America is tired of marketing. It’s hard to get people to take free things or fliers because they’re tired of all the clutter. Not so in China.

While in Beijing, we were giving away little rubber wrist bands with the company logo, and instead of being annoyed like they are in the US, people were grateful, and a crowd gathered to take them from us. When we begin to run out, people actually offered to buy them from us.

The English, baby! team went to Beijing to make videos for our site. But we inadvertently learned that China is a guerrilla marketer’s dream.

In addition to the wrist band incident, any time we began filming, a huge crowd would gather, even if we were just interviewing people with a microphone. I was constantly stopped and asked for photos just because I had a blue bike and blue t-shirt and blue eyes. The beginning of one of these clusters is documented above.

The strangest thing was that we didn’t see anyone else doing any guerrilla marketing, yet we weren’t even trying and people were being so receptive. It was and interesting surprise and very fun and refreshing. Although I admit that I had a strange feeling that I was a sham and had simply been mistaken for someone else–that someone would run up and shout, “He’s not Phelps!” and the crowd would turn on me. But that never happened. If you see a photo of me with a Chinese person on a random MySpace or hi5 page, let me know!

Well, the Olympics are over and the Ebaby! team is back in the USA. But what a trip they had! Take a look at the English, baby! Olympics page for the videos.

While he was over in China, Jason Simms sent emails about his adventures to our friends at Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper. The posts are behind the scenes and totally honest, since they’re for our hometown audience instead of our users. They make a good compliment to the official Ebaby! Olympic material. Here’s a quick breakdown of the six entries.

Opening Ceremony: “Everything is closed off for miles around the stadium. So we got as close as we could in a huge group of people up against a barricade in a park. It reminded me a scene in a zombie movie.”

Photo Ops: “I didn’t really know what was going on when the first person asked to take a photo with me—I thought vainly that I had been recognized from the website—but when a crowd gathered and we had to flee, I realized there had been a mistake.”

Ping Pong: “After being thwarted several times by the ubiquitous Olympic volunteers, we managed to reach the front row. There we discovered that we were sitting among the tennis coaching squad, who explained how the game works.”

Scalping: “He told me he’d rather just eat the ticket than give me a deal like that because it drives up the prices. He also wouldn’t let me film him. I wonder what the penalty for scalping in China is.”

Behind the Balls: “I talked to Superman of the Metal Balls and found out that he doesn’t even take tips—this is just his way of being a part of the Olympic spirit. It’s his dream to challenge an official Olympic athlete. The gold we awarded him was his first.”

Closing Thoughts: “I felt much more comfortable filming impromptu sports and interviews in Beijing than I do in Portland. Many people in the US seem to have a strange bias against cameras. They see a video camera and assume you’re doing something sinister. In Beijing, people pretty much always had a positive reaction to seeing a camera in a restaurant or on the street or in a market.”

How can I get my students to review vocabulary or grammar for hours? How can I get them to encounter the words hundreds of time? By making it fun! I have talked about taking advantage of students’ free time and using online games is yet another way to engage students during their free time.

Now, you could try to use normal games and make them educational. There are lots of ideas about how to make games educational by creating fill-in-the-blank tests from normal games for example. Read this excerpt from Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s article titled Adapting Online Computer Games for the Classroom:

Example: (from the MOTAS walkthrough game):
Level 1:
Look under the pillow to find the _1._ and take the _2._ from the wall Use the _1._ to open the _3._ . You will find a _4._ in the _5._
Missing words: locker, screwdriver, key, box, poster

That seems educational to me. And it also seems like a homework packet students wouldn’t mind doing in their free time. Here are some gaming sites recommended by Larry Ferlazzo for use in the ESL or EFL classroom.

Besides those games, I got really excited about quia.com yesterday. And I think I am going to stay excited, too. On Quia, teachers can create their own games. Then, the games can match your lessons perfectly! You can make battle ship games that require students to answer a grammar question before they can sink a ship. Like this one that tests your knowledge of the possessive.

But battle ship is just the beginning, there are 16 different types of games! Now, there is one catch: it costs $50 a year to create games. But you can use other teachers’ games for free and once you create a game it is online forever! So I think, it might be worth the money. Especially if you could get one of your computer addicted students to play for hours.

I hope, I can convince my department to finance the fun on quia.com. I really think that the more students encounter English outside of class the more they will learn. So why not help them by providing fun online games!

Zach, the man who plays Captain Jeff in our videos, kept a log of our time in Beijing on his Facebook page here are some highlights.

The arrival:

Jewel and Jason, having taken a later flight than John and I, got held up in a long line at the immigration checkpoint and had to dash to our gate. The worried flight attendants eyed John and I nervously asking us “Tell your friends ‘no snacks!’ ‘no stop for shopping!’” in halted English.

Suprising fact #1 about China: The whole process of entering the country was way more relaxed and easy going than I expected. In fact it was probably the fastest, least stressful entry I have done in any country. Despite wearing my full ship’s captain regalia we checked through immigration and customs like a breeze. They didn’t even ask any questions.

First video shoot:

We came back to the hostel and donned our costumes to shoot a segment called the “Hutong bike race“. The shooting took place to the entertainment of a number of locals living about the hutong who gazed in curiosity at our strange outfits, our cameras and John and Jason weaving around the narrow, winding streets. Jason attempted a couple of stunts, bounding out of small doorways and off a concrete ramp, but the heavy rental bikes were not well suited to his antics.

Translation troubles:

At lunch we were entertained by probably the funniest menu I have ever seen. There was such a variety of exotic food such as:

#110 The Flagrance Fries the Element Box
#109 Lives Flies the Meat Package
#115 Peru System Red Pork Bean Bun
#101 Nutritious Mutton Surface

There was the off-putting…

#118 Harsh Powder

…the dangerous…

#131 Three explodes the spring roll

…and the observant

#129 North Korea is Grim

Again, the lunch we had was delicious, but perhaps observing us giggling at the menu, the staff came over at the end of our meal with a rough draft of the new menu and asked us to correct it, kind of an international low tech spell check. It was a poignant site to see four creators of a web site dedicated to teaching English huddling around and doing rewrites of a chinese menu.

We’re big in China:

An amusing dynamic ocurred whenever we started an interview. People around us would see the camera, the microphone and John and I taking pictures and assume something important was going on. Soon a crowd would form and people started taking pictures with their cell phones.

Ebaby! member party:

When we arrived, the host ushered us up to the roof top deck and we were surprised to see between 25-30 English, baby! members already assembled there waiting for us. We heard a few calls of “English, baby!” and I made a visual impact in my Top Gun getup. After some introductions we split off into 3 tables with John, Jason and I manning a group of 8 or so while Jewel took as much video and pictures as she could in the dim light. We talked, made introductions and I fired up some simple drinking games. It felt very special to be on the other side of the world sharing mugs of beer and cups of tea with total strangers who only knew us from their participation in a web site. This scene felt like the kind of break through moment we were looking for and we took full advantage of it. I think we are going to find more significance and authentic interaction with the people on the street than with anything officially Olympic.

We took a group of about 9 to an entertainment complex called Party World. A more appropriate name might be the Ritz Karaoke. It was the most opulent karaoke box I have been to with chandeliers, tuxedoed attendants and marble floors.

There is a major atmospheric difference between karaoke in Asia (China, Korea and Japan) than that in the U.S. that I have a hard time getting across to my American friends. In Asia karaoke is a private affair. You go to a Karaoke Box and rent a private studio where they bring you drinks and snacks ordered by intercom. The studios can be small private ones for a couple or large rooms able to accomadate 20 or more. This creates a different dynamic than your average karaoke bar in the U.S. In Asia, for me at least, karaoke is a great stress reliever and I feel a sense of bonding with the people I am going out with. Since you are amongst friends there is a tendency for everyone to have a go at it and people’s inhibitions are lessened. The U.S. version of karaoke, while still fun, feels more like exhibitionism to me. In the U.S. I may sing one or two songs only if I am really feeling it. But in Asia it is rare for even the most shy person to not belt at least one number out in the karaoke box.

I truly believe that if we could just get our world leaders hammered, shove them into a karaoke box and have them belt out some Journey we could reduce the need for trillion dollar national defense budgets and work out many of our social ills. But, failing that, in our little microcosm in Beijing this little karaoke cultural exchange was, to me, what the real Olympics are all about.

The heat! The heat!:

I tried to look at it as though I was in an all day steam spa. So relaxing! Even if you are constantly damp from head to toe.

The buzz:

It was mid afternoon and our stomachs were rumbling so we headed down an even narrower alley way toward a street vendor. Here a woman had dozens of varieties of skewered fish cakes, sausages, tofu and other treats simmering in a chili laden broth. She handed us bowls so we could pick out what we wanted and combined that with noodles and vegetables, reboiled them and topped them with sesame sauce, garlic sauce and chili and added some broth. Based on my experience in Japan this was like a combination of oden and ramen. It was probably the most delicious street food I have had.

Sitting in that little alley way, with families and kids strolling by eating delicous food and watching this humble woman cooking some of the best food I have ever had with no pretense gave us all a traveler’s buzz. This is a feeling when you are in some place far from home experiencing something very satisfying and unique and everything just seems in harmony.

A while back, I wrote about using English, baby! or other social networking sites to teach students how to make inferences when they read. Today, I am going to talk about another reading lesson that you can do on social networking sites. I did it in my class this week and it was a bunch of fun. We practiced scanning for information and looking for headings on profiles.

I went ahead and found some good profiles. You want to find ones that are completely filled out and have some interesting information and nothing inappropriate. That is really the hardest part of the lesson. Well, prepping usually is. On our computer lab day, I had students get into pairs. I had already set-up the computers so that each pair had my profile on their screen and in another tab there was someone else’s profile. I had a student read my profile aloud. Then, we went through some of the vocabulary. I used a handout like this on social networking vocabulary and the scanning activity. Then, we practiced predicting where the information would be and scanning the profile for it. I had a list of questions for them to answer on the handout. Next, the pairs went off and scanned a different profile. When everyone was finished, we came back together and people shared interesting things about the person that they read about. It was so much fun.

The students were most interested by how many friends everyone had. I guess people do have a lot of friends on here! So maybe all of my teacher friends should give this a try and tell me how it goes.

I have been working with another teacher and I have learned so much from her successes. In part because she has gracefully succeeded at teaching areas that make me want to pull my hair out. One of those is teaching essay writing to low level English speakers. I have blogged about structured and fun writing. But to teach the basics, my general approach has been to do brain storming (with some graphic organizer) and then discuss the structure of the essay as review and have the students write.

But I have learned in the past year, that to improve most lessons, the teacher should just provide more schema activation (more examples). So I don’t know why I was banging my head against the wall with that basic writing lesson. The teacher I work with has a beautiful process for essay writing that begins like mine with brain storming on a graphic organizer. (Like this interactive graphic organizer) Then, however, she provides an important example. She shows them an essay she has written on the topic. She reads the essay aloud and then, the class goes back through the essay looking for its parts. They find the hook, then the thesis, then the topic sentences and details of each paragraph and the conclusion. Next, she hands out an outline of her essay and a similar blank handout for them to write their outlines. She shows them what she wrote on the outline about her hook and then they write a hook. She repeats this process until their outlines are done. Finally, the students are able to work on their own and produce wonderful essays. Look here at one of the first draft of one of their essays.

All in all, I have always loved teaching writing, but at the beginning I found it to be a painfully slow and daunting process for students (and me). And I should have realized that they just needed more examples and more ways to organize their thoughts before they wrote.

I’ve never been at the center of the world like this before. Today is the day. The date on this post reads August 7th, but here in Bejing, it’s already August 8, the biggest day of the century for Beijing. The opening ceremony of the Olympic games begins in a few hours and two-thirds of the world will be watching.

But here in Qianmao hutong, it feels like any other day. The locals are cooking food and walking down the street. But a few miles away there are thousands of people standing on the street where the Chinese Olympic team will drive later today. They don’t know when it will come by, but they are willing to wait as long as it takes.

Captain Jeff and I have posted blogs about our arrival on the official Olympic page. Here are a few photos of our trip so far. John and Jeff enjoying the first beers of the trip:

Captain Jeff with some other Captains:

Captain Jeff cooling down:

Our Hutong: