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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
I’ve got a favour to ask! Most teachers already know about GenkiEnglish, but in order to keep things going I really need the average person on the street to know about it. The idea being as we’ll sell more CDs, the prices will come down, everyone will speak great English and I can get back to making you lots of new materials rather than spending my time promoting the site.
So how can you help? Well, the Apple iTunes store today added the Genki English adults songs to its free podcast list! If enough people subscribe to it ( it’s free after all), then hopefully it will get to the top of the podcast download list and get lots of attention! So please tell your friends and older students to have a look, and be part of something very exciting! Please.
To find the podcast, go to the Music Store section of iTunes, then do a search for GenkiEnglish (without the space), and select podcast. You’ll then be able to download it for free. I’ve also included Japanese explanations of each song, so it is actually a really good resource. Students can also find it by searching for “英会話” ( eikaiwa). So please have a listen and try and download it! If you don’t have the iTunes software, you can download it for free from the Apple website at http://www.itunes.com
I try not to ask too much of the Genki English readers, but I’d really appreciate the help on this one. Thanks!
NEW: if you have iTunes installed you can now simply click on this link:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=81273681&s=143462&i=1048985
I’m very happy today that I can announce a new Genki English book! There’s always a delay between finishing a project and actually getting it out there, and sometimes the shine wears off in the meantime. So today I went and had another look at the real printed Black & White Minicards book, and it’s like Christmas morning again! I love this book!
Last year when we reprinted the CD4 worksheet book the printers came up with the most amazing glossy paper for it. Ever since, I’ve been wanting to produce something to go in the Superpack that would give it a visual boost, as you can’t really hear the CDs in a bookstore. The thing is that colour was out as it was too expensive, and trials of the kids workbooks failed as teachers were paying too much attention to them at the expense of the kids actually talking, and it took till this Summer for the penny to drop and think of doing the mini cards as a real life black and white book! So now it’s really easy ( and cheap!) for you to do copies for all your kids to play with.
It took a lot of time over Summer putting it together as I basically had to re-do a lot of the artwork in order to make it into an outline form, rather than greyscale, so that kids can easily colour it in. One advantage of this though is that I also redid the A4 cards which you can download from the site. They are all now funkied up, especially the weather cards! And as Genki English is distributed in lots of different ways these days, I also couldn’t mention the new book on the website until everyone’s stocks were updated. So if you bought a Superpack or 5 CD Set this month you probably got this book for free anyway! For everyone else, you can purchase it online or get it for free with the Superpack ( remember to ask your school to pay!) or 5 CD Set. The larger Maruzen bookstores should also be carrying it, so you can get it without post and packing ( but you might have to order it!).
And the other thing I can announce is that we are now shipping even funkier new Superpack cases, with a groovy carrying handle to make it easy to carry around, and the inside has been redesigned to make it easier to get to the CDs and books. With all the stuff in there now it really does feel like a SUPERpack, and is worth every penny of the 24,000 yen.
Right, so it’s back now to making the next set of surprise materials!
Whatever I’ve done for the last few days the computers just keep crashing. I haven’t had this for ages. Today not just Cubase, but even Flash crashed! I can’t get anything done! I tell you what though there is so much work that goes into the Genki English software, I keep wondering when other people are going to come out with a similar thing, but I don’t think anyone would be mad enough to sit through cutting up so many audio files, not to mention the coding work, which is driving me mad with all these crashes.
And no beach to destress on this week. : (
Back in Japan now, and for the life in me I can’t think why on Earth I’m back here - it is soooo expensive. After living in Thailand for a couple of weeks, Just things like water and coffee just seem crazy! Plus the weather is so muggy, you can’t even sit out to eat. Oh well, never mind.
It was cool being in Thailand and getting back into the music side of things, so that’s helping out with this new project. I also picked up a couple of copies of Future Music magazine, and they are so cool in that they now have hour long videos on the DVD showing producers at work. Brilliant stuff! Video certainly is the way to learn!
My brother and his girlfriend are also over here in Thailand having a holiday, so it’s cool to be able to show them round in my time off. And we decided to head off to the jungle of Kao Sok national park, which is pretty cool to say the least! The only problem is I can’t record here, the animals make a lot of noise! But that’s cool.
I’m on Ko Samui, sat by the beach updating my blog via Wi-Fi. The World is changing!
It’s great being back in Thailand, just being in Bangkok having meetings and chatting over dinner, everything is about “possibilities” and groovy things that can be done, instead of the Japanese idea of “hmmm, tsshh, oooo, it’s too difficult!”. With all the great people here, there’s so much potential for doing lots of cool things!
And I’ve only been in Samui a day and have had some great new ideas for the new project I’m working on while I’m here. For the first time in ages computer work is actually going to be fun!
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