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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
The Halloween Picture Book has been a huge success this week. So in the spirit of “things are better out there rather than stuck on my hard drive” I’m putting up lots of the new picture books in the “Discussion & Genki Community” section of the forum. A few of them are still in the testing stages ( e.g. decided which endings to go for etc.), but they are certainly very useable. Have a look at let me know what you think, it will hopefully inspire me to do some more, the feedback so far has!
Currently there are Family, Sports, How are you? & Days of the Week. ( CD Owners’ Username required. When you make a comment, you’ll need to register again, but make sure you create a new & different username!)
Just spent the last week on a fact finding and sorting things out trip into Asia.
Taiwan was cool, my first time there, and even though a lot of the country is still under developed, the central areas of Taipei seriously scream out “The Future!”. The whole sense of style in the buildings ( tallest in the World!), and things to buy ( the phones and laptops were light-years ahead of Japan and Europe), really makes it a vibrant city. English level is pretty bad, but many people speak excellent Japanese. Unlike Shanghai, where I found I could read a lot of things, they still use the old style of Chinese writing here, which did cause me quite a lot of not understandings. Certainly an interesting place for the future!
And as usual Hong Kong was nice and exciting, it still has the best nightscape in the World. So lots of future projects to look forward to in that part of the World, and I really have to get back to work on my Chinese!
Most of my energies over the last few years have been spread all over the country, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. But one place where I haven’t done much, outside of bookstore events, is in the capital Tokyo. So this week has been nice to have not one, but two workshops in real elementary schools.
As today’s workshop would be attended by a class of university teacher training students, the very nice lady in charge also asked me to do a kids demo class. Fair enough, except they chose 5th graders! I do have lots of stuff for 5th graders, but nothing that could be considered a “demo class”. I usually just do motivation stuff and using things like photos from my travels. I was also warned that some of the kids could be a little out of hand, but that most of them are very quiet and hard working. Actually I would have put the worrisome kids as being the quiet ones, noisy kids are never a problem!
In the event I needed have worried at all, they were as a model class as you could imagine and were so interactive, asking questions and making lots of very intelligent comments. The content was a straight by the book demo GE lesson, Rock, Paper, Scissors and Do you have any pets? plus lots of motivation stuff and self intro things and it worked great, with them bouncing out of the class demanding the teacher do the Gokiburi game with them next English lesson.
Then it was the teachers’ workshop, and one of the best ones I’ve ever had. As it’s term time we didn’t have much time and the teachers had lots and lots of questions. Usually when it’s all question time the teachers start getting all fidgety ( just like 5 year olds!), but here even without any activities or games they were totally into the whole philosophy of things. They were asking a lot of big questions and I was like “Do you want the light answer to that, or the deep one?”. To which they wanted the deep answers and it was great getting into proper teaching fundamentals as well as the more practical stuff.
The board of education were also very impressed and have invited me back. It would have been great to chat longer, but I had to catch my flight, and I had never seen so many people at Kawasaki station when I changed trains!
Right, tomorrow it’s off into Asia!
It’s great being back into term time. Summer is cool in that the workshops are lots of fun, but it’s nice to get all the new ideas into action. One project I’m working on at the moment is a book of lesson plans for all the GE themes. All the content is on the site, the problem is getting a cool A4 layout. Word is useless with its massive fonts and silly editing, Flash is cool but difficult to make master changes, and I’ve been looking for ages for a simple to use DTP package that has easy to use templates that look stunning.
Today I found it, “Pages”. 9,000 yen, very cheap ( Adobe is 100,000 yen!). The only problem? It’s Mac only!
As I was in town I popped into Bic Camera to ask if they had anything suitable for Windows. They showed me to the Microsoft rep, who was very nice and showed me lots of things, but ended up with “No, we don’t have anything as good as the Apple software”. Ah.
My laptop is getting a bit old now. It certainly looks it and is on the verge of melting through overheating nearly every day. So soon I’ll have to replace it. The new Mac laptops do have excellent specs these days ( until last year they were so slow). So I asked Bic Camera if they had any Windows machines that could match the specs of the top of the range 17″ Macbook Pro. We went round every manufacturer in the store, and they didn’t even have a machine that was more powerful than the one I’m using now, which is two years old!!! Some came close, and were half the price of the Mac, but even a ten percent speed increase or battery life has a massive impact when you spend 13 plus hours a day on the thing.
So after being disappointed with the PC side of things, I figured a trip along to the flagship Mac store in the Ginza was in order. The idea being to total up how much a new system would cost. After all the glossy “Mac cures everything” style website and brochures, with all their talk of “genius bars” and things, I was expecting to walk in there, tell them what I needed and if they happened to come up with an ideal package there was the possibility I would buy the set up there and then ( I need to get this new project started!). But the people in the store were lackluster to say the least. Isn’t the whole point of sales to listen to what the customer wants, find a product and make them super happy to walk away with it? Not here, it was “well, you can do this, or maybe this” and I’m like, “No, that’s not what I want”. “Hmm, well I’m not sure then”. They have the stuff I need, I’ve found it on the machines myself, but they instilled absolutely no confidence whatsoever in buying a machine from them.
So I left a bit fed up, looked a bit more on the web and found a free Windows DTP package.
Regular readers will know I’m fascinated with using Digital Whiteboards in Japanese schools. With so many teachers afraid of using computers ( or mice!), the thought of simply touching a picture on the wall and hear it talk is very appealing. The market is still wide open as, unlike Europe, a lot of schools don’t have them yet, and the ones that do never seem to use them, let alone know what they are!
So today I popped along to the Hitachi headquarters ( the biggest maker ) for a chat about how to use the ones that schools have ( very often they have thrown the cables and driver software away!) and to show them the GE software. If ever there was a piece of hardware in need of a killer app, this is it.
They also showed me all their funky new products, from a 100,000 yen system that simply clips onto an existing whiteboard, to the brand new plasma display ones, which are simply fantastic. It’s just a big plasma TV, but when you put up the GE software you can touch the screen to play the games, select the words and everything. It is so nice, the graphics look fantastic enlarged and eventhough it’s pricey ( about 2,000,000 yen for a system) it would be amazing for even the most terrified teachers, as it’s simply a TV you can touch, no fancy computer gear on view!
Have a look at the Hitachi site ( English - Japanese ) , there’s always the possibility your school has a budget set aside just for this type of thing. And even if they don’t, have a hunt around the school buildings, there might just be one locked away in some storage room because nobody knew how to use it!
It’s hot, it’s sunny and I’m on a pacific island and able to take a day off. The teacher who organised this week very kindly offered to let me crash another night and the plan was to do some sight seeing. Unfortunately the planes back to Tokyo tomorrow were all full. As were the ones this evening, which meant I had to leave at lunchtime Saturday. Oh well, it would have been nice. So it was back to Tokyo and this time Ueno as it was the only place I could find a hotel at such short notice. It’s a completely different mind set here, but it meant instead of a leisurely day by the beach, I did get a lot of work done, which I guess is better in the big picture of things.
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