Vietnam project: Day 3 + 4

On days 3 and 4 the workshop started to run smoothly with WordClassifier, a tool to analyse any English text on a comparison with a word frequency list. Teachers can easily detect the difficulty level of the text while running the text through this program.

Then they can use the words of a certain difficulty level to create exercises. I used Crossword Compiler to show how you can make interactive crosswords, using an online dictionary to fill in the clues. The local teachers were particularly interested in the use of the word and clue database of CC, so we spent some time experimenting with that.

In the afternoon we explored a simulation game, SimCity4. Although the school program is very strict, there are quite a lot of themes that relate to traffic, urbanisation, economy, social organisation,... and the language content of a game like SimCity4 is full of these themes... So the idea was: work in groups of three, One plays the game (tutorial), while the second notes the interesting words and the third constructs a webquest lesson plan. This however was too complicated since the playing of the game seemed more complicated than I thought... So together they explored the program, of continued to work on Crossword Compiler.

Power cut?

At a certain moment the message came in that a power cut would strike the area the next morning... Jan rushed to find a solution... : renting a power generator for the workshop room...
However at the last moment, the company seemed to want to profit from the situation and wanted more money... Rip-off and back against the wall...

Next day the generator was installed in the early morning, before the start of the workshop.

Guess what? There was no power cut... And in the beginning our power was deliberately cut to link the electricity system to the generator.... And then we had to carry on, using the generator and consuming the fuel...

And then... an unexpected gift! Nice calenders for the team members!!

The fourth day was filled with the making of Zarb exercises. Zarb is a plugin program for Word that offers a few dozen makro exercises. The result is not interactive, and must be printed out, but you have quite a number of different sorts of exercises. I gave the a few tips like: use a separate target test sheet on which you copy the exercises.

• Use another page to built an exercise.
• Once finished, copy it to the test sheet, and the answers to the teachers key sheet.
• Always try to combine more elements, like text, listening and/or viewing with the exercises so that they become more interesting.

And then... an old program which in no time had a great success: Zork... I used it in the 1980's and '90's as a sort of rescue program, a life buoy to save you when the Internet has gone down...

All of the attendants were eagerly trying to get into the house, the living room, to try and find the secret passage to the underworld of Zork. The old DOS-program has very funny ways of reacting to the English imperatives that need to be written... Smiles hit the room...

In the evening the core team were invited by Mr Tach to a nice floating restaurant where we had great delicacies like "drunken prawns"!!

On our way back we witnessed one of the effects of global warming: some of the streets in Saigon were flooded...