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Are you studying Japanese, thinking of visiting Japan, interested in Japanese culture, people, products, etc.? If so, this site is for you. My name is Jeff Blum and I have been attempting to learn Japanese, off and on, for many years (my progress is very slow). During my studies (both independent and class-based) I have assembled notes summarizing key grammar constructs, word usage nuance, aspects of the language that regularly trip me up, etc. In fact, the name for this site (besides being, well, "welcoming") came from my desire to post my summary notes for the popular Yookoso! textbooks. I have also assembled a huge collection of links to the best sites on the Internet. All of these (well, actually I still haven't posted many of them yet), plus some of my favorite JPOP tunes and their lyrics I share with you here. If you have any feedback to offer, or especially if you want to contribute notes of your own or articles you have written, please do so at jmblum@yookoso.com.

We developed these free resources to provide teachers with high-quality resources online, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you do best -- helping your students! Let us know what else you would like to see here.

Connect your favorite courses to relevant learning resources. Exchange knowledge and information with other members whose academic interests match yours. Join peers and professors in exploring the newest academic frontier: free online courses.

how you can apply Bloom's higher-order thinking skills in your classroom. This poster shows the segments of an orange with each segment relating to a thinking skill and some helpful verbs to serve as prompts.

For those of you who prefer it, we've also created a grayscale version of the poster. And if for some reason you're against "oranges" and prefer lists, you can just download the Blooming Verb List. You should be able to glue the template onto a 3" x 5" index card or colored card stock, making it easy to carry around.

The process is simple: Students choose a picture and tell a story in six words. I had so much fun doing the activity myself I decided to use it with both my young learners and my more mature learners. It worked beautifully! Six words doesn’t intimidate anyone, so even my weakest writers enjoyed thinking of their stories. Six words also creates an effective framework for activating some micro-grammar awareness—especially word order in sentences, and the need for pesky little words in English (like BE verbs and articles).

I have been teaching quite a few students over the summer and was interested to see how they each approached the process of language learning. All of them worked hard and made progress and were delightful to teach and work with but analysing their preparedness and study methods gave me some insights into what sort of things seem to work well.  

Learning styles  

Student behaviour 

It is important to vary the activities in your lessons so that you cater for students with different learning styles. The following lesson-planning framework can help you do this.

I read a lot about the “new paradigm” that is occuring in education. There is a lot for us teachers and particularly those in leadership positions to think about. I really do hear some things repeated over and over again – that I just won’t buy into. I don’t believe the hype. These ideas seem so obvious and so clear that to me, they must be a lie. Reality is crooked and operates on her own principles – not the nice, clean kitchen cupboards we like to stack away our beliefs in. So in brief and to maybe get others thinking a little “outside the box” – here are 3 things that are being hyped in the educational world that I disagree with completely. (and a joke for each that I hope will support my argument or if not, at least give you a chuckle)

Today, all of the sophomores and juniors in my school are taking the PSAT. That got me thinking about some of the many resources designed to help students learn PSAT and SAT vocabulary that I've come across over the last few years. Here are five resources worth checking out.

Vocab Ahead is a great service offering hundreds of videos designed to help students learn SAT and ACT vocabulary words.

Bubba Brain is a simple site packed with review games for students preparing for the SAT and AP exams.

The Invigilator, directed by Manesh Nesaratnam, is a story about two high-school teachers and their aspirations in the teaching profession. Starring celebrity actor Cheryl Samad and Tony Eusoff, this film is at once a light-hearted clash of pedagogical perspectives and at the same time an echo of societies' frustrations with the inadequacies of available education systems. The Invigilator has been selected and screened for the Fukuoka International Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, Australian Malaysian Film Festival, Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia Pacific, Dawnbreakers International Film Festival and London Asian Film Festival.

A few of the sites I came across were solely for finding teachers, some did not offer any or much free material, and a few were almost exactly what I was looking for. Another aspect of modern language learning that I was hoping to find on these sites was portability – if they offered downloads of audio and text so I did not have to sit at a computer with an internet connection in order to study.  For those of us who work all day long at a computer, the thought of only using a computer to study languages isn’t exactly enticing.  For these reasons, and the fact that I was focusing on German and Italian, my top three choices are Busuu.com, Livemocha.com and Lingq.com, while Hello-Hello.com gets an honorable mention (but mostly because they don’t currently offer German.)

Over the last weeks, I have been attempting to learn German through various different interfaces. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me at all. This post shares a little of my experience using both Busuu and LiveMocha. The reason I’m reviewing them together is that I find both their advantages and their disadvantages to be very broadly similar, even if the actual systems are very different and present different types of interfaces. I’ll start with how I think these can be useful and then say where I feel they fall short.

Evernote is a great application for educators. It’s usefulness can range from planning a course to delivering a lesson plan to capturing feedback after class. I experimented with using Evernote while I was teaching courses at San Jose State University. It proved to be an excellent classroom companion. Here are some ways to use Evernote to achieve your teaching goals.

These games and activities have been collected from various sources: past issues of the Fukushima JET newsletter, games books, various CLAIR and AJET teaching resource guides, and stuff left over from my predecessor. I apologize for not quoting sources, but I collected them in such a hurry when I first got here that I can’t find the original sources in most cases. It is safe to assume that I did not come up with all of these games, so please do not give me credit for doing so. You can, however, assume that all mistakes are mine.

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

Give your students further practice with English grammar through writing exercises. We offer a good number of writing worksheets on this site. There are printable composition writing templates, sentence scrambles , gap fill exercises, word scrambles, picture description and more which have been broken down into beginner, intermediate and high level writing exercises. Almost all you need to give your English students good writing practice.

There are indeed vast amount of YouTube videos which can be used in the English language classrooms but teachers might not have the time to go through all of them. Students perhaps spend more time watching videos on YouTube than television these days. Here are 10 best YouTube channels for English language teachers, not only to be used as a teaching material but as a guidance to improve their teaching methodology. These channels contain videos of good quality for English language teaching. Of course, teachers still need to make sure that the videos are suitable with the lesson or tasks.