"Kanji alive" useful for kanji study

"Kanji alive aids language learning"

This looks like a great language learning tool for all you kanji learners out there. Here is the Univeristy of Chicago site., too.

"Kanji alive"

Like rarified air?

My students are becoming like air at 30,000 feet, rare, but more valuable. Several students have stopped coming to class. My guess is that they have given up on getting a credit in English this time around. I am having more fun with the people who are left, though. They really are a kick sometimes. One of my Chinese students, struggling to come up with the word flight attendant, blurted out, "hikouki sister." (hikouki is airplane in Japanese)

cool web tricks

I was just over at hmmn..., and there was a post there about trying to access the georgewbush.com from abroad. I guess you can't do it. I tried, too, but couldn't, either. In the comments one from Dragan suggested that we use an "anonymizer site." I didn't know what that was, so I tried his hint and tried the URL he suggested. Got right in. For all you expats who need your Dubya fix, try it here.
http://www.anonymization.net/http://www.gop.com/News/LatestHeadlines.aspx

Furl and 10 cool things you can do with it

I'm sure we all have navigated to a page and would like to have a copy of it for further reference. There is a service called Furl that helps manage those articles for us. I found out about this service from Contentious, in an article called, "10 Cool Things to Do with Furl."

I have signed up for the service, but have truthfully not had the time yet to try it out. I will try out saving some articles to the service and then make my list public on this site. There are some drawbacks. Those and possible implications for use are covered in the article.

Generating Student Motivation

I received an unsolicited message from a representative of Longman Publishing Company the other day that I would like to share with you. It is a short paper by Michael Rost, entitled, Generating Student Motivation. It is a very informative paper that really provided some great new teaching inspiration for me. I put the report up on my university server if you would like to see it.

Generating Student Motivation, by Dr. Michael Rost

This article again gives me pause to consider traditional formal education cliches. I call them cliches, because I think that some modes of formal education are worn out, stale, trite expressions of a concept, and should be rebuilt in a different way in order to be effective. Home schooling and other styles of education provide some hope for motivating learners, but I'm not sure that the kinds of education that I am involved in, for example, can offer the kinds of learning environments that can help learners achieve to the best of their ability.

I think the best that teachers can do, those who are involved in very traditional education settings like me, is to incorporate ideas that will stimulate more successful learners. This article has some great points of departure.