I was recently asked to describe my ideal classroom as efforts were made to find a suitable venue for an advanced business English class I started two weeks ago. Obviously I interpreted this in a pragmatic way. I wanted a place equipped with computers having internet access, a projector, a smart board, failing that a flip chart whose pages I could take home with me. I failed to ask for a space to meet without the computers and failed to request that the computers should be capable of both playing and recording sound.

What I got was an IT room with tables in rows, no smart board, no flip chart but a blackboard, a tiny space where we can make a circle of chairs and two outside balconies. The blackboard means that I have to make notes of what is on it before making space for new stuff or we take bad photos with our mobile phones.

 

There is a projector with speakers which means that I have been able to show a couple of You Tube videos (sharp intake of breath from my participants) this one for example as an example of a good presentation. We used that one to devise a rubric for assessing presentations.

This is a company course and participants come from all over Denmark as the company has branches everywhere. Therefore I wanted a digital location to keep all course materials (including those oh so dangerous You Tube videos) and set up a course on our Moodle, enrolled everyone, showed them where it was and how to access it and then discovered that the company IT policy is so strict that no matter which option I might have chosen none of my particpants can access the course at work. It is cheering to note from the logs that they do access the course website anyway and this must be from home.

The balconies are great for small group work. So far we've worked on needs analysis, emphasis, presentations and the use of Powerpoint. My next session will be a big test of the facilities as we are concentrating on telephone communication and I want them to record conversations in pairs for analysis later. I will be pleasantly surprised if the computers are primed to record. In my experience setting up computers to play and record sound is at the bottom of the list of priorities as it is seen as the road to perdition. So plan B is to use my all singing all dancing PDA, Edirol recorder which I use for podcasting, mp3 player and even my camcorder. If only two people in the room have mobile phones which record that should bring the number of recording devices up to what we need.

One day, all this stuff will be taken for granted and just in the background to be used when I need it.

The latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural deals with intercultural weddings including two examples of Lebanese people marrying non-Lebanese. Here the inter-cultural issues are clear but as the round table discussion, also included in the show, reveals, any wedding is a bringing together of two cultures, the male and the female or at least those of the two families involved.

I have now been to two sessions on how to teach languages in Second Life courtesy of LanguageLab.com. So far I am learning a whole lot about how to operate in Second Life because even though I have been there for just over a year now, I must admit that I haven't got very clever with it yet.

The intention is that we get input once a week until November when we get a month or so to work on our own projects. I am very impressed with the amount of thought and work which has gone into the design of Language Lab so far and I am keen to learn more on a practical level even though I am rather short of time and certainly short of computing power. I crashed once today and wasn't able to try out the rather fetching dragon outfit we were given free of charge in order to practice changing our appearance. One very good thing is that voice is working amazingly well for me. Meanwhile maybe I can persuade my employers to give me a computer which enables me to run SL easily rather than as now working at the edge of the children's computer's capabilities.

These problems make it all the more attractive to try out the virtual world at www.there.com which, according to Nik Peachey's very helpful post on the topic, seems to be much less demanding of computing power.

I dedicated most of the latest Absolutely Intercultural podcast to the International Baccalaureate because we happen to offer it at a high school in the town where I work. What I discovered is that the IB as it is known means very different things depending on its location. Here in Denmark it is an opportunity for young people of different backgrounds and cultural identities to get an internationally recognised qualification through the medium of English. In the US it seems to be just another High School alternative with no special international flavour and in France it seems to be seen as a threat to the standard French qualification if it is offered in French and does not seem to have much value in its English version. I also included  part of a conversation I had with a Brazilian teacher, Carla Arena, who includes cultural exchanges simply through the medium of blog writing and at the end of the show I felt that the IB students were not getting the full potential benefit of the readymade worldwide network of which they are a part.