tokyokevin

Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is a great place for reference for anything to do with movies. I love to discuss movies with my students. Unfortunately, the names in Japanese often have no connection to the names in English.

With this web site showing, though, I can lecture and show short pictures or even trailers to make [...]

Keeping notes organized is hard enough on paper. But when you add web pages, media clips, videos, audio, podcasts, and whatever, it gets hard to handle. Try EverNote, for keeping things organized and connected to what you do.

Just like most other Web 2.0 sites, you can share part or all of your online notes and [...]

I am often astounded by how slowly everything goes in class. It is like everyone is living in molasses. The answers are always carefully considered before being uttered. This is not how communication works. It is not good enough to speak correct English, you have to speak it fast.

Learning goes the same way. You need to [...]

Better than Monopoly

OK, OK. It’s not a computer thing. This is a simple board game, one you play at the dinner table after dinner. Did you know Germans are real big fans of board games, instead of TV?

10 Days in the USA is a simple geography game that takes about 45 minutes the first time [...]

The Moth is a podcast of short stories told by amateurs, and a few professionals. They are told at a weekly event in New York or Los Angeles. People are selected to get up on stage and tell their stories, without notes, to the other story-tellers (the hardest audience).

You can listen to the Moth on [...]

iKnow does more than language

iKnow grew out of a project at Cerego, a company here in Japan that made English language learning software. They moved the content online, made it free, and “socialized” it, made it have more Web 2.0 features.

After that they expanded the content to include more than English, to other languages, and [...]

LiveMocha is a social web site, like Mixi or Facebook, or MySpace, but better.  This social web site is all about language learning and language exchange. People teach each other or simply interact in foreign languages. The New York Times has taken notice (look at the quote on their home page). I ask my students to [...]

study words you really need

Lexxica’s Word Engine is built on research done by Charles Browne and others. He has been into Showa to speak to teachers and students about learning vocabulary. The main idea is that most books in high school teach the wrong words, words that are of very low frequency (they aren’t used [...]