When Dr Penny assigned our 20% project, I knew immediately what mine would be. Since a long time ago, I have been planing to create a website/page for people interested in learning Portuguese. For many years, I have been tutoring and teaching Portuguese as a second language, and I created most of my material since there are no many good textbooks available, or, what surprised me, resourceful websites. Therefore I have compiled many worksheets, activities, games, and especially Power Point presentations that I created to use with my students, which could be somehow used in this idea of a website. I actually made promises of publishing some material for some of my adult learners, only to realize it would require more than my good intention to make it true. Maybe a n assignment that accounts for 20% of my grade is what I needed to "motivate" me. So that is what I have been working toward throughout the semester, and it turned out to be more work than I had anticipated. Firstly, all my images were just taken from the Internet without any permission. So the first part of my project was to replace those pictures for images that I searched for and asked for permission, or drawn myself. After that, I needed to record my voice over the PowerPoint presentations, which is extremely time consuming, I must say. Then, I created a website using Weebly, sketched a plan for what the pages would contain, uploaded some PowerPoint presentations to YouTube, linked the videos to my page. Now I am working on short explanations of grammar points, and selecting some videos that explains and show Brazil and its culture, which I thought could be interesting. I also made available a few handouts, which I had to change to a PDF format. Therefore, my website is a work in progress, and it will take a lot more work for it to look like what i have had in my mind, but I am happy for having it finally started.
You can took a look at it, and let me know what you think!
My 20% project: www.portuguese4englishspeakers.weebly.com
Credits: image by Clix
When you showed this in class I was totally blown away by the amount of dedication and time you put into this project. I don't know if the title 20% time does it justice...probably more like 120% time. I really think this site is a great resource and I am sure it will be receiving an flurry of hits as it gets discovered by more and more people.
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