R.I.Chalmers

Thank You Cleaners | Learn English | Vocabulary

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:04:14 +0000

10,000 + YouTube Subscribers!

Richard — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:42:20 +0000

I wrote on this blog last November that I hoped to have 6000 YouTube subscribers by November 2010. Well, today we passed the 10,000 subscriber mark, and it’s only August. Recent trends show that I should have 15,000 subscribers on YouTube by November 2010 – considerably more than I earlier predicted.

We also have 2063 Linguaspectrum members. And that is without any form of advertising. I am soon to launch my subscription service. I hope to turn a high proportion of my members into subscribers to the new Premium Content.

What I have learnt over the past few months is that hard work and more hard work eventually pays dividends and achieves your goals. Endless hours of work should see us with 30,000 YouTube subscribers by this time next year (August 16th 2011) and, I hope, 5,000 Linguaspectrum members.

The numbers seem fantastic, but they are only a tiny fraction of the people out there who want to learn English.

There Their They’re | Learn English | Confusables

Richard — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:07:47 +0000

This latest video English lesson deals with another 3 troublesome homophones – there, their and they’re. You only have to read the comments on any English online newspaper to see how even native English speaker have trouble with these. This video is also full of fiendishly difficult tongue-twisters designed to test your verbal dexterity. I defy you to say them all correctly.

Students can now record their classes

Richard — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:17:17 +0000

As an online English teacher, I am always looking for ways to make the learning process as effective as possible. One of my students, Ady, asked today if he could keep the audio from our lessons. I already give students the full notes that we make with screen sharing on Skype, but never considered recording the audio.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One, it would produce a huge file. 30 minutes of MP3 would run to several hundred megabytes. Two, this would be too big to send to the student by email. Most email services limit the size of the attachments you can send.

So I did a bit of research and found a very interesting program called CallGraph. This is a free download that allows you to record your Skype conversations on two channels. This is useful if you want to isolate the teacher or the student. It’s easy to download and install. I installed it to my system in minutes and was able to quickly make a test recording.

I am recommending all my online students to download the program from http://callgraph.biz/ and use if they want during our classes. Being able to relive a class as often as necessary will help students with particular points of grammar or pronunciation. By recording the audio themselves, they remove the need for me to send anything bigger than the PDF files I always send containing the class notes.

Skype to allow conference video calls

Richard — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:52:19 +0000

Skype 5, currently in Beta, has the capability to allow up to 5 users to share a conference call. For me as a an online teacher, this is exciting news indeed. It means that I can offer group classes to students who may be separated from each other by thousands of miles.
Many students, especially in the Far East, cannot afford even my low prices for classes. A class shared between four students, however, would be affordable to most.
Students could arrange with their friends to take group conversation classes with me online. All would then join the class at the appointed time and would enjoy a classroom type environment.
It will be very interesting to see how this works in practice.
On my wish-list for Skype is two-way screen sharing. I use screen sharing in my online classes every day. It makes teaching easier and learning is faster. What I would like to see is the ability for the student to also interact with the screen at the same time as me. Currently, the student has to initiate a screen share of their own, and thus screen sharing goes from one to the other, but never both at the same time.

To Too Two | Learn English | Confusing Words

Richard — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:09:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNNEVDe98oI

This was by far the most difficult video I have yet made for YouTube. Some problems with the rendering at YouTube caused massive synchronization problems and the video was unusable as a teaching tool. I had to redo the whole thing in MPEG-2 and then spend 11 hours uploading. Thankfully, it finally rendered correctly at YouTube’s end. I hope this is not going to repeat itself.

The Fisherman and the Little Fish | Learn English | Aesop’s Fable

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:09:38 +0000

Vegetable Idioms | Learn English | Idioms

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:45:30 +0000

Seafood Idioms | Learn English | Idioms

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:30:18 +0000

Personal Pronouns | Learn English | Grammar

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:26:08 +0000