Today was the Tokyo version of the Kobe JET Programme renewers conference I did last month, which both together had about 1,000 participants. As usual it was a different vibe in Tokyo to Kobe ( bigger city, so people are more dispersed I guess), and things were overall very good. I did, however, mess up…

One of the great things about Genki English is all the amazing ideas people send in to share with everyone. Sometimes they take a bit of work to make public ( especially things with copyrights of images etc.), but they are always really good ideas. Today I finally managed to get Atley Jonas’ Days of…

One of the other workshops I attended last week in Kobe was on storytelling in the classroom. Funnily enough when I looked at the name of the presenter, it was Hamish Buchan from the British Council. The British Council, in various countries, have been really great over the last year or so ( have a…

Yesterday, after having meetings all morning ( lots of new stuff coming up on the site!), in the afternoon I popped along to some of the ALT workshops to see what was going on. The first one was by an elementary school ALT, Stein Setvik from Nagahama City Elementary English Program in Shiga Prefecture, and…

Today was this year’s Kobe Conference for recontracting members of the Japanese governments’ JET programme. This was the 4th year I’ve been asked to present here, but quite a few things have changed, so it was almost like doing it for the first time. First of all there was no AJET info fair, so I…

I made a couple of big changes to the site today. The first is splitting the printed/laminated picture card packs in two. Quite a few people already have the cards for CDs 1 to 4, but were getting fed up with the all the hassles of printing out lots of the new ones. After trying…