Test Week!

That's right kiddies... that means classes are finally over!

I've finished my fifth year grades entirely as they were due on Monday. I've entered in all of the first year grades and they are now subject to examination before finalization. I only have a "few" projects to grade for my fourth year classes and I'm finished entering grades in.

Then I'm on to my "office days" work... preparing for next year. I'm psyched for the last semester. Whew.

JALT Presentation materials - arrrgg!

Doreen and I have been cranking on pulling materials together for our JALT presentation this weekend in Shizuoka. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it'll all go through well enough. There's a sizable list of things that can potentially go wrong.

• The song doesn't play back in the presentation
  
• Presentation CD's come out as coasters
• My projector dies
• Computer problems, etc.

I'm staying positive though. We still have time to get things together. I'm quite happy with my automated Flash-based Captivate Walk-through of all the later steps for putting together a Karaoke Project using PowerPoint.

How much do they understand?

I had a difficult time with my 4th year students understanding the assignment for the day. The didn't seem to understand what it was they were supposed to do, nor how to complete some of the initial steps.

I had shown them multiple examples of PowerPoint presentations that featured "new vocabulary" slides.

1. They knew about finding the lyrics,
2. they knew that there were words in their songs they didn't understand,
3. they knew how to find the meanings of these words online,
4. they knew how to make new PowerPoint documents,
5. but they didn't know how to take one of the words in their lyrics and copy and paste that word along with its meaning in Japanese into the PowerPoint document.

I had to go around to most of the Ss individually to show them what it was exacly I wanted. I should have been more clear about the process. I think next class I'm going to have to do a tutorial about assembling a Karaoke project. I should have done that today.