Ebaby! Blog

Well, the Olympics are over and the Ebaby! team is back in the USA. But what a trip they had! Take a look at the English, baby! Olympics page for the videos.

While he was over in China, Jason Simms sent emails about his adventures to our friends at Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper. The posts behind the scenes and totally honest, since they’re for our hometown audience instead of our users. They make a good compliment to the official Ebaby! Olympic material. Here’s a quick breakdown of the six entries:

Opening Ceremony: “Everything is closed off for miles around the stadium. So we got as close as we could in a huge group of people up against a barricade in a park. It reminded me a scene in a zombie movie.”

Photo Ops: “I didn’t really know what was going on when the first person asked to take a photo with me—I thought vainly that I had been recognized from the website—but when a crowd gathered and we had to flee, I realized there had been a mistake.”

Ping Pong: “After being thwarted several times by the ubiquitous Olympic volunteers, we managed to reach the front row. There we discovered that we were sitting among the tennis coaching squad, who explained how the game works.”

Scalping: “He told me he’d rather just eat the ticket than give me a deal like that because it drives up the prices. He also wouldn’t let me film him. I wonder what the penalty for scalping in China is.”

Behind the Balls: “I talked to Superman of the Metal Balls and found out that he doesn’t even take tips—this is just his way of being a part of the Olympic spirit. It’s his dream to challenge an official Olympic athlete. The gold we awarded him was his first.”

Closing Thoughts: “I felt much more comfortable filming impromptu sports and interviews in Beijing than I do in Portland. Many people in the US seem to have a strange bias against cameras. They see a video camera and assume you’re doing something sinister. In Beijing, people pretty much always had a positive reaction to seeing a camera in a restaurant or on the street or in a market.”

How can I get my students to review vocabulary or grammar for hours? How can I get them to encounter the words hundreds of time? By making it fun! I have talked about taking advantage of students’ free time and using online games is yet another way to engage students during their free time.

Now, you could try to use normal games and make them educational. There are lots of ideas about how to make games educational by creating fill-in-the-blank tests from normal games for example. Read this excerpt from Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s article titled Adapting Online Computer Games for the Classroom:

Example: (from the MOTAS walkthrough game):
Level 1:
Look under the pillow to find the _1._ and take the _2._ from the wall Use the _1._ to open the _3._ . You will find a _4._ in the _5._
Missing words: locker, screwdriver, key, box, poster

That seems educational to me. And it also seems like a homework packet students wouldn’t mind doing in their free time. Here are some gaming sites recommended by Larry Ferlazzo for use in the ESL or EFL classroom.

Besides those games, I got really excited about quia.com yesterday. And I think I am going to stay excited, too. On Quia, teachers can create their own games. Then, the games can match your lessons perfectly! You can make battle ship games that require students to answer a grammar question before they can sink a ship. Like this one that tests your knowledge of the possessive.

But battle ship is just the beginning, there are 16 different types of games! Now, there is one catch: it costs $50 a year to create games. But you can use other teachers’ games for free and once you create a game it is online forever! So I think, it might be worth the money. Especially if you could get one of your computer addicted students to play for hours.

I hope, I can convince my department to finance the fun on quia.com. I really think that the more students encounter English outside of class the more they will learn. So why not help them by providing fun online games!

Zach, the man who plays Captain Jeff in our videos, kept a log of our time in Beijing on his Facebook page here are some highlights.

The arrival:

Jewel and Jason, having taken a later flight than John and I, got held up in a long line at the immigration checkpoint and had to dash to our gate. The worried flight attendants eyed John and I nervously asking us “Tell your friends ‘no snacks!’ ‘no stop for shopping!’” in halted English.

Suprising fact #1 about China: The whole process of entering the country was way more relaxed and easy going than I expected. In fact it was probably the fastest, least stressful entry I have done in any country. Despite wearing my full ship’s captain regalia we checked through immigration and customs like a breeze. They didn’t even ask any questions.

First video shoot:

We came back to the hostel and donned our costumes to shoot a segment called the “Hutong bike race“. The shooting took place to the entertainment of a number of locals living about the hutong who gazed in curiosity at our strange outfits, our cameras and John and Jason weaving around the narrow, winding streets. Jason attempted a couple of stunts, bounding out of small doorways and off a concrete ramp, but the heavy rental bikes were not well suited to his antics.

Translation troubles:

At lunch we were entertained by probably the funniest menu I have ever seen. There was such a variety of exotic food such as:

#110 The Flagrance Fries the Element Box
#109 Lives Flies the Meat Package
#115 Peru System Red Pork Bean Bun
#101 Nutritious Mutton Surface

There was the off-putting…

#118 Harsh Powder

…the dangerous…

#131 Three explodes the spring roll

…and the observant

#129 North Korea is Grim

Again, the lunch we had was delicious, but perhaps observing us giggling at the menu, the staff came over at the end of our meal with a rough draft of the new menu and asked us to correct it, kind of an international low tech spell check. It was a poignant site to see four creators of a web site dedicated to teaching English huddling around and doing rewrites of a chinese menu.

We’re big in China:

An amusing dynamic ocurred whenever we started an interview. People around us would see the camera, the microphone and John and I taking pictures and assume something important was going on. Soon a crowd would form and people started taking pictures with their cell phones.

Ebaby! member party:

When we arrived, the host ushered us up to the roof top deck and we were surprised to see between 25-30 English, baby! members already assembled there waiting for us. We heard a few calls of “English, baby!” and I made a visual impact in my Top Gun getup. After some introductions we split off into 3 tables with John, Jason and I manning a group of 8 or so while Jewel took as much video and pictures as she could in the dim light. We talked, made introductions and I fired up some simple drinking games. It felt very special to be on the other side of the world sharing mugs of beer and cups of tea with total strangers who only knew us from their participation in a web site. This scene felt like the kind of break through moment we were looking for and we took full advantage of it. I think we are going to find more significance and authentic interaction with the people on the street than with anything officially Olympic.

We took a group of about 9 to an entertainment complex called Party World. A more appropriate name might be the Ritz Karaoke. It was the most opulent karaoke box I have been to with chandeliers, tuxedoed attendants and marble floors.

There is a major atmospheric difference between karaoke in Asia (China, Korea and Japan) than that in the U.S. that I have a hard time getting across to my American friends. In Asia karaoke is a private affair. You go to a Karaoke Box and rent a private studio where they bring you drinks and snacks ordered by intercom. The studios can be small private ones for a couple or large rooms able to accomadate 20 or more. This creates a different dynamic than your average karaoke bar in the U.S. In Asia, for me at least, karaoke is a great stress reliever and I feel a sense of bonding with the people I am going out with. Since you are amongst friends there is a tendency for everyone to have a go at it and people’s inhibitions are lessened. The U.S. version of karaoke, while still fun, feels more like exhibitionism to me. In the U.S. I may sing one or two songs only if I am really feeling it. But in Asia it is rare for even the most shy person to not belt at least one number out in the karaoke box.

I truly believe that if we could just get our world leaders hammered, shove them into a karaoke box and have them belt out some Journey we could reduce the need for trillion dollar national defense budgets and work out many of our social ills. But, failing that, in our little microcosm in Beijing this little karaoke cultural exchange was, to me, what the real Olympics are all about.

The heat! The heat!:

I tried to look at it as though I was in an all day steam spa. So relaxing! Even if you are constantly damp from head to toe.

The buzz:

It was mid afternoon and our stomachs were rumbling so we headed down an even narrower alley way toward a street vendor. Here a woman had dozens of varieties of skewered fish cakes, sausages, tofu and other treats simmering in a chili laden broth. She handed us bowls so we could pick out what we wanted and combined that with noodles and vegetables, reboiled them and topped them with sesame sauce, garlic sauce and chili and added some broth. Based on my experience in Japan this was like a combination of oden and ramen. It was probably the most delicious street food I have had.

Sitting in that little alley way, with families and kids strolling by eating delicous food and watching this humble woman cooking some of the best food I have ever had with no pretense gave us all a traveler’s buzz. This is a feeling when you are in some place far from home experiencing something very satisfying and unique and everything just seems in harmony.

A while back, I wrote about using English, baby! or other social networking sites to teach students how to make inferences when they read. Today, I am going to talk about another reading lesson that you can do on social networking sites. I did it in my class this week and it was a bunch of fun. We practiced scanning for information and looking for headings on profiles.

I went ahead and found some good profiles. You want to find ones that are completely filed out and have some interesting information and nothing inappropriate. That is really the hardest part of the lesson. Well, prepping usually is. On our computer lab day, I had students get into pairs. I had already set-up the computers so that each pair had my profile on their screen and in another tab there was someone else’s profile. I had a student read my profile aloud. Then, we went through some of the vocabulary. I used a handout like this on social networking vocabulary and the scanning activity. Then, we practiced predicting where the information would be and scanning the profile for it. I had a list of questions for them to answer on the handout. Next, the pairs went off and scanned a different profile. When everyone was finished, we came back together and people shared interesting things about the person that they read about. It was so much fun.

The students were most interested by how many friends everyone had. I guess people do have a lot of friends on here! So maybe all of my teacher friends should give this a try and tell me how it goes.

I have been working with another teacher and I have learned so much from her successes. In part because she has gracefully succeeded at teaching areas that make me want to pull my hair out. One of those is teaching essay writing to low level English speakers. I have blogged about structured and fun writing. But to teach the basics, my general approach has been to do brain storming (with some graphic organizer) and then discuss the structure of the essay as review and have the students write.

But I have learned in the past year, that to improve most lessons, the teacher should just provide more schema activation (more examples). So I don’t know why I was banging my head against the wall with that basic writing lesson. The teacher I work with has a beautiful process for essay writing that begins like mine with brain storming on a graphic organizer. (Like this interactive graphic organizer) Then, however, she provides an important example. She shows them an essay she has written on the topic. She reads the essay aloud and then, the class goes back through the essay looking for its parts. They find the hook, then the thesis, then the topic sentences and details of each paragraph and the conclusion. Next, she hands out an outline of her essay and a similar blank handout for them to write their outlines. She shows them what she wrote on the outline about her hook and then they write a hook. She repeats this process until their outlines are done. Finally, the students are able to work on their own and produce wonderful essays. Look here at one of the first draft of one of their essays.

All in all, I have always loved teaching writing, but at the beginning I found it to be a painfully slow and daunting process for students (and me). And I should have realized that they just needed more examples and more ways to organize their thoughts before they wrote.

I’ve never been at the center of the world like this before. Today is the day. The date on this post reads August 7th, but here in Bejing, it’s already August 8, the biggest day of the century for Beijing. The opening ceremony of the Olympic games begins in a few hours and two-thirds of the world will be watching.

But here in Qianmao hutong, it feels like any other day. The locals are cooking food and walking down the street. But a few miles away there are thousands of people standing on the street where the Chinese Olympic team will drive later today. They don’t know when it will come by, but they are willing to wait as long as it takes.

Captain Jeff and I have posted blogs about our arrival on the official Olympic page. Here are a few photos of our trip so far. John and Jeff enjoying the first beers of the trip:

Captain Jeff with some other Captains:

Captain Jeff cooling down:

Our Hutong:

The Internet is necessary to do a lot of things. Being an active member of a national government isn’t one of them.

It has recently become news that McCain doesn’t use email. When questioned, a representative of his campaign responded, that the senator, “is aware of the Internet.”

Well, I should hope so. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t aware of the Internet, but I’m kind of surprised that there’s anyone in the US who doesn’t use it–let alone a senator and presidential candidate.

According to this article about increasing Internet penetration in China, only 71% of the US uses the Internet, so McCain is by no means alone. But what’s important here is that McCain might know English, baby! exists. Apparently his wife commonly logs on for him and directs him to things such as his daughter’s blog. So there’s a very small chance that she has directed him to our site. But, if we were to get on John McCain’s daughter’s blog, those chances would increase greatly. So I hereby pledge to do my best to get the attention of Meghan McCain and have English, baby! join the Internet in the category of things that John McCain is aware of. Who knows? Maybe I can even get her to create a profile here. Since McCain’s competitor, Barack Obama is leading him in polls of our members by 60%, he could use some help here, so maybe Meghan will step in. Stay tuned.

CNN Report on Internet use among US presidents and presidential candidates:

My first contact with Meghan’s blog:

“Hoe was Saturday? I hope you had a great wicked.” Well, those sentences are really confusing because they have some pretty BIG typos or spelling mistakes in them. They should read: “How was Saturday? I hope you had a great weekend.” It might be hard to even guess what the person really meant, but I am getting really good at it. I have begun teaching typing to my ESL students and those are some of their actual mistakes! That’s why typing can be so much fun in an ESL classroom.

My students seem to like working on the computers a lot and are generally excited to learn anything (with some exceptions). So we have been spending a good amount of time in the computer lab. They all have pretty low computer literacy, so starting with typing seemed logical.

At first, we practiced some basics. But then I got more creative, I had them make a man by typing with the text centered. Like this:

llllllllllll
0 0
j
v

I
wwwwwwww
ttttttttttttttttttttt
wwwwwwwww
ttt tttttttttttttt ttt
o wwwww o
ttttttt
wwww
oooooo
ooooooo
oooooooo
ooo ooo
ooo ooo
bbbb bbbb

We highlighted the man and changed the alignment to right. So he looked like this:

llllllllllll
0 0
j
v

I
wwwwwwww
ttttttttttttttttttttt
wwwwwwwww
ttt tttttttttttttt ttt
o wwwww o
ttttttt
wwww
oooooo
ooooooo
oooooooo
ooo ooo
ooo ooo
bbbb bbbb

One of the students said the man looked like he had fallen from a tall building (all smushed). It was funny. And everyone was relieved when we changed the alignment back to center and the man “came back alive.”

Now, this may seem like a silly waste of time, but when students write paragraphs we often ask them to use three different types of alignment. Their name and date are right aligned. The title of the paragraph is centered and the paragraph is left aligned. Spending just a little bit of time teaching this can make a real difference for students who aren’t familiar with computers. And my 16-21 year old students love the little bit of whimsy and creativity in this lesson.

I personally love teaching creative typing. This is just one of the fun activities I have done. But I need to figure out how to help them use spell check because wicked instead of weekend just isn’t good. Do you guys have any ideas?

A few days ago, the Chinese Olympic team unveiled their uniforms, much to the dismay of many Chinese bloggers. The new uniforms are being called old-fashioned, but I think they’re totally retro and look great!

In any case, it seems high time to unveil our uniforms. Check out John and myself modeling the logo track jersey with matching shorts and wrist and headbands. I took the new outfit for a test drive in downtown Portland recently for a video shoot and turned more than a few heads. I wonder how much these outfits will stand out on the streets of Beijing.

What would you do if your students always came thirty minutes late to class and never did their homework? Well, you might pass it off as cultural or time management problems. On the other hand, you might say, “Who cares why they are late! They should be punished!” I don’t often think about punishing students. I tend to empathize with them.

Most of my students work at least one full-time job and many of them work two jobs. Some of them work a night shift and a day shift. So I find it hard not be impressed by what they do. They are my inspiration. They work so hard and they normally manage to come to class three days a week for two and a half hours.

The problem is that class is four days a week for three hours! And despite how busy they are, I am responsible for teaching them all of the course material. So the other teacher and I decided to “punish” them for missing class. Two days a week, we instituted a half hour homework time after class that is mandatory for students who come late or don’t complete their homework.

The first two Homework Half-Hours went brilliantly. Even students, who weren’t required to stay, decided to stay and work on extra homework or help other students. The time was very productive and I thought they were all very motivated.

But maybe they were just motivated because they wanted to leave! Because last night (which would have been a class followed by the Homework Half-Hour), only three students came to class. All three of them had completed all of their homework and didn’t have to stay after. I can’t help but think that the other students did not want to get “punished” for not doing their work, so they decided to skip class. It was very depressing because we only want to make them successful. And we just aren’t sure how to do that if they are gone so much! I honestly feel like I got punished last night.