Manten Resources

Supporting your Japanese language program

Teacher Wellbeing

Time for some Christmas Cheer!

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I was shocked to realize that there are only 5 weeks left until Christmas. This time of year is an enjoyable time for me as I love to hear from teachers who are setting up new programs and adding new resources to their tool kit for the following year.

I have also been inspired to launch a new resource for Stage 6 Beginners targeting scaffolding text types. This resource will be called The Kaeru Project, and the workbooks can be used parallel to classwork, so it does not matter if you are using Jblog 4 or a combination of your own materials. The booklets provide students with 3 short writing lessons (5-15 minutes each) working through scaffolds that unpack sample responses to HSC style questions. These will be launched for 2024 with the following booklets currently in the review stage:

Course 1: Diaries and Dialogues (plain form)

Course 2: Casual emails and letters (plain form)

Course 3: Transitioning from Casual to Polite texts (including speeches)

Although they specifically target Stage 6 Beginners, they would also be of use to Stage 5 and Stage 6 Continuers students or as a resource to use when compiling your own reading exams.

I currently have a work experience student who has been testing these out for me and they suggested we run a Christmas contest offering a free copy of Course 1 as a prize.

We will have 3 draws with two winners each week:

November 20th, December 4th and December 11th.

All non-winners from Week 1 will be automatically entered into the following week’s draw.

To enter, please complete the survey via this link. (Don’t worry – it only has one real question!)

You just need to share with us a message of how Manten resources have helped you in your educational setting. Your kind messages and tales of how you incorporate our resources into your programs are so inspiring.

So spread a little Christmas cheer and enter today!

Year 12 2022 Assessment ideas

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“Many people wish they started sooner. Almost nobody wishes they started later.” James Clear

Term 3 has been a long and difficult term for many regions due to lockdowns and restrictions. It is heartbreaking to watch some of our students crumble a little at the edges and difficult to offer support through the barrier of a screen. The preoccupation for many has been our Year 12 2021 students, particularly in NSW regarding the timing and format of a 2021 HSC.

The dust has finally settled, and we have a plan to aim for. We now need to turn our attention to our plans for the Year 11 cohort as they move into Year 12 in Term 4. With one week of term left, deadlines for assessment task schedules may be looming. To assist with this we have created three Year 12 tasks that are designed to work in with your 4th formal Trial HSC task.

Each task is $70 or $210 for the set of three and the suggested weighting grid.

The topics assessed are:

Task 1: School trip preparation – Written response to an oral text (Reading and writing skills)

Task 2: Well-being Centre – Response to written and spoken texts (Listening, reading and writing skills)

Task 3: House Swap – Response to a written text/interview (Reading and speaking skills)

Although these tasks are specifically designed for the Stage 6 Beginners course, teachers of other courses may find them useful as inspiration for their own teacher developed tasks. As always, you are encouraged to edit the tasks to suit your cohort.

To order, email me at jblog1help@gmail.com

The wait is over!

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The new support resources for Jblog 4 are now ready including your new programs, student workbook tasks, teacher marking guidelines, sound files and google forms. Take the stress out of the final week of term and buy yourself some time with this useful pack. Your entire year 11 lesson prep is done for $600. This set supports Jblog 4 the new Stage 6 Beginners course.

Haven’t ordered your copies yet? $70 plus postage for the textbook that covers both Year 11 and 12.

Teaching continuers but looking for additional reading texts – then you need a copy too! Includes current topics such as COVID-19 and veganism.

To order any of our resources just email me at jblog1help@gmail.com and request a quote or invoice.

Online learning options

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During this new period of self-isolation and restricted movement, I have discovered a new level of mindfulness in my daily life. Even road signs begin to take on new meaning when so many of our daily distractions, both good and bad, have been removed. This week’s roadside prophecy was “Use other path”. This is the reality for many teachers now coming to terms with online learning.

Today I want to focus on what a lesson might look like in two common platforms – Canvas and Google classroom. The key point to remember is that you do not need to be perfect. Have a growth mindset and allow yourself the space to improve gradually. In this post I will show you how to use your Jblog google forms as they are in a google platform and how to adapt them to the Canvas platform. If you click on the images contained in this post you will be able to see them more clearly.

The Google platform

If you are using Google classroom it is relatively straightforward to add your google form task to your classwork stream.

You can create an assignment and just add the link to the google form. You can then add instructions and a title, and you are done.

You can get the link to the google form by going to your copy of the form on google drive. Click on the send button and then select the link tab. This will provide you with the link you need.

The Canvas platform

You can achieve the same thing in Canvas by adding the link to the google form and directing students out of Canvas to complete the form. (See above regarding how to get the link to your google form.) I added this to my module as an assignment page. If you want to keep the marks all in Canvas, you can manually add the score to Canvas if you add the points to the Canvas assignment set up.

When you have more time, you may want to start moving the content into Canvas as a Canvas quiz and keep everything within the one program. You can do this by setting up a normal Canvas quiz page and adding the sound file for the quiz from your Jblog google folder.

You can find the sound files in your google folder in the Sound files folder for the relevant chapter. Upload that sound file to Canvas by selecting the record/upload media button, then select the Upload media tab and Select audio file tab. I find this works better than inserting a link to a file as that tends to require a download and is less seamless.

You can then copy and paste the questions and answers into your new Canvas quiz from your old google quiz.

Good luck everybody. If you have questions or you get stuck, please feel free to contact me at  jblog1help@gmail.com .

We are all learning together and if I can help if some way, please let me.

Stay well.

New ways with old resources

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Tomorrow my son’s school will close and we will be a family of 3 working from home. As many of us face similar prospects, it is a good time to reimagine some of our old resources in the new online context.

I am a tactile teacher and love hard copies, particularly for tasks where I want the students to write. I am a parent too though and realise that even if I upload worksheets online, the expense of printing at home will not be feasible in the long run for most families. This has led me to look at options for how to use my old favourite worksheets without printing them out. If you are using Jblog student workbooks, you will realise that most of the tasks are also available as pre-made google forms. You can simply upload these to your school platform such as google classroom. Some tasks do not fit that format though so let’s look at how we might tackle these activities.

We are going to use this example of a find-a-word that the teacher has made as a word document.

Option 1. Make the worksheet a jpeg image.

  1. Open the word document and CTRL+prt sc to screenshot the worksheet.
  2. Paste into paint program. Zoom out so that you can see the full page. Click on the Home tab + select.
  3. You will be left with just the image of your worksheet. Click on file + save as + jpeg and name the image.
  4. You can now upload the jpeg to your online platform. The students can then open up their copy and complete it using their digital pen. They can save the completed image and share with you as evidence of their work.

Option 2. Make the worksheet a google drawing

  1. In your google classroom, make a new assignment. Type in the instructions for the task.
  2. Click on the create button to access the drop-down menu. Select google drawings.
  3. Paste your jpeg image into the google drawing page. Select make a copy for each student.
  4. Click on assign (if you are ready for them to see the task). Students can then answer on their copy which is saved automatically.

 

This example was for a simple worksheet but you could use it with longer tasks such as teaching hiragana via the Hiragana Patch system.

There are lots of great interactive tasks online for us to use but don’t forget to include some calming tasks such as this find-a-word in your programming of activities.

Remember my favourite quote “The worst use of time is to do something really well that needn’t be done at all”. (Brian Tracy, Eat that frog!) If you have a worksheet that works, keep on using it. You just need to update how your student accesses it.

Good luck everyone.

Teaching under COVID-19: our time for Kensho

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This year has been a challenging one. We’ve had terrible bushfires, followed by storm damage and now a pandemic – and we’re still in term 1! Times like these can be stressful for both students and teachers. I am hopeful though, that this slow-down of our lives will help us experience a moment of kensho. Kensho is defined by Vishen Lakhiani as “Growth from temporary pain”. It can shock us into hansei, (reflection), with regards to how lucky we have been to have had so much choice in the past; but also a mental edit that perhaps some of the things we were cramming into our lives in the past are not missed now that they are gone.

This week I was saddened when our conferences and workshops had to be cancelled or postponed until next year. I was due to run a primary network meeting tomorrow but due to the enthusiasm of the group we have decided to run it virtually. This event is forcing me to upskill my knowledge of videoconferencing – a task that had been on my to-do list for months. I need to be an expert by tomorrow – and will subsequently need to adopt a growth mindset when I realize I am not.

Many of us are preparing to live and teach with less face to face contact. Teaching, as we know, is heavily influenced by the relationship that exists between the teacher and the students, and between the students themselves. As we prepare to run courses on-line, we need to ensure that we strive to maintain that connection. Here are some tips to do so.

  1. Use a narrative or the first person when creating resources. The students need you now more than ever so where possible share voiceovers or videos of yourself welcoming the students to the work each week and verbally talking them through the tasks you lined up for them.
  2. Consider including a task like The Platform. This formative task encourages students from year 9 to 12, to share their interests and use language to comment on each other’s findings. Working in smaller pods of students enable them to feel less social anxiety about sharing and can develop a sense of connection with the teacher in a virtual space.
  3. Manage your own mental health by using resources and websites that are ready made for some tasks. Your energy is better spent on providing feedback to the student on their efforts than in spending hours creating the perfect on-line task.

We know that some of us who use class sets of textbooks may be worried about what to do when the teaching goes on-line. To help with this, we have made flipbooks of Jblog 1 and Jblog 2 textbooks that are available to teachers for a one-off fee of $100 during this COVID-19 period. This cost allows use to load the text to your school’s preferred online platform to enable access for your students. This offer is only available to school’s who have purchased a class set in the past. Email me at jblog1help@gmail.com for details.

Good luck everyone during this time of change and challenge. Keep looking for those moments of kensho!