Posted March 22nd, 2011
by Sofia Helpman
Yesterday a woman who lives in India, whom I will call Bala, participated in my online class How to Write Email That Gets Results. She told me that at her company a typical opening sentence of an email is this: ”I hope this email finds you well.” Bala wanted to know whether such an opening sentence was appropriate when sending email to US clients.
What do you think? Is “I hope this email finds you well” an effective way to begin a business email?
In its favor, the sentence is courteous. But it doesn’t speak the language of a US or Canadian audience, in my experience.
Rather than opening with a sentence about finding you well, business writers in the US and Canada are much more likely to dive into the subject of the email after greeting the reader by name with a “Hi,” “Hello,” or sometimes “Dear.”
If the writer and reader have not communicated lately, a sentence such as “I hope you are doing well” or “I hope you are enjoying this spring weather” is the US and Canadian equivalent of Bala’s example. (I have emails with t
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Posted in Education Tips
Posted March 21st, 2011
by Sofia Helpman
One to one laptop programs have been around here in Australia for quite a while now. Gary Stager spoke extensively about that last year when he was in Australia, pointing out the work of David Loader who pioneered the first school notebook program at Melbourne’s Methodist Ladies College back in 1990. I’ve visited a couple of schools who have ventured down that track – St Albans Meadows in Melbourne and Holy Family here in Adelaide – and the model seems to be the same whenever one talks about 1:1 in today’s schools. Firstly, head over to the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation (AALF) website, plan your school’s path forward using their excellent 21 Steps To 21st Century Learning and decide on a suitable affordable model of laptop to roll out.
I really enjoyed the sessions with Travis Smith late last year and took his advice of “don’t rush your school community into things” advice to my site as we grapple with our own proposals for a 1 to 1 program. We are close to r
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Posted in Education Tips
Posted March 3rd, 2011
by Sofia Helpman
This is purely a vanity posting and possibly demonstrates how traditional media (newspapers, magazines etc.) still have a pretty strong hold on my consciousness. Many of my virtual colleagues are featured with regularity in magazines, quoted in articles, featured in television segments but it is a real rarity for me and perhaps befits my station in life. My opinion was sought a little while back for a piece in Adelaide’s The Independent Weekly and then late last year, I was contacted by an editor at Australian Teacher Magazine to contribute to a small column feature called Q & A for their monthly ICT In Education section. I almost forgot about it until an email arrived from the same magazine plugging something else and triggered my memory and sent me looking online to see if I’d made “the big time”.
It’s in the February edition and below is a screen grab of the column. I’ve then
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Tags: Media, Media 2nd Posted in Education Tips
Posted February 26th, 2011
by Sofia Helpman
Image by chausinho via Flickr
If you are very familiar with the English language already, and you want to make a self-practice on how good you are in its pronunciation, then I would recommend you to use tongue twisters.
I’m sure you’re familiar with this. If not, you will love to know what this is and what it does to you! If we will define it, a tongue twister is a phrase in any language, particular to English, that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly. In other words, the terms are creatively made with patterned similarity and rhyme. Let’s take this tongue twister for example:
rally lorry , lorry rally
This may sound so easy when one just read it with their eyes. But i
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Tags: English Language, Language Posted in Education Tips
Posted February 19th, 2011
by Sofia Helpman
Via Tom Hoffmann’s shared Reader feed came this post with a statistic that caught my eye.
About 80 percent of American teachers, for example, are female; at the elementary school level, nearly 90 percent are women.
I wondered what the stat would look like here in South Australia and the nation in general so I had a quick search. The article I found over on the ABS website focussed on the percentage for males, but I do know enough basic maths to work out that my state has female teachers at 69 percent of the teaching workforce.
The occupation of ‘teacher’ has historically been seen as a job for women and this predominance is increasing. In 1993 approximately 37% of teaching staff in South Australia were males but by 2009 this proportion had fallen to 31%. Teach
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Posted in Education Tips