What shall we put on next year?
Who could have expected that enthusiastic response to Romeo and Juliet show we took to the streets last month?! Now nobody wants to stop, they all want more. To start a new chapter and give a preview of what’s to come we document the event on a special page – gv_plays
From WP to GV
This time last year we turned to WordPress, a powerful editing tool for the web which has served us well for the last twelve months. We certainly don’t get over-excited, we are not computer geeks (yet), but it’s great to have support like that.
Empowering listening
We are all used to listening tasks incorporated into practically every course book, from beginners to truly advanced. Heavily edited and often strikingly unnatural, they function as testing exercises and only in the context of the lesson – once done, instantly forgotten. That’s a big drawback.
The advent of podcasting has changed a lot in using authentic listening resources in teaching and learning. There are tons of fantastic quality programmes available for multiple listening sessions, at any time, anywhere, with that bonus of a personal, almost intimate feel that good podcasts, like good radio, always have.
To meet the needs of Diana, Gosia, Karolina, Jarek, Joanna and Michał, all members of ielts_7 group, we start an online collection of selected podcasts aiming particularly at students focused on IELTS.
Our selection: Raw listening for IELTS
The source: Start the Week
More news, more posts, more English
As Global Village website is becoming more and more content oriented, we need a tool which allows our students and teachers to create even more content and manage it dynamically. These days we are lucky to have tools like WordPress to help us. It’s a powerful and flexible Open Source project that puts website creating and blogging within reach of regular users here at Global Village.
- It gives us complete control over the site, its appearance and its content.
- It offers automatic creation of pages based on the contents of posts. The most recent post appears at the top of the page (e.g. news) or the category page for the page assigned category (e.g. projekty).
- It automatically formats our pages based on a predefined template or theme. When we change the theme, the entire site’s appearance changes automatically.
- It has an ability to include links and images, just like any other website.
- It automatically archives old posts by category and date and offers search facility.
- Most importantly, readers can enter comments about a post, thus starting an online discussion of its contents.
- And best of all, WordPress is free.
At the moment, most of the website runs under WordPress. gv_blog will be fully incorporated into it in a couple of weeks. gv_files, exclusive to Global Village students, will be available again when the school year starts
Global goes WordPress
The busy bee above, which you’ve grown so familiar with for the past year, will be gone soon. Or would you like us to keep it?
OK. We’ll let her stay for the rest of this rather miserable summer. Meanwhile, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Follow the link under the pic and find out.
Lost in Bachotek
An exceptionally long, five-day EuroBachoTeX 2007 conference closed yesterday, leaving some 60 participants with lots to remember, learn and get ready for. Typically, TeX developers had their prime time, but regular users couldn’t complain either, with 40 presentations focusing solely on TeX, a graphic design workshop, a crash course in paper making, a day trip to Toruń, and plenty of individual sessions with ‘TeX clinic’ doctors, whose job was to help solve problems.
The youngest speaker at the conference, eleven-year-old Sam Guravage from The Netherlands, not only lowered the statistical age of the conference gang, but also got the hottest applause after his presentation. Read below.
Confessions of a Teenage TeX User
There are other worlds out there
What car make do you drive? Which bread do you like? What films do you watch? Any of these questions may spark off a conversation, often with a good deal of opinions and arguments.
Would it be equally so if we aksed: “Which tool do you use to write your letters, essays and reports?” The first response would probably be some genuine bafflement creeping into the face: “What do you mean?” In this world and at this time, everybody is expected to use the only right tool – the one spawned by Microsoft Corporation. Unless you are aware of the alternatives, which, of course, aren’t promoted by Word vendors. For good reason – they are available for free.
TeX is one of the other tools and we are happy to promote it. Below is our small contribution to the TeX community and a good starting point to find out about the system.
Paperless school
We all know the daunting and frustrating task of controlling the flood of printed matter – unsolicited post filling up letter-boxes, piles of newspapers and magazines pushing into every scrap of living space, letters, bills and bank statements silently cramming cabinets and drawers. Enough!
Teachers’ working spaces don’t seem to be spared from the avalanche of paper either. What makes it even worse is that they create so much clutter themselves. All those lesson plans, notes, hundreds of unreferenced photocopies, snippets and press cuttings kept in hope to be re-used one day. They seldom are. And the backlog of unsorted low-quality materials grows and threatens to clutter the mind as well. Enough! But how to stop the dominance of ineffectively used paper.
A solution has arrived. This month we are testing a beta version of DEVONthink Pro Office. It has been around for some time, but the latest incarnation finally makes teachers’ dreams come true.
This is just a small list of jobs DEVON does:
- Keeps an impressive range of text and other files in one database.
- Within the database it allows groups of files and links between them.
- Uses Artificial Intelligence to classify new documents added to the database.
- Searches the database in an instant.
- Runs its own web server and publishes the database as a searchable website on a local network or the Internet.
- Gives distant users the possibility to search for documents, view and download them. Simply speaking, it turns the database into a mini-Google.
2006
Why blog at all?
Here are just a few general reflections at the advent of gv_blog.
What use our students, teachers and fans will make of it is entirely up to them, but we owe them a few words of explanation as to what underlying usage scenario we had in mind.
- gv_blog is a collective blog and as such requires a collective effort.
- Individual members can post entries which other members can then freely comment on. This way entries from students belonging to a certain language group reflect a small collective of minds. Currenty, all entries on idioms posted by step_up group form a perfect example of such spontaneous interaction.
- A question to you, learners: Have you ever developed a sense that you are not learning, not achieving much, not participating? A question to you, teachers: Have you ever felt that you are not really teaching, not being helpful, that your students are slipping into apathy?
- Well, gv_blog was designed to reduce such doubts and open up a new perspective. It’s a democratic tool. It respects your freedom and independence while making you a creator and participant.
- When you create among others, you regard yourself as a participant.
- As soon as you create your part, you want to show it to others and expect them to collaborate.
- You can only gain a sense of authorship if you are part of a commumity.
- Within your group (school) community you create an interaction by saying things to others who then give you recognition.
- It is this interaction which is so appealing about a collective blog.
