End of Week 2

I have been an ESL instructor at FAU for the better part of 20 years. I started when we still had blackboards and a cart with a TV and VCR. Pretty scary, I know. I left FAU a few times...once for 5 years when we moved to Mexico City and two more times when I felt that I would never get experience on more than a physical blackboard! I moved to FAU's University Center for Excellence in Writing for one year...we did in-person and Skype tutoring. I also left to be the academic director at a non-profit devoted to teaching English online via Skype (no video allowed though...can you imagine!!!) with Rosetta Stone as our course materials. Aside from using Skype, I learned how to build a website with Wordpress, get onto a computer half-way around the world (teamviewer) and fix their Rosetta Stone and general computer issues, and use two online language learning programs (Livemocha and Rosetta Stone). This course is my next push to stay current and keep moving forward. So far, it has been very motivational!

With our recent change of directors, I am now leaving FAU and will be going to Chicago for training in my new position as the ELLC for Amerigo Education's Boca Raton campus. I expect to be using a lot of new Web 2.0 tools...and I am looking forward to more opportunities to grow.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 10, 2018 at 7:29 PM

    Skype is so handy. The way it operates and functions.... and now it has screen sharing and group video so tutoring is that much more powerful. I always like to hear about other people's teaching experience, as I have done informal teaching, but both of my parents were lifetime teachers before retiring..... and my mom was an ESL teacher as well. So I was frequently hearing about and discussing the material that she was working with.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJuly 10, 2018 at 8:34 PM

    Skype was great...I used the screen share for tutoring in the Writing Center and for my work with the non-profit organization. For the latter, I created picture pages related to each unit of Rosetta Stone so we (the student and I) would have something to look at and discuss. I used free clip art and bought a few collections of clip art. The only issues I had with Skype were related to internet problems in the countries I was connecting to: Madagascar and Honduras. That year, access in Madagascar was affected by a ship which apparently cut one of the main cables bringing internet service to Africa. In Honduras, the instability of the connection hindered our work greatly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. VanessaJuly 12, 2018 at 6:38 PM

    TV carts! What a throwback! :)

    ReplyDelete

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