Last semester I had the chance to be in the classroom, and it was great. Most of my students passed and overall I felt like I did a good job. Then… a surprise. One of my students gave me the acrylic with my picture in it and a very nice message. These are the things that make me stay awake late, working on materials and classroom preparation. Many people say it is not worth to be a teacher. I completely Read More …
Since my arrival at Lakeland University Japan I have been so busy with administrative duties that just imagining being in the classroom was overwhelming. Well, it seems that life does not wait for us to be ready. From May I will be teaching two courses, and I am very, very excited to be back in the classroom. The course will be something new to me, but a course that I have been planning and thinking about for a long time: Read More …
For the last 13 years, I have been teaching in the classroom. True that during the “with corona” times we were all shifting between online and face-to-face here and there, but essentially, the structure of my courses did not change. Now that we are all back to face-to-face classes things were supposed to settle down, but with the lab changing locations, I am unable to be with my students every week. Yes, I changed jobs but I am still supporting Read More …
The 2022 academic year came to an end. From a professional point of view, it was great to graduate so many students and it felt good when I realized how well all those little scripts I made years ago worked well. Yes, you read it right: scripts. The thing about management is that usually there is no such thing as one system doing it all. Information is often managed in one system but the reports and data analysis have to Read More …
The first time we prepare a course is always difficult. Is this text appropriate? Are students going to engage in the discussion? If they don’t understand, what other examples can I give them? The preparation is always plagued with doubts. Luckily for me, I got an amazing group this time and things went much better than one could expect. We had only eight lessons in the semester (1 credit course), but every lesson was full of discussion and questions. It Read More …
Every year in my ICT class we have a mini research project where students create a questionnaire and interview their colleagues. This year I had a big surprise when I found out that some students were using Google forms to create the questionnaire and posting it on social media in order to get more answers. So far, so good. The problem with this approach was that, due to the educational nature of the task, we are skipping many steps there Read More …
We had classes canceled in the morning today, and I decided to take the whole day off in order to catch up with test corrections. I was sure this would be a relaxing day… but oh boy… It is really sad to see that some students could not do anything asked in the test. My partners and I are really working hard explaining, going around the classroom to check students’ doubts… and still … looking at the tests, it is Read More …
I have always been a person who favors new things over used ones. There are mainly two reasons for that. The first reason is that usually the price difference is not that big so, why buy something that someone else was using? The second reason is that you cannot check how the previous person “treated” the thing. Specially in IT, it is often the case that you will find out something does not work only when you need to use Read More …
It was a rainy Sunday yesterday and there I was, in downtown Miyazaki, to do a presentation about online security. This is not my usual type of talk, and to be honest, it was quite challenging. The audience was small (less than 20 people) with ages ranging from 20 to 60 (as far as I can tell). I was not really sure about how much the attendees knew about technology so creating the presentation made me a little bit nervous. Read More …
Oh my… it looks like a joke, but the last time I posted something here was… an year ago!!! I (and everyone else around me) have been very busy preparing for the new academic year. A new curriculum, graduate school prep, and of course all the normal work that we do at the college everyday running in parallel. It is really interesting how life happens and, suddenly, posting on my personal page looses its priority. In 2021 I worked really Read More …
