Today, another report of a game I’ve used in an EFL class. This time, it’s Heart of the Deernicorn’s Night Forest.
Night Forest
Tag: teaching in Korea
TEFL Alice is Missing
At the university where I work these days, one of the classes I teach every semester is Screen English. For the last three semesters, I’ve included the silent, text-based role-playing game Alice is Missing (from Hunter’s Entertainment) as one of our activities. Usually we play it toward the end of semester, when students are eager for something to break away from the familiarity of student-led discussion group exercises. Despite a few challenges, it goes surprisingly well. The challenges include:
Show Me Your Work
This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them.
Streamlining the Workload, Part 2
So, here’s a Part 2 I never expected to post. Last time, I wrote about streamlining some of the “paperwork” (or, really, data wrangling) for dealing with attendance tracking, grading, and so on. Experience tells me that not everything there works: for example, I couldn’t find a way to include the Student Numbers students input into their Zoom registrations in my attendance records. (Sigh.) Still, a lot of what I discussed there did help. Generating attendance records goes much more quickly when you know how to use a Pivot Table, and when you’ve given strict instructions for how people should …
Streamlining the Workload
One focus of my work at my day job this semester has been to make working online a little more manageable. I thought I’d share some of the tools I use to do this, as well as to have them here in case I need them later. The past few semesters, a series of policy changes have made it hard to make things manageable, or to scale labour in a reasonable way. The administrators I deal with don’t really seem willing or able to recognize that online teaching can involve more time spent on stuff that we wouldn’t have to …