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Issue 34
Tuesday Edition
David Skaife
August 20, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In this issue
😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap
Another relatively slow week in the Facebook group
Playground
🛝🛠️Dusting off the Greeting Card Template
Still under construction
I had some more new ideas for the structural bones behind the Greeting Card Template. For those that have been around and remember, I published some Knock-Knock jokes as Playground Stories. These were just proof-of-concept experiments to see how the mechanics worked in the real world with real people. Check them out below and you can see how this 2 page with an ending GIF concept works.
I intended to do more with this Playground concept but got really busy with teaching (a good problem to have), however, this week is slowing down a bit so I dusted it off and started working again.
My original thought was to create Playground Stories for my 3 year old to play on the iPad, but all he can do is tap on items and drag them around using the touch screen. So I needed to take out the movement components and have nothing in the toolbar to use or to distract.
One of the ideas I have had on the back-burner is a word search puzzle for older students. I decided on a 10x10 to start with but I think 12x18 might fit. I placed it on the second of the two pages or rooms that are available with this template, so the student will need to do an exercise or activity before they can unlock the word search.
 Tiny Playground but a lot going on |  Dealing with parallax during the build |
 Another angle |  This is the starting point for these Greeting Card type builds |
Now this is a difficult and precise build to get working and somebody once told me that “people might be willing to pay for a class to learn how to do this”.
I will post more as I get further along in the build
Preply
🧑🏽🏫🔮Preply update August 2024
Things are still going well for me on Preply, I raised my rates and have fewer demo classes but I think it will work out overall. Some of my original students are taking breaks or quietly vanishing. This seems to be the normal way of things. ABAS- Always Be Adding Students.
Last time I checked, there were over 22,000 English teachers on Preply, so I am grateful to have any students at all. There is an algorithm that circulates profiles to the top part of the list, nobody seems to have a handle on how it works but it does seem to be pretty fair, giving everyone a shot, which reflects my overall perception of Preply…they play fair. They have figured out that when the teachers make money, they make money.
There have been no surprises, everything seems above board and transparent, the support staff have been excellent and timely, they seem to treat the students and tutors as real people that have value. The changes that have been made have all been positive in my opinion. The last company I worked for was the opposite, every change meant more unpaid work, lower wages, stricter BS rules, fines, fewer hours and fewer students.
Naturally this has just been my experience and your mileage may vary, it could also all change at a moments notice but,
so far, so good.
Editorial
✍️🃏Editorial: A funny thing happened during transcription…
With my conversation classes for adults I record a short speaking section and have it transcribed for the next class. The AI is super helpful at doing this tedious task for me but between pronunciation errors and the AI trying to fill in the blanks there are some pretty funny sentences produced from time to time. This week I had two that really struck me as song lyrics. So what does an AI nerd do? Naturally, I went over to Suno, put in a simple prompt and a couple minutes later had a song for each of the odd sentences.
"Mic check, one, two... is this mic on? Great, because these beats are about to drop!" -image and caption created by Gemini because I asked nicely
The students are still laughing, they had no idea they were such talented song writers.
The first odd sentence was “I’m a disc girl and it wasn’t really a party”. The sentence was supposed to be “I met this girl and it wasn’t really a party”. We decided it sounded like an 80s Pop song.
The second odd sentence was “He is a bad Indian player”. Original sentence was supposed to be “He is a badminton player”. The student thought it sounded like a rap song, I agreed.
The quality of the songs surprized us all.
Links
🧐⛓️💥Interesting Links
These are links that I found interesting but haven’t written about, there is simply too much happening these days.
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