I wrote earlier about one of my educational projects with an ESL teacher here in Kazakhstan. We designed an Jeopardy game in .html to have some fun with kids. Well, implementation didn’t go so well. A lot of teachers found it hard to work with because you had to edit so many different files and know a bit of html, or at least not be terrified of html.

So we decided to go another way. Powerpoint! The advantage is that it’s much easier to work with because you can change the questions all in one file and program without opening a million separate files. Plus it’s What You See Is What You Get. Animations and sound effects are easy to add. You can do an Audio Question or a Video Question without too much work. So here for your consideration is the PPT version, done in Open Office but everything should be compatible. The board is composed of links to the question pages and then each question page has a Back link that takes you to the board. Final Jeopardy at the bottom–the question has the theme song looped 4 times for a two minute time limit. Can easily be removed or modified.

These particular questions are designed to review Straightforward Intermediate Unit 2. Have fun, feel free to modify it, and if you have any suggestions or problems let me know in the comments.

Jeopardy Powerpoint (7 Nov 09)
and for those who prefer html: Jeopardy HTML (22 Sep 09)

A new ratings site (call it Kazakhstan’s Alexisa) has sprung up: Whois1in.kz. Basically it tracks traffic to websites in the Kaznet web-space. However, I’m not sure how they limit that. They were kind enough to send me an invitation. So apparently blogging in English doesn’t really matter as long as your site is related to Kazakhstan in someway.

So down at the bottom of my site you will notice a new badge that looks like this:

I took this screenshot in better days when my overall ranking was 29th of all the sites registered. On that day I had 57 page views and 33 visitors. Checking now, I’ve only had 42 views from 22 visitors so far, and I am ranked a dismal 98th. But I am the 6th most popular blog and considering that among my competitors are a blog service and a blog compiler that takes entries from different blogs and republishes them, I feel pretty good about that.

If you want to register, you can go here. They have a variety of badges to choose from and they all look pretty slick. I also noticed that the badges by default point to the homepage of Whois1in.kz so I advise modifying it to point to your own site’s statistics by replacing the link in the code. Also the link opens in the same page, so I would change the target to “_blank” or “new”.

As is usual, I’ve become busy particular as school has started. This year, I’m working very closely with a school and I have all sorts of interesting experiences to relate and some observations but I prefer to let a little time and distance pass before blogging about them so that they are less recognizable. And so I have some distance on them before unleashing my first, possibly wrong, impression.

In the meantime, I haven’t had much free time to blog even as a bill to make Nazarbayev President-for-life is in the works and Vinokourov made a failed bid to become manager of Team Astana instead of a rider (I thought he spent two years dying to get back on his bike). Not to mention alien hiergoglyphs left in South Kazakhstan. Hopefully I’ll get some time to cover these issues in detail.

What I have been doing in my free time is working with a few teachers to develop a Jeopardy html program! I introduced the idea of playing Jeopardy (or Своя Игра) in the class, to review for tests or just for fun. The teachers were amazed and we improvised a basic method of drawing the board on the whiteboard and then typing up the questions on paper. We discussed whether to write the questions on the board or to do it orally. Now my school is equipped with smartboards or interactive boards and so we have computers with the images projected to the front of the class. And we can use a pen-like thing as a mouse to click on stuff. One teacher and I decided it would be a lot of fun to design an interactive Jeopardy board. We decided to use html because 1) I know enough html to pull it off and 2) we figured every classroom with a computer has an internet browser. However we didn’t want to put it online because not every classroom has internet access and because teachers should be able to change the questions!

Since a lot of ESL teachers coming to KZ get on this blog, I figured I’d post our files here. This particular game is designed to test Unit One of Straightforward Elementary. But it should be easy to change the questions (if slightly painstaking). If you want to check it out, just download the link below. Board.html is the Jeopardy Board. Clicking on each dollar amount brings up the question. There is then a link to the answer. On the answer page, there’s a link back to the board and that dollar amount has disappeared.

If you want to edit it, open Board in Notebook or a text editor and find the categories. Change those to whatever you want. To change the questions, go to the subfolders 1,2,3,4 and 5. Each numbered folder corresponds to a category. In each folder is the question file named 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500. And the answer files, named 100a, 200a, 300a, 400a and 500a. So use a text editor to replace my questions and answers with your own.

There is also a Final Jeopardy game. If you go to the board and scroll down, you’ll see the final jeopardy picture. Click on it to bring up instructions (this file is located in the fj folder, fj.html) and give the students time to decide how much to bet. Then click on question, which takes you to the file fjq.html. The Jeopardy theme may or may not play depending on your browser, but in a ideal world it will play 4 times, or for 2 minutes. Get around this by simply playing it in your computer’s audio player. fja is of course the answer page.
Here are the files. It should be good to go. Just download it, save it to your computer, open the folder and open board.html.

Jeopardy.zip

If there are any computer geeks hanging around who want to improve it, I’d love to see:

*reliable MP3 playing (preferably with a loop of 4 times) so the theme will play in all browsers
*automated score keeping would be awesome, a separate screen maybe with points that are automatically added
*A wizard program that would let teachers change questions and answers easily. I imagine something like you start a setup program and it asks you to enter your categories, then enter each question and answer, then save it all.
*Animations or some kind of fun transitions.

But I would like to ideally keep it lightweight and also able to run on any normal computer (so some teacher in a village can run it without installing the latest Shockwave plug-in and so on.

Due to popular request, I redesigned Dombro Hero. People who had bought the T-shirt asked the design to be moved up higher and the wording to be bigger. Once I did that, I thought it looked better a little more square, so I rotated the dombro and moved it to the other side.

The Original Dombro Hero T-shirt is still up for sale. And I am really grateful for the people who posted about it and all my buyers too. It’s never too late to get one–this site has even delivered to Tajikistan and Afghanistan so I think those of us in Kazakhstan will get our orders too!

Another T-shirt I designed is a heavily photoshopped (well, GIMPshopped but who’s keeping track?) photo of mine of Bayterek. I have been looking for a nice simple T-shirt of Bayterek, the symbol of Astana and I couldn’t find one that I liked. I also really like the neon-pastel color scheme of the official “Capital Day” posters so I used them as a background. Click on the photo of either T-shirt to get to the buying page. Each one is available in a variety of colors and styles including long-sleeve, fitted and V-neck.

End of commercial. We will soon return you to your regular KZBlog with some travel stories and photos as I’ve been on vacation the last few weeks and been doing some traveling (finally) around Kazakhstan. I’m going to try to give not only adventure/travelogue stories but also concrete info on how to get to these places and what to expect there. I hope readers will add their own advice and stories in the comments.

Some more photos of Astana on my redbubble. So far my best seller is Dombro hero but I’m proud of a lot of my pics. So check them out and if you like them, buy a print. The quality is really good and yes, they do deliver to Kazakshtan (as well as anywhere else in the world).

Statue near the Canal in Astana at sunset.

(more…)

Not strictly related to Kazakhstan, but this is kind of a cool blog with extremely practical advice about getting around Ukraine: Urk:)landia. Includes information on getting a visa, how to pay your cell phone balance, registering with the authorities and most posts include lots of pictures to make it clear. Maybe I should start something like this for Kazakhstan.

Toktali is a blog written by a Kyrgyzstani who is currently living in Austria. It’s an interesting and nice looking blog with most posts in both German and English. It also has a post on one of the stories I neglected to post on here: Tourists Buy Nuclear Waste as a Souvenir! As Toktali writes:

Three Chinese tourists have bought a 274-kg piece of depleted uranium and brought it home from Kyrgyzstan as a souvenir, the China Daily newspaper reported. The three tourists bought “the glittering treasure” for $2,000 at a flea market in Kyrgyzstan, hoping to make money by reselling it in China. Not knowing what they had actually bought, the tourists sliced off a piece of the stone and took it to experts from Beijing’s University. After identifying the souvenir as a piece of depleted uranium, the scientists called the police.

I’ve heard of people sneaking dinosaur bones out of Mongolia, valuable art out of Russia, and artifacts out of Kazakhstan, but depleted uranium is a new one!

Just catching up now with some emails people have sent me. Jason in KZ, an American living in Almaty, contacted me months ago to tell me that he has moved to video blogging. Check out his YouTube channel, Luck21842 for hot Asians and the Victory Day celebrations among other things!

Here’s the latest video, taken in Panfilov Park:

Got this announcement in my mail today and I thought I’d share it with you as I know that TOL is an excellent source of news and information about Central Asia and the former Soviet Union:

Transitions (TOL) today launched a new version of Chalkboard, the
website dedicated to news and analysis of education issues in
transitional countries.

We’ve improved the old site with a more modern look and feel, and
have added new features and resources for readers and journalists
alike. Go to http://chalkboard.tol.org to have a look at the new site.

KEY NEW FEATURES

• Highlights of the key obstacles and success stories in education
  reform, from critical thinking skills, to teacher training, corruption
  and curricula development.
• A database of Transitions Online’s articles, covering education in
  Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
• The “Snapshots of Reform” series: overviews of the education
  reform process in 32 countries, from Eastern Europe to Central Asia,
  South East Asia and Africa.
• Resources, tools and information for journalists to help with writing
  engaging news and feature stories on education topics

Just a little Public Service Announcement. Public service numbers including directory information and emergency services will change in Kazakhstan this year. Any number beginning with a 0 will begin with a 1. So 01 (police) will become 101.
From Trend Capital:

Aside from Almaty, nationwide information service numbers will shift from Jan. 9. Almaty will begin using the new numeration later. The 09 inquiry service number will change in March.

“So, in order to contact the Central Repair Bureau, for instance, customers will dial 165 and not 065,” Dalabayeva said. “Customers will also dial 169 for paid reference services as opposed to 069.”

The old information numbers will operate until March 31 to ensure customers shift smoothly to the new numbers.

“The second stage beginning March 18 will include changing the rescue and emergency numbers throughout the country – 01, 02, 03, 04, 051 and 09,” she said. “The information numbers in Almaty will change at the same time.”

Both old and new rescue and emergency numbers will operate simultaneously until June 15