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Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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 Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 5:55 am Post subject: TeachingRecipes.com - We made New/Awesome website for ideas |
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Hi everyone,
It's been a while since I last posted, but I've been working on a new social website for teachers that I'm really excited about.
David Deubelbeiss (ddeubel) and I have collaborated to create teachingrecipes.com, a site for teachers to share your lesson ideas, games, and other tips for improving your classes.
A teaching recipe is a short idea on how to get students participating, practicing and producing language in the EFL classroom. It can be a game, a useful website, a general methodology - whatever works for you. It doesn't have to be elaborate: just something basic, and maybe even step-by-step.
We're trying to make TeachingRecipes.com the simplest way out there for teachers to share lesson ideas, and, more importantly, to find and rate them after they've been shared. Just post a title and your actual recipe, then tag it and categorize it with proper keywords so that others can easily find it. We've got a super-effective live search box right at the top of the page, plus the sidebar lists the most popular recipes.
We've done our best to make this as easy to use as possible, but we're asking for your thoughts on how to make it better.
Try out teachingrecipes.com, share your teaching recipes, and browse the ones other teachers have shared.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
Dmitry |
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 4:27 pm Post subject: |
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| *bump from last night* |
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frankly speaking
Joined: 23 Oct 2005
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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| I find it ironic that the moderators allow this and other threads that show websites other than Dave's. I got a threat from Dave about posting about another web suggesting others to go there for additional resources. |
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Demophobe
Joined: 17 May 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 6:04 pm Post subject: |
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| frankly speaking wrote: |
| I find it ironic that the moderators allow this and other threads that show websites other than Dave's. I got a threat from Dave about posting about another web suggesting others to go there for additional resources. |
Ironic? |
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seoulsister
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Location: International Network
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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| The color scheme is bloody hard on the eyes, I only looked at it for a minute and then gave it up from eye-strain. Why don't you change the text color to white? Just a suggestion ^^; |
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lifeinkorea
Joined: 24 Jan 2009
Location: somewhere in China
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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| It's very well designed. However, it's not a site. It's just a billboard to the EFL classroom ning site. Try clicking on the links to the advertised lessons being "shared". |
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| lifeinkorea wrote: |
| It's very well designed. However, it's not a site. It's just a billboard to the EFL classroom ning site. Try clicking on the links to the advertised lessons being "shared". |
Thanks for your comment!
The lessons currently on the site have been put up by David (ddeubel), who runs EFL Classroom. Therefore, most of the links he has put up point to what he does there, since that's where he keeps his stuff. However, we hope you and others will take advantage of the site for sharing your own ideas & resources, so that our posts will become a tiny fraction of all of the links and resources posted.
In short, if you have your own resource links or know of some good ones around the net, by all means put them up and crowd out ours!
Thanks! |
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lifeinkorea
Joined: 24 Jan 2009
Location: somewhere in China
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 7:51 pm Post subject: |
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I am not quite sure what the function of it is for. When I went to sign in, I found out it is a gateway for other services, https://rpxnow.com/how_it_works
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| you make it faster and easier for users to access your website and increase the conversion rate from �visitors� to �registered users.� |
It actually does the opposite by the looks of it, and it makes my efforts doubled.
If people have stuff like myself on Youtube, Ning, wikis, etc... then the only way to share seems to be to re-upload each of the files. I would rather see a directory of teachers. Each teacher would have a page listing their "contributions" followed by tag words.
This way we can search for something, and it can show teachers who have related material.
Right now, it has a "King of the Hill" feel to it. The only organization I see is the star system, which to be honest I never use. |
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 9:30 pm Post subject: |
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| lifeinkorea wrote: |
I am not quite sure what the function of it is for. When I went to sign in, I found out it is a gateway for other services, https://rpxnow.com/how_it_works
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| you make it faster and easier for users to access your website and increase the conversion rate from �visitors� to �registered users.� |
It actually does the opposite by the looks of it, and it makes my efforts doubled.
If people have stuff like myself on Youtube, Ning, wikis, etc... then the only way to share seems to be to re-upload each of the files. I would rather see a directory of teachers. Each teacher would have a page listing their "contributions" followed by tag words.
This way we can search for something, and it can show teachers who have related material.
Right now, it has a "King of the Hill" feel to it. The only organization I see is the star system, which to be honest I never use. |
Umm... RPXNow is the system that provides the ability to handle logins from other accounts, like your Google Account, Flickr, Youtube, Livejournal, etc. Lots of websites use it, and we're not affiliated with them in any way, other than that we want our users to be able to login in order to post recipes via their existing accounts, saving the bother of creating a new account solely for our site.
Users who want to just browse without posting recipes have no need whatsoever to login, not with our login system, nor any of their other accounts (gmail, flickr, etc).
You had to dig a bit to find that quote mentioning RPX's services, as I hadn't noticed it. Unfortunately, I can't get rid of it, since they're little ad blurb is what allows us to use their service for free.
In response to your other point: we intentionally didn't include an upload system on our site, since we wanted to avoid making users re-upload stuff that they already went to the trouble of uploading elsewhere. Instead, it's faster and easier if users just type into their recipes links to the content they wish to reference. Our system will automatically convert any typed web address into a URL. Plus, we have a handy Youtube button that allows you to embed youtube videos right inside the recipe, just by providing the youtube web address to your video.
I understand that the rating system is not everyone's favorite idea, but we hope it'll help some people while browsing. If you can think of a way to improve the rating system, we'd love to hear it.
Please let me know if this responds well enough to the points you made.
Cheers,
Dmitry |
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lifeinkorea
Joined: 24 Jan 2009
Location: somewhere in China
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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| we want our users to be able to login in order to post recipes via their existing accounts, saving the bother of creating a new account solely for our site. |
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| Instead, it's faster and easier if users just type into their recipes links to the content they wish to reference. Our system will automatically convert any typed web address into a URL. Plus, we have a handy Youtube button that allows you to embed youtube videos right inside the recipe, just by providing the youtube web address to your video. |
What if I have 1,000 references? I still have to input each reference one by one. Sending them to the source of their creations is the fastest, but I don't use Yahoo, Google, Myspace, etc... for content management. Either I don't use them at all, or I use a few for only contacts.
Again, I'll stress, I think you should have a TEACHER DIRECTORY, which profiles what each teacher wants to contribute. That way, teachers only have to deal with one page instead of short blurbs here, short blurbs there on each and every topic which is scattered among other teachers' stuff.
I have a wikispace up at englishlessons.wikispaces.com
I have things linked on the left and everything is on just one page per topic. I don't upload anything, I don't even have the images collected (for copyright reasons). However, it's all there under one "roof" so to speak. It would be nice to join up with other teachers and have profile pages we can skim through.
The idea I am thinking of is a Myspace for ESL teachers. Each teacher would get their own page and work as a shelf, holding what they have.
Last edited by lifeinkorea on Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:09 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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| seoulsister wrote: |
| The color scheme is bloody hard on the eyes, I only looked at it for a minute and then gave it up from eye-strain. Why don't you change the text color to white? Just a suggestion ^^; |
Our color scheme is currently black or dark gray text on a white background.
Could you please tell me which browser you were using?
A bug was just brought to my attention that affects Internet Explorer 6 (and possibly Internet Explorer 7). This bug makes the whole page appear blue, instead of just the header portion, making the text practically impossible to read.
I apologize if you tried to access the site with IE6 or IE7 and ran into display issues.
I'm not sure if we'll end up supporting Internet Explorer 6, but I'm working now on a solution for Internet Explorer 7. The site appears to work well in IE8/Firefox/Safari/Opera.
Cheers,
Dmitry
Last edited by Korussian on Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:57 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Korussian
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:31 pm Post subject: |
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What if I have 1,000 references? I still have to input each reference one by one. Sending them to the source of their creations is the fastest, but I don't use Yahoo, Google, Myspace, etc... for content management. Either I don't use them at all, or I use a few for only contacts.
Again, I'll stress, I think you should have a TEACHER DIRECTORY, which profiles what each teacher wants to contribute. That way, teachers only have to deal with one page instead of short blurbs here, short blurbs there on each and every topic which is scattered among other teachers' stuff.
I have a wikispace up at englishlessons.wikispaces.com
I have things linked on the left and everything is on just one page per topic. I don't upload anything, I don't even have the images collected (for copyright reasons). However, it's all there under one "roof" so to speak. It would be nice to join up with other teachers and have profile pages we can skim through.
The idea I am thinking of is a Myspace for ESL teachers. Each teacher would get their own page and work as a shelf, holding what they have. |
I like your idea of a MySpace for ESL Teachers - perhaps I'll build one if you don't beat me to it ;) At least, I'll think about how to include some of the functionality in TeachingRecipes.com.
Meanwhile, I think the source of my confusion about your earlier comment relates to the stated goals of our site: we're not a bookmarking engine, we're a teaching ideas engine.
Your wikispaces site looks very useful and chock full of info, but it's the thought-out lesson ideas in the left sidebar that would be most helpful to share with TeachingRecipes.com, not just out-of-context web links.
TeachingRecipes.com is not looking for you to post 1000 links to resources, but instead we'd love for you to post a paragraph or two that a brand new or experienced teacher could read over and then just do in class that day. Sure, if your teaching recipe relates to or relies upon some YouTube link or some website or picture or flash game, then you'll want to include that link in your recipe as well.
The idea is that using our tagging system and the categories, plus the very smart search box at the top-right of the page, finding teaching ideas is easy enough, without having to browse through any individual teacher's postings one-by-one.
To sum up, TeachingRecipes.com is a place to find and share ideas that teachers can read and follow to improve their classes. If you have lots of links to share and you want to see the links of other like-minded folks, then there are definitely better social-bookmarking sites out there. Those sites will provide your links with a single home, and then you can reference your collection as a whole on TeachingRecipes.com, and tell us how we can get teaching ideas out of it. Otherwise, it would be great if you could write a short blurb about each link you want to post, and add those as individual recipes - it's up to you as a user.
Thus, I'd certainly appreciate it if you could take a moment to write a blurb about why teachers might want to visit http://englishlessons.wikispaces.com for lesson ideas, and then post that blurb + link to TeachingRecipes.com.
Cheers,
Dmitry
[Edit: fixed a few typos] |
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lifeinkorea
Joined: 24 Jan 2009
Location: somewhere in China
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| Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 7:00 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Thus, I'd certainly appreciate it if you could take a moment to write a blurb about why teachers might want to visit http://englishlessons.wikispaces.com for lesson ideas, and then post that blurb + link to TeachingRecipes.com. |
The problem with that is that I don't have everything centrally located. The wikispace page is just one area. I have a library of photos at school, data files through google, and videos on two other services. I use all collectively, and they are always works in progress. You can improve upon them or apply portions. More emphasis on communicating over content is mentioned below.
If there was a main "Teacher page" I could post my contact information. I understand if you make lesson 1, and I make lesson 2, then we have 2 complete lessons. However, I find the joy in teaching is being able to take component parts and put them together to make a lesson for that day (like legos).
So, conversing and saying "HEY BOB, I SEE YOU WANT TO DO BLAH BLAH BLAH WITH YOUR LESSON....., why don't you add variable B."
Kind of like I am doing with you now regarding the website. I am not telling you everything about webdesigning, nor am I not submitting a .css file. Instead I am communicating from a person to person level, rather than content to person level.
I am afraid the blurb would just end up giving someone an incomplete scope of my "ingredients". Communicating the recipe like during a cooking show is what makes things really come alive. With the internet, we don't have to wait for the show to finish to ask questions and communicate.
That's what I am looking for, teachers to talk to in real-time that are going over the same lessons I might be. I am not interested in taking something they did and "stealing" it or deciphering what the heck they meant. I prefer to contact them and engage in the very thing I am teaching my students, English conversation. |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 1:26 am Post subject: |
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Dmitry,
I'm finally coming up for air!
Wonderful work!!! and I'm glad you saw as I did, both the need for something like this and most importantly (and which some people don't really understand), the need to do something about it. Teachers really need a place for basic ideas - our profession has thousands of teachers DAILY entering the profession. They need a place to quickly glean a library of real good ideas - ideas being the crysallis of good teaching. what's out there right now is too "flat".
I like the new look but will email you some thoughts about tweaks still...as Picasso said, everything is at all times a work in progress..
I really hope others will share their favorite activities - just a quick description to give us the "idea" and off we go. In the meantime, I will load up some more of the "basics" like Running Dialogues, find someone who, flashcards, backdoor, circle games, storybook ideas etc..... I know teachers will find and appreciate them. I'll announce on EFL Classroom in our Aug. newsletter.
To address two people who posted:
Not a billboard for EFL Classroom. I have taken people's comments about searching EFL 2.0 to heart and this is one way to help with that BUT it is also such a unique thing that it should really live on its own. However, I will go wherever on the web to get teachers the goods. I think others know that and value that. So I have no qualms about also putting up recipes on Teacher Recipes.
Also, teachers can now search videos and resources with cool tag clouds...
http://eflclassroom.com/cloud/tagcloudvideo/tagcloud.swf
http://eflclassroom.com/clouds/tagcloudresources/tagcloud.swf
lifeinkorea. I get your point and I think it great that you want to let others know about what you are doing and have dialogue. But there is a solution. Thousands of teachers on EFL Classroom use our internal messaging and groups for private conversation about lessons and content. Do that. Don't complain but contribute and get out there and start the dialogue. It just won't happen by itself..... Further, you can comment and elaborate to your heart's content on Teacher Recipes also...
Dmitry, once again thanks and appreciate your advocacy for teachers and furthering the profession. (purple heart is in the mail) 
DD
http://eflclassroom.com |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 2:57 am Post subject: |
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As discussed above, we've made major changes to Teaching Recipes that I think everyone will love!
These include a new layout. A new display of tags. Smart Search. Notification of new recipes added by members. And most importantly, you can now download and print a recipe on paper to share and store - just like you would with recipe cards! Lots more new recipes each day as we build a great online index card file.
If you have a great idea, help us out and pay it back to a job that's been good to you. Thanks in advance,
Korussian, thank YOU. You've been incredibly "smart" in how you put this together.
DD
http://eflclassroom.com |
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