What did I read today? And technical hiccups.

I'm rather pleased with the new assignment type I've come up with - initially as a crisis saving device (what on earth should we do in class today?), but it really seems to work quite well. The idea is that the students go to the school library, which is well stocked with magazines and newspapers of all kinds, each of them selects an article (sometimes I give a broad subject they must choose within, e.g. American politics, navy issues, technology) in an English-language magazine which they read, and then write a short report and post it to me either on it'sl or email. This way all of them are active, everyone reads something they have chosen (but worthy stuff!), and everyone writes something, which I try to give very swift feedback to. I plan to do more of this.

Then a little griping about technical limitations: our precious language lab was of course only half functional this week (what else is new? It never ceases to amaze me that we can put people on the moon, launch intelligent missiles, and I'll never really understand how a radio works, but getting that dratted language lab to cooperate for more than one hour without technical problems is just not possible), so I decided to do the listening exercise (very ordinary stuff, Economist audio article, listen & fill in missing phrases) in a classroom, just play the file from the class pc. This works a dream on my office pc, but not so in the classroom, as it turned out. A flashing message that a sound codec (who's that when he's at home?) was missing. Thus, my class got rather more time to do the "What did I read today"-exercise mentioned above than I had planned for - hope (springs eternal) it made them read more closely and spend slightly more time on their writing afterwards.