Illustrated Language

I have been using Slack for work pretty heavily for the past week. We are all busy getting our programs set up for the start of school in just over a week; we are trying to lessen our load by sharing resources for our orientation lessons, which are mainly about US culture but now also include support for the summer reading assignments our students did not do (visa issues, late registration, etc.). I have sent and received powerpoints, links to online sites, and documents via Slack and am getting used to how it works. I have not yet sent tacos to my colleagues, but I might do so just for fun!

One of my responsibilities in my new job is to help students identify and adjust to American culture. Our director identified independence, self-sufficiency, the American Dream, and equality/diversity as the key values we need to introduce first...via a mass-market movie. We have been going back and forth about what to show: something Disney like High School Musical or Lemonade Mouth, something more like The Duff or Mean Girls or Edge of Seventeen (all nixed for various reasons you might imagine when thinking about parents!). I think we've settled on Spiderman: Homecoming. That said, I had to get moving on the values lesson and also on the two summer reading books each grade level had been assigned but no one has read. I needed a compelling video to illustrate these values and link them first to teenagers, so I re-purposed classmate Tyrone Sandaal's link to a New York Times video of NYC kids, which he used for his shared knowledge project on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clos

I took a partial "tech-free" day today. My husband, younger daughter, her friend, and I went to the Venetian Pool , probably my favorite place in Dade County. You can see why I like it in this video I took while waiting for the pool to open today. We put our phones in a locker and then dove in. Floating in that cold spring water, looking up at a sky framed with palm trees was a slice of paradise! It was refreshing to see so many people talking, playing, and swimming without being connected at least for a few hours.

My younger daughter and I made croissants for breakfast today...a process which began yesterday. You can see the pics on Instagram. I'm posting the final one here! This is an example of how YouTube and face-to-face classes combine. I took a croissant class at Sur la Table last year; for me, it's really important to be able to feel and smell as I'm cooking, so YouTube alone is not enough. I've made croissants two or three times since then. Yesterday, I forgot exactly how to do one of the folds, so I checked with a pastry chef I've watched before on YouTube (Here's the link:  Classic French Croissants  ). That online reinforcement/review was croissant-saving! One of the ways of using social media with international students has to do with cooking. Many of the Saudi and Kuwaiti students I had a few years ago were young men who had never even boiled water. Alone in the US, they craved their moms' cooking, so they Skyped with their moms and followed direc

Slideshare on Implementing an International Online English Language Learning Program Having read articles on the use of social media in Thailand, the Republic of Georgia, South Korea and Ghana, I noticed some similarities with my own experience using Skype and Rosetta Stone to teach English in Madagascar, Honduras, and the US.  I joined I Want to Learn English, a 501 c(3) organization, as its sole employee and academic coordinator in 2010. My job was to develop the online English program the founders of the organization had started as a dream of providing English education to the people they had met during mission trips in Honduras and Madagascar. While IWLE was based in the Episcopal Church, it was not an evangelical organization; it was a purely educational endeavor. The premise of the program was the following: 1. Set up computer labs with internet access and Rosetta Stone licenses in three countries: Honduras, Madagascar, and Delray Beach, Florida. 2. Designa

I'm overwhelmed with communication tools at work. Why is she smiling?? Image from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/imagine-react-router-as-your-switchboard-operator-f4f1ac22188c