Web-Questing, Across The Universe

I'm feelin' good, folks, I'm ever so well. Firstly, thanks for your comments: I do read this thing so I've been replying, and I'll do my best to keep up with you all in this very Web 2.0 way (or are blogs old hat now? Should I be twittr-mobbing from an iPhone, or something?). Also, I just had a lesson with my Intermediate teens - the absolute Nightmare Class when I started - that absolutely flew. I don't know how much language they got from it (which is always the main aim), but in terms of their attitude and the effort they put in, it was like they'd broken through a wall. Less painful than that, obviously.

I can't really take credit for planning it, because it was a "Webquest": an IT-based lesson that we'd been through in a seminar and Jeanette had prepared for us. Fifteen minutes of online research and they were brilliant for the rest of the time, and gave me two great little presentations of holidays they'd devised. I think just being near the wi-fi'd laptops for a while got them all charged up. I've been having ideas about how I can get the Wii into a lesson as a genuine language tool, because they'd love it (half the students have one). Making Miis for the little ones to revise "I've got blue eyes", etc? The wordy bits of Twilight Princess for reading practice with the adolescents? Maybe I'll get some plans down and we'll see about the fun end-of-year lessons. Bit too soon to start rocking the boat that much, I think.

Aah, and an early finish tonight: off home for a chicken sarnie, a beer, and some time on a mind-boggling text adventure (or, to be pretentious, work of Interactive Fiction) I downloaded. I've been trying to write one again recently, but thought it might be an idea to see how the professionals do it. And by "professionals", I mean "people who write text adventures but don't seem to gain money or fame at all". It's not a genre that gets you into Heat magazine.