Schools receive budgets for creating and printing posters and wall hangings for these rooms, sporting international places and cultural info. The problem is that the posters they end up with often have spelling/grammar mistakes, with low-resolution images stretched haphazardly over odd background photos. Not a stylish way to introduce foreign places to local students.

I’m not a graphic artist, but I’ve made an effort to design some more effective posters, in resolution high enough to look good in a frame about 80cm wide x 120cm high.  The idea isn’t that the posters are the most reflective of the country, nor that the facts on them are the most interesting or profound.  They’re just made to be some nice and vibrant posters to be put up in a room meant for exploring foreign languages and cultures.

You can find the results below:

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the England Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the Canada Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the South Africa Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the Australia Poster

Click here to download the (very large) PDF of the New Zealand Poster

A few quick Google Searches for Jeopardy templates for Apple Keynote turned up nothing except for discussion forum help requests.  Yes, there is a fundamental piece missing in Apple Keynote that makes building a proper Jeopardy game template impossible, but we can get 95% of the way there with almost no effort.  To my Apple fanboy chagrin, Powerpoint turns out to be even better at Jeopardy games.

Download

I have created a High Quality ESL Jeopardy game/template for both Apple Keynote & MS Powerpoint.  It includes 25 questions in 5 categories, geared toward high-beginner or intermediate English learners with some good general knowledge about the world (i.e. high school and higher).

Click here to download ESL Jeopardy for Apple Keynote – Version 1

Click here to Download ESL Jeopardy for Microsoft Powerpoint – Version 1

Description

Version 1 comes with 5 categories (Science, Math, Geography, Misc, and Sports), with 5 questions per category (increasing difficulty from $100 to $500).

Here are some thumbnails of most of the included slides:

Usage Directions

1. Clicking on any dollar value, say “Science for $300″ takes you to that answer;
2. Give the students a chance to think of the question (What is ____, who was ____, etc);
3. When the students answer correctly or times runs out (keeping track of time is up to you), click anywhere to proceed to the correct question;
4. Click anywhere (on the question text or in an empty area of the slide) to return to the game board.

Caveat Emptor

The functional difference between the Keynote version and the PowerPoint version is that Keynote cannot remember which links you have clicked on.  In other words, after clicking an answer on the Keynote Jeopardy board, viewing it, showing the corresponding question, and returning to the gameboard, it is impossible to mark which questions have already been seen and which ones haven’t.

Luckily, PowerPoint doesn’t have this problem – click on an answer/question, and when you come back to the gameboard, the ones you have already seen will be faded out to differentiate clearly from the unseen ones.

I hope this Jeopardy template is useful.  In the future, I plan to create one or two new versions with new categories & questions geared towards English language learners.

Click here to download the whole package!

Some lessons lend themselves easily to explanations & games, but ordinal numbers as a concept are not always straightforward to teach.  I recently attended a workshop in which my group had to prepare a quick demo lesson on ordinal numbers. To teach it, we used four ideas:

• Familiar celebrities (familiar to Korean students, anyway) & Olympic medal positions to introduce the concept of ordinals
• A bit of a math challenge to engage the students in figuring out which number in the series is next, previous, first, and last
• A physical activity to engage a dozen students in organizing themselves in order according to the ordinal written on the card they received
• A “Hotel Game” in which a bell hop moves from cell to cell on a grid, and the students have to yell out, for example, “3rd floor, 5th room!”

Here are the materials we used:

• The presentation as a whole – Click here to download in PDF format & Click here to download in Apple Keynote format
  
• The whole pre-made Hotel Game & directions – Click here to download in PDF format
  
• The Hotel Game board – Click here to download in PDF format
  
• The Hotel Game bell-hop image – Click here to download in JPG format
  
• The Ordinal Number Cards – Click here to download in PDF format
  

In fact, I visited this job listing so much that, in the past, I wrote a Greasemonkey userscript to make browsing it easier by removing all of the recruiter postings from the list. Pretty nifty, but you need Firefox + the Greasemonkey extension to make use of it.

Now here’s an even easier way to do it in any web browser!

1. Simply Bookmark this in any web browser: ESL Cafe: Remove Recruiter Job Ads
   (I suggest you put it in your browser’s bookmarks bar, if you use that)
2. Navigate to the ESL Cafe Korean Job Board
3. Use the bookmark you made in Step 1.

You will see, instead of navigating you away from the Korean Job Board, that the job board has actually changed.  Whereas there were job postings from recruiters scattered throughout it before, now they are all gone.

Happy Job Browsing!

Body Parts Flash Cards

Download Body Parts Flash Cards

I put together these Flash Cards using images found online, editing many of them somewhat to add pointers to the specific body part. I tried to choose images which were explicitly public domain. However, please use these only personally, for educational purposes, which is how they are provided. If you know of an image which does not belong in this set, please don’t hesitate to contact me so I can remove it immediately.

Body Parts Bingo

Download Body Parts Bingo 4 x 4

Download Body Parts Bingo 5 x 5

BINGO has a bad rap among some ESL teachers become it is seen as a cop-out for real teaching.  However, after drilling the students on the body part flash cards, I like to have them write the body part names out in English at random in the BINGO squares, and then choose different students to speak out body parts I indicate on myself or other students.  For example, the teacher points to a student’s arm, and asks another student to yell out the word.  “Arm!”, yells the student, and all the other students practise listening by crossing out the word on their BINGO sheet.  Obviously, this is for low-level language learners, and is a more of an ice-breaker than a serious language acquisition activity.

Body Parts Scramble

Download Body Parts Scramble

Like BINGO, the Body Parts Scramble is meant to be given as a fun ice-breaker or easy homework activity.  Although this is not a good way to spend class time, it can be nice used as a puzzle for students to take away in order to practise the content of the flash cards covered in class.

Body Parts Idioms Dialog

Download Body Idioms Dialog Script

[Video Not Yet Available]

This CGI dialog was originally created using xtranormal.com.  I used iMovie to dub in the voices and add the titles, music, and pop-up captions.  It makes for a great listening exercise before the following presentation.

Body Parts Idioms Presentation

Download Body Parts Idioms Presentation

The zip file contains JPGs, ordered by number.  The first and last slides are missing, since they normally contain the intro and walk-out slides that you must customize for your own audience.

This presentation covers Body Parts idioms, such as “he has a head for languages”, “you’re trying to pull the wool over my eyes”, “he’s my right-hand man”, etc.  It’s meant to be presented to more advanced conversational classes.

The images used in these slides were gathered from all over the web, and should be used only for educational purposes as examples of the action or phrase indicated in the slide.

Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

Download Body Parts Idioms Evaluation

This evaluation goes with the previous idioms presentation and video dialog.

I found my current and previous job through Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Job Board, mostly because it’s wonderful. It’s a no-nonsense thing – a page of job titles/companies, and you can click on each link to see whatever info the employer chooses to provide, all surrounded by superfluous text and ads. Beautiful and ugly at the same time.

In fact, I visited this job listing so much that, in the past, I wrote a Greasemonkey userscript to make browsing it easier by removing all of the recruiter postings from the list.  Pretty nifty, but it had its drawbacks:

1. You need Firefox + the Greasemonkey extension to make use of it
2. You have to manually download updates to the script every few weeks as new recruiting pop into existence
3. You have to manually visit the ESL Cafe Korean Job Forums to get the job listings

Now I have come up with a better solution:

But here’s the kicker: this list has already filtered out more than 115 Korean recruitment agents, and it’ll automatically filter out even more recruiters every time I update it from my secret, non-disclosed location in the Korean outback.  You don’t have to redownload anything or change anything.  Just keep checking back to your RSS feed, and keep noticing that recruiters aren’t in the list, or, if they slip in, drop me a line and I’ll disappear them.

Meanwhile, for those folks who prefer the unadulterated version of the Korean Job forums with all recruiter ads intact, I have also created a standard RSS Feed, that does zero filtering.

Click here to get the RSS Feed: Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Job Forums (including recruiters)

I’ve successfully tested both of these RSS Feeds in Google Reader, but please let me know if you have any trouble.

Happy RSSing!

I got lucky.  As soon as I was able to get the proper Mac drivers for the funky Samsung ML-8900 at my school, I was able to set myself up for our office printer with no extra hassle.  But not everyone has such an easy time of it.

Download Samsung ML-8×00 Mac OS X Printer Drivers Installer

Today, I was trying to use the same drivers at my girlfriend’s office, but it was a no-go.

The mac drivers I had were for the Samsung ML-8×00 (download above), and her printer is an ML-8700.   Those are the right drivers, so no sweat, right?  Wrong.  I could get her computer to send a file to the printer for printing, but the printer would spew out page after page of useless data.  Actually, this all the normally-hidden formatting/meta-data that your computer always sends along to the printer along with any file, you just aren’t supposed to see any of it printed out.  The fact that it was getting printed out meant that the printer driver wasn’t playing nicely.  What to do?

Here’s how I eventually solved the problem, and so can you.  Please note that these instructions will vary slightly, depending on your version of OS X.

1. First, make sure that the problem really is the drivers, i.e.: your computer is properly connected to the printer, you’ve got the correct IP Address for the network printer, the printer’s status is “online”, and there is paper in the tray.
2. (If you’re using OS X Leopard, then skip this step) Download the free/open source Gutenprint Driver and install it
   
3. Go into your OS X System Preferences and into the Printer & Fax option.  Click to add a new printer.  If it’s an IP printer (i.e. you have its IP address written down), then select “IP”.  For the driver, click “Select Driver to Use” to select it from a list.
   
4. OS X Leopard should list lots of different Samsung printer models by default.  Normally, previous versions of OS X would list only one or a few, but, thanks to having installed Gutenprint in the step above, the list on previous versions of OS X should now include many more Samsungs.
   
5. Ideally, you would just select your actual printer model and “tada!”, but it’s probably not quite that straight forward.  If the driver for your printer model isn’t in the list or isn’t working, then here’s the trick: choose a different model number that’s as close as possible to your own. That’s it.  Just choose a similar model that says “Gutenprint next to it”, and press ADD to finish.  Gutenprint will take care of the rest.
   
6. Do a test print.  Perhaps, like me, you will be pleasantly surprised to find it working perfectly, even though you have selected what is supposed to be the wrong printer model.

Gutenprint contains within it all of the information necessary to set up a slew of usually unsupported printers in Mac OS X.  Even if you are trying to set up a printer that isn’t Samsung, or isn’t anything close to what I was dealing with in the instructions above, do consider trying Gutenprint as your printer driver if you’re having problems.

Happy printing!

A brand new website currently in Beta called Xtranormal is a killer app when it comes to grabbing ESL students’ attention with fluid CGI characters that you direct and script.  Its tagline is, “if you can type, you can make movies”, and it really is that simple.  You can even give your characters various accents, from American English to Belgian Dutch.

Yes, I know I am sounding like a gushing fanboi here (I have no affiliation with Xtranormal.com whatsoever), but, with almost no CGI experience, I took just 10 minutes to create from scratch an exact movie of a short dialog in my high school ESL textbook.  The dialog itself is hilariously bad, but its taken from a worse textbook.  Here are both the dialog and the scene I created:

Instructions For Your Own CGI Dialogs

So, how did I create this thing so fast?  Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to http://www.xtranormal.com, and click the “Make Movies” link at the top-centre.
   
2. Here, you have two dimensions of options.  You can choose to either include realistic-looking CGI people in your movie or cartoony-looking CGI people.  You can also choose if you’d like a monologue (just one character) or a dialog (two characters).  I suggest choosing a dialog of cartoonish people.  The advantage to the cartoonish people seems to be that they currently provide more options when it comes later on to animating them and giving them facial expressions and background locations.
   
3. Now we get to the meat of the website – the design stage.  Even though things aren’t really structured that way, I like to start by designing the set and characters in the scene.  To do that, click on the far left button in the group of buttons at the very bottom.
   
4. From the set design page, we can choose one of a bunch of stylized sets, from country homes to late night sports shows, to street scenes.  Click Apply when you’re doing exploring them.
5. Next, click on the third button in the group of four, to select your first character from all of the character options.  At the bottom, you can even select his/her linguistic style.  Click apply, and do the same for your second character.
   
6. Now that our set is built and our characters are cast, it’s time to write the dialog, control the camera, and direct the actors.
   
7. Start by writing some text for your first character, and then click the little plus at the bottom-right of the dialog box to get a new dialog box below it.  You can click on the picture for Actor 1 or Actor 2 at the top of the dialog box to direct who is doing the talking.
   
8. After you are finished entering some or all of your dialog, you have a chance to control the camera angles.  Simply drag the little camera icon right in between some of the text you have written, and then select the camera angle from the ensuing list.  Where you have placed the camera icon in the text is where the camera angle will change in the script.
9. At this point, you can also experiement for yourself by dragging in facial expressions, animations, looks, points, pauses, etc.
   
   
10. After you think you have put everything in place, simply click the “Action!” button at the bottom-right of the script.  It will take a little time, perhaps 1 or 2 minutes, for your scene to render.
11. When your scene is ready, press the “Play” button on the video to watch it.  Note any problems or changes you would like to make to the video, and then go back to re-edit it.  To get rid of the camera movements, actions, etc that you had previously inserted into the script, simply delete them from the text as you would any word or group of letters – i.e. select with the mouse + delete button on your keyboard.
    
12. Finally, when all is said and done, click the “It’s a wrap button”, and Xtranormal will ask you to register.  This is a good idea to do, since then you will be able to save this video and share it with the world, either via YouTube, or by using the embed code XTranormal provides.
    

For the time being, Xtranormal is in Beta and is therefore free.  This may not last long, so I encourage you to register as soon as possible for maximum benefit.

Good CGI’ing!

This script also comes with a loosely-related but perhaps more useful feature: image links in any post are automatically displayed as largish-thumbnails in the bottom of that post. Here’s a screenshot:

Automatically embedded images in Dave

Finally, this script also fixes the profile link for any poster, so that clicking on their name or avatar takes you properly to their profile instead of to an error page.