for good measure. There is a lot more to PowerPoint than I was aware of. I was transfixed by the displays. I teach the younger students and I imagine that they would be transfixed as well. I think I will go to You Tube to try and find basic PowerPoint tutorial. Probably the most useful button in PowerPoint/Excel/Word is the ? button, the help files, they may have the answer to your question right there !

Just a point

I used to work at a language training centre where they used computers and You Tube a lot. The parents wanted instant results with the computer games their children played in class. Second Life could hardly be called a quick fix, it is very much a long term thing. So, how do you explain that to the parents ?

Hungry ?

If you are hungry today just remember there are some people out there who are even hungrier than you are !
Go and visit The Hunger Site and make a donation of food at no cost to yourself. There are other sites there as well, go and visit them and donate.

The National Palace Museum Taipei,

If anybody gets the chance to go to Taipei, do go and see the National Palace Museum. This has the world's largest collection of Chinese artifacts. When my ancestors were dodging wolves and bears in England, Chinese people were writing, painting, making exquisite bronze pots and creating all sort of artifacts. If you are Chinese, go and see the museum, if you are not Chinese, go and see it anyway ! Gong Hay Fat Choi !

The FBI has developed new technology to save the world from terrorism, click here for a demonstration !

An Inital Proposal

I have some serious reservations about “Games” such as Second Life. In Bangkok in 1994 I used a game with students called The Oregon Trail. This proved to be extremely popular with the students, less so with the administrative staff and probably the parents. By and large Thais are extremely conservative. I would imagine that many parents might object to “games” being played by their children. To be truthful regarding Second Life I have only had a brief glimpse of it. Judging by some of my peers comments on their blogs they got a lot further with it than I did. A trip around the Globe Theatre for instance really intrigued me. If it fired my imagination, I wonder if it would fire a student’s imagination. Judging by my experience in Bangkok in 1994 I would have said that students would be fascinated by it. Perhaps field trips could be organized with trips around the world without ever having left the classroom. Maybe students could keep blogs about their travels.

My guess is my generation is probably the last generation that has not had constant exposure to computers. Things have changed a lot with computers. In 1990 I helped a woman buy a PC. It had a large hard disk by the standards of those days, 20Mb. Nowadays computers are far smaller, far quicker and with massive capacities by comparison. Further in a few more years they will have improved further.

In the past I have given ex students my e mail and Windows Live Messenger and SKYPE name. Very few students bother to keep in touch. With hind sight keeping a history of conversations would be a really good idea. http://thefoomeister.blogspot.com/ has a suitable caution about online behavior on dated 31 January 2010. I wonder if SL allows you to speak and listen to other players you meet. If anybody has information on that please let me know.

What I would propose is taking a more in depth look at SL, particularly with a view to being able to talk and listen, (maybe this could be done with another programme like SKYPE running in a different window. One thing that I think was very relevant was SL is not the sort of game (?) that you would be able to spend 20 minutes with and be able to do anything useful. I would imagine it would take many sessions just to master the controls. Then again maybe the students would be able to lead their teacher around and show them how to do things. The question then would be who was helping who ? The answer might just be does it matter ?

Voice of America

Here is a link to a page on Voice of America http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2010-01-30-voa2.cfm it has a streaming MP3 function so you can listen to the reading.
The reading is a bit slow in my opinion. However, I do believe it has potential. Text could be deleted to make a cloze test. Lara mentioned in her blog http://huiren1983.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-proposal-for-action-plan.html
that she felt the BBC spoken English was too fast. Maybe the answer is to switch to VoA. Maybe students could read and listen to the text from the VoA article above and then record their version.

Reading children's stories

To back up my suggestion for reading poetry, well why not children's stories.
There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats. That was a quote by Rat.
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GraWind.html
Maybe story telling at CityU would be good for us, any comments ?

Re conference call

I would like to start a poetry reading group on the campus in the gardens. There are small shelters there, near a babbling stream (OK so it is artificial, but you can't win them all). Maybe those interested could meet with some tea or coffee and read and listen. However as Robbie pointed out we are all busy. SKYPE has a conference call system. Maybe interested parties should try this as well. I have used SKYPE for years but never used that function. Can anybody throw light on it ?

Hail !

All hail Streaker Foomeister !

Re old computers

So some folk have many computers, and some have none. I have an old computer sitting in my drawer that needs fixing. I wonder how many geeks or non geeks have old dead or not so dead computers lying around. I used to work for Acer in Taiwan and they used to do part exchange deals. The engineers would build bitza computers. I wonder if smart guys could teach their students how to get dead computers working and then donate them to needy children. I noticed a web site that recycles old printers, it sells cheap ink as well. INK-HK.COM

An ex workmate lived in a very affluent area in Hong Kong. People would dump their unwanted computers. She would take a screwdriver and take the hard disk, the price was right as well !

Poetry reading

If anybody was disappointed by Wednesday's poetry reading what about doing one outside on the campus, when we have time ? I guess we are all a bit too busy these days.

Second Life

This was a new one on me. It did cross my mind that a history lesson might just become far more interesting if the students could actually visit any sites of study. March with the Roman army maybe ? A biology lesson where the student goes into the pond to study the life cycle of a frog? This has a lot of potential. A geography lesson where the student could go into an active volcano? What ever next ? Years ago I had a Land Rover, I worked on it but did not really understand how the engine worked until I stripped out an engine and took it apart. Now, if I had the opportunity of wandering around inside a working engine, I would have understood it a lot better. It took me a long time to figure out how a differential worked, it would have been quicker if had been able to clamber inside a virtual differential. In the end I would rebuild differentials that the Land Rover specialists would not touch.

Odd ways of learning English

One of my contacts in Shenzhen, China learned her English by watching Prison Break. An odd way but I had no problems understanding her. Does anybody know of any other odd ways of learning English ?

What have the Romans ever done for us ?

OK so what have the Chinese ever done for us?
Paper, gunpowder, sunglasses, food, medicine, a sail, wheelbarrows, a writing system, the rocket.
Can anybody add to that ?

British English

At the risk of infuriating the vast majority of British English teachers who insist that British English is the correct form of English, I would suggest that English is just a language. It does not matter where it comes from, or what accent is used as long as it is understandable. This is clearly demonstrated by this advert


This demonstrates that beer helps students master the correct pronunciation. Maybe the good professor from Singapore who conducts phonology classes at CityU could kindly provide huge quantities of beer to assist his students master pronunciation. I would have said that about 99.9999% of English vocabulary is the same the world over. There are small differences between American English and British English, way too small to be of any major significance.

Regarding artwork

Often there is incidental English used in artwork classes. Example the students want a red crayon so they have to ask for it. Children can be very creative, far more so than I am ! I would show them how to do the artwork and then hide it as I did not want them to copy my feeble attempts. In the UK I picked up some plastic cookie cutters from A to Z. Just right for using with Play Dough. Play Dough sets are readily available at toy shops. It is a good way of encouraging manual dexterity. Origami would be another great activity. Some artwork can be taken home, this is good a PR exercise. Often children are enthralled by such artwork activities. Sometimes the results are unpredictable, eg green elephants in a picture, however I am not one to say that green elephants are wrong or bad. If a child wants a colourful creature, flower, or a pink sky, well they are being very creative indeed ! If the artwork is displayed at the school it greatly encourages the students. Often artwork materials are all around us. Scrap cardboard, old clothes and material, photos, food containers and such like. Plastic containers with lids can have a few beans put inside them and have the lid glued on and they make great rattles. Sometimes very young children will select those in preference to commercially made rattles. Recycling is also very ecological, further the price is right ! A discarded jar can become a thing of wonder when it has a few beans planted in it to show children how plants grow. Plastic bottles can be made into hanging plant pots. Discarded 20 litre plastic buckets that contained paint or detergent make very good plant pots, they would do well for giant sunflowers !

String and rope can be used to show students how to tie knots. Some shoes still have shoelaces ! As a teacher you may be breaking new ground if you show your students how to tie knots, now there is a point, knot and not are spelled very differently but they sound the same !

My sewing abilities originated when I was at primary school and we had to make a puppet out of papier mache. The puppets clothes had to be sewn ! Papier mache is in itself a dying handicraft. The price of it is right, try and use it if you can. It could be used to make wonderful masks for school plays !

Arts and crafts

To get ideas for arts and crafts have a look at MTR stations in Hong Kong. Sometimes they display local schools' arts and crafts. Flowers made with cardboard and paper, painted in the hues the children like. Arts and crafts can be sometimes be very revealing.

I have seen the arts and crafts created by Cambodian and Burmese children in refugee camps. An American artist would take art materials and show the children how to use them. The children would paint and draw wonderful pictures, sometimes tragic pictures that man, let alone children should not have seen. It was a release for some of them, like therapy.

One Christmas I invested serious money (25HKD) on a sushi Play Dough set. I thought that the children might enjoy playing with it. I was right on that one ! Suddenly all the children were creating small dishes of Play Dough sushi, the teacher's assistants were using all making sushi as well, oh yes, and so was I, it was great fun for all ! One boy, who had been somewhat disruptive, suddenly wanted to tell me about his trips to Japan and how he loved sushi. This was the most communicative he had ever been. If you teach young children Play Dough will make an excellent activity for them. Play Dough is cheap to buy, if you need lots of it you can make it. Search for a recipe on Google.

On one occasion I showed the children how to make a butterfly by folding a piece of paper in half and cutting out a shape of half a butterfly. I opened up the butterfly and applied paint to half of the butterfly and folded it together again, and sort of squished it a bit. I then opened it up so the children could see the finished product. Then I would hide the butterfly as I did not want them to copy my butterfly. Every butterfly was different, this is the way it should be.

If you need ideas for art activities, YouTube is a good place to look ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJNj1AVFcrg Every time you find a useful site go to "More From: XXX" and see if there is anything else that you like there. If there is something you like save it to a hard disk rather than saving the link. Links sometimes get removed, it would be unfortunate if you were going to rely on a link that had been removed.

Magic, juggling and balloon modelling

I usually teach the younger students. I have been using magic, juggling and balloon modelling for years. Of the three by far the easiest to master is balloon modelling. To a young child a balloon is really exciting. A balloon made into something is even more exciting. They make wonderful prizes. Balloon modelling is a win win sort of thing as even if the model does not work out as planned it is fun. I suspect that face painting would be very good with the younger student as well.