Joe's Blog

Teaching, technology, open source and everything in between.

Archive for January, 2010

Nice site found: Free ESL Materials.com

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Following other teachers via Twitter has its uses. I probably wouldn’t have found this lovely site without it: Blogs: Free ESL Materials.com | Blogging | Lesson Plans. If you are an ESL teacher like me, it is a great resource.

I especially like Breaking News English.  Here you can find not only topical texts but also

  • warm-ups
  • mp3 audio of the texts
  • before reading/listening activities
  • while reading/listening activities
  • after reading/listening activities

In fact, for every text you’ll get a complete lesson that you can adapt to your needs. Great stuff!

Written by Joe

January 31st, 2010 at 8:46 pm

Posted in English,Teaching

Teaching the news

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If I ever have to teach TV news again, I’ll definitely use this lovely video:

It is hillarious, it is so true, but it will definitely need subtitles or a transscript for my students. Nevertheless, it is worth the work!

Written by Joe

January 29th, 2010 at 1:21 pm

Posted in English,Teaching

Bitten by Metacity: Bug 555027 – autologin failure …

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I got bitten by this ugly bug (Bug 555027 – autologin failure …) and could no longer login to my lovely Gnome. With the help of the fine lads at #opensuse-gnome on Freenode and in the forum, I was able to find a patch here.

Now everything seems working again.

Written by Joe

January 27th, 2010 at 8:58 pm

Inkscape classes

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If you (like me) have no idea of what to do with Inkscape, hop over to Inkscape Class Day 1 « Máirín Duffy for an eight session course by Máirín Duffy.
Originally held for 7th grades in the Boston area, all of us can enjoy the course via blog and PDF.

Impressive!

Written by Joe

January 26th, 2010 at 3:04 pm

Moodle for 2nd language and history teaching

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This book (Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching) seems to be exactly what I was looking for. Strangely, there are no reviews on Amazon for it yet. The contents are impressive, as is the price tag: a hefty €35-40.
The book is promoted in the Moodle Language teaching community and probably worth the money, so I’ll get it eventually and read it.

Now, is there a similar book for history teaching?

For starters I’ll read the teachers’ manual here (German).

Written by Joe

January 25th, 2010 at 2:21 pm

If Gnome hangs while you log in …

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… this might help you: GnomeLoginHang < Computing < LEPP TWiki.

It sure helped me this morning.

Written by Joe

January 25th, 2010 at 11:33 am

Posted in Gnome,Open Source

Hi there!

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I really thought I could do without a blog. Well, I still had my photo blog over here, but it seems that one can not  always express one’s opinion in the 140 characters of Twitter.

So, this blog is back!
;)

Written by Joe

January 24th, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Posted in Usual Madness