AKITA JALT meetings in 2004
picture album page 6 (part 1) of 2004

October









Guest speaker: Thomas E. Blair
Date: Saturday, October 23rd (2004)
Title: "An Overview of Moodle: Course Management System for Language Teaching"
at the Library Computer Room of AIU (Akita International University)

11 people attended the meeting.

Chapter Report (to be printed in The Language Teacher) Guest speaker: Thomas E. Blair Akita: October “An Overview of Moodle: Course Management System for Teaching” by Thomas Blair. Mr. Blair gave a brief description of Moodle and of how he has used parts of it. He demonstrated a few features on the big overhead screen but mostly he told us the advantages and disadvantages since he only had one hour. It is open source software so there is very little support except from users. He found the quiz feature to be the most useful and easiest to use. Other features are on line journals, forums, chat rooms and email. If a teacher is computer savvy and has the time then this is a cheap and acceptable way to use the internet for a class. He says you need to take a workshop to really learn all the features in a reasonable amount of time. Students need to know how to type. It was an interesting introduction to this type of open source course management software especially since earlier in the year we had a similar description of Blackboard which is expensive commercial course management software. The remainder of the meeting was our annual business meeting. Officers were elected for the next year and a brief discussion was had on plans for the next year. A chapter evaluation form was handed out. Reported by Jarrett Ragan

November
AKITA JALT meetings in 2004
picture album page 6 (part 2) of 2004

November
JALT Four Corners Meeting




"You could use the lexical approach to make vocabulary memorable for your students. We will discuss interesting and effective strategy to do it..."






"In conclusion you CAN'T teach vocabulary. ;-) That is my conclusion..." The whole audience has a good laugh!

Guest speaker: Susan Barduhn
Date: Wednesday, November 24th, 2004

Title: Activating the Lexical Approach and Making Vocabulary Memorable
At Room D-201 (AIU Library) of AIU (Akita International University)

32 people attended the meeting.
Good to see some AIU students, who joined us for the first time.

Chapter Report (to be printed in The Language Teacher) Guest speaker: Susan Barduhn Akita: On November 24th Susan Barduhn gave an interesting presentation “The Lexical Approach and Making Vocabulary Memorable” There were about 30 people present on a Wednesday evening including about 8 students. Professor Barduhn actively engaged the participants in her presentation by presenting the various lexical approach concepts using PowerPoint as an aid then having us do various activities so that we could internalize the concepts. We covered recognizing chunks, matching, categorizing, sequencing and deleting activities that can be used to teach using this approach. We then did some simple experiments to learn how our brains remember words. These showed us that we remember best the first and last things we see or study and things that stand out. Also things that we can associate with previous knowledge are easy to remember. We also did an exercise on Cognitive and Affective depth and discovered how these affect the learning of vocabulary. She ended the presentation by giving us some tips on teaching the learning of vocabulary. There was a lively question and answer session after the talk. Reported by Jarrett Ragan

Susan, the guest speaker, and Akita chapter officers after the presentation


We enjoyed talking and eating tempura, tofu and etc. at a Japanese restaurant.

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Akita JALT

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