I've chosen to dump a pile of my tidier, more general resources online in addition to here, mostly for the benefit of those teaching elsewhere in Asia, including friends in Japan. Made this stuff over the years and hopefuly others can benefit from them. I'll be uploading more as I tidy them up and export to PDF over the coming days. Some of the resources have appeared on Waygook, some have not
yet appeared on Waygook (yes, even I hoarde, although out of laziness, not unwillingness to share). Some have appeared on Waygook despite me not recalling distributing them publicly which is odd. I guess they found their way onto Indieschool or something with the license stripped. Copy
left license at that. Sigh.
Anyway, the web address is
here.
* * *
This is probably also the place to mention that I'm leaving Daejeon on Friday to futures uncertain.
Overall, Korea's been a blast. So uhm, hope you guys find my stuff useful, big thanks to the mods and a
huge, huge, huge thanks to Arsalan who runs this site out of the goodness of his heart at quite the personal expense. Seriously, he's a champ. If you have a PayPal account and some coin to spare, please give him a hand with it. By providing a framework for us to share what we have here, I feel he's made one of the biggest single contributions to public EFL classes in Korea out of anyone in the country.
Departing tips:Someone asked for people to post such stuff a while back, so here goes. I don't know if anyone will read them or actually cares, so feel free to just go back to whatever it was you were doing.
1.
Plan your board out before lessons. This is a big one, don't neglect it ever. Find a visually consistent style for presenting information and if the students respond well to it, enforce the rule upon yourself to maintain it. Personally, I used little smileyfaces for spots where the students swap in vocab items, and would then list the items on the side of the board under each face, and then would highlight articles and prepositions/verbs in different colours to split longer sentences into bite sized chunks making it visually more akin to how Korean reads.
2.
Share what you prepare. Even if a specific colleague is a pain and a terror, their students aren't. In fact, their students probably get the short end of the stick more than you.
3.
Keep crap on your desk to engage students or form talking points. Some will seek you out to practise a little more. A spare game or something suffices. They've got their own classes, so having a reputation for being open to students isn't going to suck up all your time and you can always just hide in the teacher's lounge with a cup of tea if you're having an off day.
4.
Don't waste deskwarming. Deskwarming is not the devil (unless you're in a freezing cold or poisonous work environment or stuck
tablewarming in the lunch room or something equally ludicrous). It is awesome. Think of a project that will benefit your students but also help you develop meaningful skills to take home. In my time here I've learnt a bucketload about typography and graphic design. Who knows if I'll use them again, but new skills beat no skills. And I can potentially one-up casual web designers in geek cred.
5a.
If you're a software engineer or compsci major or just a programmer in your own right or heck,
utilising your deskwarming to learn how to code (and not going after one of those new Samsung jobs in yesterday's news) I strongly, strongly encourage you to look into the open source project
Learning With Texts. Make it a personal development project to impement it in a cute, visually simple, controlled way for your students. Ask your MOE for server space or something and give it a whirl. To be able to issue reading homework to your students like this (even if its optional, although dangle rewards if so) would be a huge benefit to them. It'd take an NT just a minute to voice-over a given text once a free dictionary is plugged in and all the students in your district could benefit. If you care about actually progressing education in upper elementary and junior high levels,
make this a project and make it happen. 5b.
If you're not a programmer but want to try something new, experimental and tech-y, consider having a play with
QR codes. They're pretty useless now, but your students' phones will all probably have readers on them by the end of 2012 so it opens a new vector for teaching. I've considered everything from QR enabling vocab lists (linking pronunciation guides) to scavenger hunt type things. Just be sure that you always offer an alternative for those without access to a reader.
