Correspondence units 7/8

26 Março 2020, 08:00 • Cláudia Rute Canelas Pereira Duarte

Correspondence units 7/8

Correspondence units 5/6

24 Março 2020, 08:00 • Cláudia Rute Canelas Pereira Duarte

Correspondence units 5/6

Presentations (questions and decision about evaluation) and correspondence (correction and setting up activities)

19 Março 2020, 08:00 • Cláudia Rute Canelas Pereira Duarte

Presentations (questions and decision about evaluation) and correspondence (correction and setting up activities)

Presentations/Correspondence homework

17 Março 2020, 08:00 • Cláudia Rute Canelas Pereira Duarte

Presentations/Correspondence homework

Homework

12 Março 2020, 08:00 • Cláudia Rute Canelas Pereira Duarte

My dear students

I’ve been trying to adapt our course to our new circumstances but it has taken me some time because it’s very different from our good old boring face to face classes and this is not easy. I ask you to bear with me and try to cooperate as we muddle through this chaos. I will do my best to make sure that you can meet all the goals for this semester and that your learning and evaluation are as regular as possible. However, I’m still feeling my way around all of this myself, so please forgive me for any last minute changes.

Firstly, I would like to restart classes, online version, next week. I’m still learning how to use the software but my plan for now is to use Zoom, so I would ask you to open an account and explore it. I will send you an invitation through the email registered in Fenix and the class will take place at a similar time to our usual classes. I’m sure it’ll be an awkward experience for everyone at first, myself especially, but the upside is that Zoom only allows for 40m sessions, so it’ll be a short class. If I find another way, I’ll keep you posted. For the rest of the time I’ll be setting homework and reading/writing assignments for you to do in the meantime. You can always ask questions during the online class or send me an email but please allow for some time for my reply because I’m sure I’ll be swamped in email even more than usual.

The idea for now is to do all the writing part of the course and we’ll keep the oral for later, when we’re all together again, hopefully in time to do everything we need to do. As I see it, the worst-case scenario, if we continue in isolation for a long time, is that evaluation will be done all in writing and no speaking, but I’m not planning for that yet, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

So now for practical issues.

Regarding our programme, presentations are suspended and we’re going to go into writing correspondence. I’d ask you to do all the exercises in our coursebook from page 30 to 47 until Tuesday next week. You should keep in touch with people in your “company” and share your work. On Tuesday we’ll have our class at 9am (I don’t think there’s any need to get up for 8am if we only have 40m) and you can ask all the questions you have. I’ll also be sending you the answer key/suggested answers for those exercises then so you can check and ask more questions for Thursday.

I will do my best to keep my summaries updated and fully informative about what the tasks are from one session to another, so please keep track of that too.

After this section we will probably do Reports and I might even find a way to finish Presentations and have you record yourselves or do it in an online class, I haven’t decided yet.

Finally, if you have any questions, suggestions or comments on any obvious thing I’m forgetting, please send me an email. I am sending this email with all your emails instead of through Fenix so we can keep track of everyone, I hope you don’t mind me sharing your address (well, if you do it’s too late now anyway, needs must when the virus drives and all that…).

Let’s try to make the best of a difficult situation, and let’s hope we’ll all walk away with an interesting story to tell our grandchildren.

Keep washing those hands and stay safe.