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 Printable Lesson Plans Genki English CDs:  Volume 1  Volume 2  Volume 3  Volume 4  Volume 5  Volume 6   New CD Vol. 7   MP3 Songs |
Take any problem in the World and it's invariably caused ( or made worse)
by a lack of education. Too many kids hate school because it's too boring.
The aim of Genki Learning is to have all subjects in all countries taught
in a fun, engaging and effective way. There are already a few million kids
benefiting from this, and even a whole country where the government has
put it in all their schools. But there's still a long way to go!
While I'm on the road you'll hear about my travels & workshops, and
when I'm doing studio work I'll keep you up to date with ideas, updates
to the site and some of my favourite teaching resources. So if you want
to find out what's it's like behind the scenes or how & why I do what
I do or even if you're just nosey or a bit bored, have a read.
I'll update the diary as often as I can, so keep coming back. And of course
whilst I'm away, the office staff are always ready to send off your CD orders just as soon as you send them in!
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Previous Entries are here
Finished work at two and started work at 7 (it’s strange waking up at that time of the morning, I didn’t realise it was so light then!). There was a post on the discussion board asking about the Theory behind Genki English and I realised there isn’t much about it on the site - I guess I was just asking people to trust my research! So I started a reply back but it ended up massively long!! It is good to get everything written down though, but it’s so long I need to edit it up a bit more, a bit more time please!
I also got some fantastic emails today, including one from South Africa and one from the JETs in Saga asking us to do their mid year conference. Very often the only people who we hear talking about Genki English are the people who moan (usually high school JETs saying the site’s not suitable for them - please tell us some ideas you use and we’ll put them on the site. It’s not just Elem School, I’m quite happy to put up info for all teachers!). But it’s so great to hear from the people who use the site everyday and the comments they had were just great (things like “I think this idea ROCKS!!!!!!! ” & “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”) , need I say more! We’re really looking forward to coming down there!
Then it was time to get everything ready for our 3 day tour of Tottori and getting ready for the 7 hour drive up here! Mind you it is freezing! I packed my long trousers but I wish I’d have brought a sweater, all I have is Ehime T-shirts!!
Took my computer back today! When I bought it I said I wanted a fast laptop to do video editing on, but the one I bought, a Dunamis, wouldn’t work well except when it was plugged into the mains! Not too good for a laptop! But full marks to the computer store, Applied, who were great about the whole thing. I also ended up buying a whole load more stuff including another 160Gb hard drive. It is really silly what we can do with computers theses days! So then I felt really relaxed, I’d been worrying about my computer for a month now and wishing it would work, so now I’ll use my old LaVie computer (totally brilliant!) and be content in thinking how much money I’ve saved! My LaVie (NEC) is great, I hated the Sony I had before, but loved the Sharp Mebius before that! With all the travelling I do my computer is my life, it’s my work, my studio, my telephone home, my music and even my TV (my brother records all the good English TV during the year and then I put it in my computer at Xmas) so it’s got to be good! I was also thinking about where to live , and I reckon Okinawa could be a nice place. The upshot of being homeless is that I can live anywhere, so why not somewhere that’s supposed to be paradise? Plus I like the fact that everyone gets up late and works at night!! : ) But then I went out for lunch in Ehime in a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the sea. The sun was shining over the waves and with the palm trees in the foreground and the mountains in the background it looked so great. I wish Ehime could be like this all year round! This is actually one great thing about Japan, you actually get 3 Summers. One is the Japanese spring, which is just like an English Summer, then the Japanese Summer which is like the Mediterranean and then you get another English Summer in October! So find somewhere to go in the Winter months and your sorted! Spent the evening (till 2 AM) doing some more work including a cool new search engine for the site. This one is made by atomz.com and even works in Japanese, so for the first time the Japanese version of the site has a decent search engine!
Tomorrow is the final day before I have to decide whether to take my new computer back. So last night I spent till 7AM trying to do as much of the high end editing and animation that I can to see how it compares to my older computer. And to be honest for the amount of money it cost I don’t think it is really up to the task! So I spent the rest of the day backing up data to DVDs (video editing takes a lot of space!) and also went out for dinner in the evening with a mate who was over from the States.
I travel too much! I had two days solid to get some editing down, and more important to get into a “video editing” frame of mind. And today I have to change to be in “travelling mode”. But I really need to get some time to get some new things produced!! : ( So I’m sat on the high speed boat from Fukuoka to Matsuyama catching up on my email and the diary. The crazy thing here is the price, compared with just jumping from one Japanese island to another it would have actually been cheaper to fly back to Korea!!
Excellent! A few weeks ago I found the most amazing piece of software called “It’s me” ( www.reallusion.com ) that has these brilliant 3D animations. They instantly gave me tonnes of inspiration to come up with a series of action packed cartoon clips for the DVDs. I was thinking of doing “cutie, cutie” ones for little kids, because that’s what everyone wants, but everybody else does that and the Genki English curriculum is aimed at Elementary School kids so let’s make it “cool”! Today I finally got permission to use the software on the DVDs so provided I have enough time to get everything sorted these should work out pretty good!! The rest of the day was spent editing and decided what to do about my computer! I seem to have spent a whole month on this. I bought a mega cool 3Ghz mega fast laptop a few weeks ago but it is only a little bit faster than my normal notebook, plus it doesn’t work with all my hard drives unless I connect it to the mains supply. But for the amount of money I paid it should work a lot better than this!! Hmmm
Right I have two days to get some serious work done before i have to travel again (my schedule is crazy!). So here we go with editing the DVD and making it look really Genki! I also updated the website with the stuff I produced in Korea (including a new phonics game ) and sent out the Japanese newsletter.
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