Suitable material for students ?

How Stuff Works I wonder if this web site would be good for the curious student ?
Oxfam say that if you give a starving man a fish you feed his family for a day. If you teach a starving man how to fish you feed his family for a life time.

I used to have a deaf student who could lip read in English and Cantonese, I found it all a bit mind boggling. Sometimes she did not know what a word meant, she made the mistake of asking me what a word meant, I would not answer her but I would pass her the keyboard and direct her to OneLook.com. I helped her to help herself.

Knock offs

When I lived in Shenzhen I did suffer from the plague of fake goods there. This was often the case with dodgy hardware such as flash RAMs that suddenly did not work anymore. They looked like the real thing but suddenly they would stop working, usually when you needed it to work the most. I had an MP3 player that stopped working after a few months. Not so good. For that reason I used to shop for electronics in Hong Kong. Many Chinese mothers do not like using Chinese formula (baby milk) due to the various scandals, such as putting chemicals into milk powder. It strikes me that China needs to improve its quality control if it is to capture more of the world market for its goods.

Copyright

We covered copyright in Monday's class. In 1995 I taught at a school in Bangkok. The school used photocopies of an entire book. This book was not cherished by staff and students alike. On a practical side when it came to teaching colours, how do you teach when all the colours were various shades of grey ? This was where I used my picture dictionary. Taiwan and China had much the same attitude as Thailand, photocopies of entire books were good enough. There is not much incentive for the author to produce work if it is promptly photocopied. I do not think the odd page being photocopied would be a problem. If I wrote a book I would be pretty annoyed if it was promptly copied by a school and I got no money for it whatsoever. It would destroy the incentive to produce original material. Thus overall the standard of material available would fall drastically.

The Government of the HKSAR has amended the copyright law to permit greater flexibility for teachers and students. A reasonable amount of copyright material is allowed to be included in presentations and lessons. Hong Kong's Amended Copyright Law states that fair could be the following "A teacher including a short clip of a film which is not being currently shown in cinemas, for illustration in his teaching presentation. The title of the film, the producer and the principal director must be acknowledged.". Thus if a teacher screened all of Avatar as an end of term treat for their class might find themselves behind bars. A brief clip of Flash Gordon with acknowledgments would not.

It was noticeable that British English was used and further the document was gender specific. I suspect a female teacher might well have a job arguing in court that the law did not apply to her and that she had not breached the Amended Copyright Laws.

Also mentioned was for an Intranet suitable security measures were in force and the copyright material was deleted after a year.

If a teacher or a student was to photocopy or scan an entire book that was deemed too expensive, that certainly would breach copyright laws.
http://www.ipd.gov.hk/eng/intellectual_property/copyright/edu_guide.pdf.

Intellectual Property Department. (2007). Hong Kong's amended copyright law: a guide for teachers and students. Retrieved 28 December, 2007. from http://www.ipd.gov.hk/eng/intellectual_property/copyright/edu_guide.pdf.

Re Windows Live SkyDrive

Last night one of my peers left her flash RAM in the computer. Fortunately for her I saw it and rescued it. This could have been catastrophic, indeed Claire lost her Flash RAM and had to rewrite all of her assignments. I am looking into using Windows Live SkyDrive as it has 25Gb storage for the right kind of price, that is free of charge. Maybe it is the flash RAM you cannot lose as long as you remember the password.
I have uploaded one of my assignments and will attempt to recover it at CityU today. It could well save all sorts of grief using SkyDrive.
To access SkyDrive sign into Windows Live. On the top task bar on the right there is a button called More. Click on that and then click on SkyDrive. Then you can upload or download stuff to SkyDrive, public or private viewing. To download stuff go to the Windows Live web site, sign in go to SkyDrive locate the document and download it. Your file will look like _your.file.docx_. Then you have to select a programme to open it. I have tried this for small files and big files. Small files upload and download quickly. Big files take a lot longer, so don't throw away your flash RAMs quite yet, and don't lose them either !

April Fool's day is near !

You will notice that this is from the BBC so it has to be true !

The English Club

The English Club is site that may help you or your students.

Singapore versus Hong Kong

This is the song from Singapore that has caused rivalry between the two countries, oops country and SAR.



This was the response from the Hong Kong Wokstarz.



So, what song do you prefer ? Comments please !

Timing

New teachers should always wear a watch. After a while you know when to start finishing a lesson. I worked in Taipei with a teacher who overran a class by 30 minutes. We were doing back to back teaching so his next class was short change by 30 minutes and so was mine.

Second Life

Here is a quickstart guide for Second life.

Hail to a redundant technology ?

“A book is a wonderful thing, it doesn't care what you look like, your race, or your social status. Yet it offers the same treasures to all who are wise enough to seek it out.”

On line literature resource

Here is an online literature resource. There are a few books in this web site so there might be something for everybody.

A picture dictionary

I have always found picture dictionaries very useful. Anyway have a look at this picture dictionary maybe you can use it. Here is a dictionary and here is a thesaurus. Free Rice is a way of bolstering your vocabulary or maybe your students vocabulary.

Re reading for week 7 by Liou

A response to Practical Considerations for Multimedia Courseware Development: an EFL IVD Experience. Hsien-Chin Liou.

In Taipei in 1998 I was drafted into transcribing some of the scenes from the movie The Mask. Every time I missed a word I would have to replay the movie and I would have to go back about 7 minutes and watch again and try and transcribe the word. The net result was it took a lot of time to transcribe even a small clip of the movie. Liou describes a technique called IVD Interactive Video Disk. This article was written nearly 6 years ago, so I would expect that the technology has vastly improved since then, a 486 and 8Mb of RAM was mentioned. One of the movies being used to developed this was Ghostbusters. This is all very well but some would argue that this was a bit dated. Today's blockbuster is tomorrow's old movie. Maybe now the technology has evolved so that Hollywood's latest can be used in the classroom almost immediately. It strikes me that students would really enjoy this sort of activity. It did mention that lay teachers would be able to use the software. That would be a huge plus IMHO. Quizzes can be constructed, there seems to be many options for students to interact. If this sort of thing could be used with the latest popular movies I am sure it would be very useful indeed. The bottom line is will the students like it ? Esperanto is the perfect language, regular verbs, easy to use, the only trouble being hardly anybody uses it so it is worthless.