Students in the UK face huge increases in tuition fees

Hi everyone,

Here's the article that I have already sent to your email address, and which appeared on the BBC website today. What is your opinion of this? Is it fair to make students pay for what was actually the fault of the big banks? How does this compare with the situation in Spain? What are the implications for the future of higher education?

Feel free to start discussing this on the blog.

See you tomorrow

Roger

Our Proficiency course

Hi everyone,

I am going to be your teacher on this course, hopefully until you take the exam in June. It is my intention to make all the technological and practical resources that I can available to you during the course of the year so that you stand the best possible chance of passing the exam, whenever you decide to do it. I thought that it might be fun, and helpful, to create a blog for our course. This blog will conceivably fulfil a number of purposes:

• suggesting possible discussion topics for class and making resources available to the others to "gem up" a bit on the subject before the discussion starts
• continuing discussions that we have started in class but haven't been able to finish because of time constraints
• I can use it to post messages to the whole class and information concerning what was covered in the last class.
• Sometimes students send me links to grammar resources, youtube clips, relevant websites which I then send to the rest of the class. The blog will be a quick and easy way of delivering these links.
• Etc. etc.

Obviously this will only work if there are at least a few people in the class who are putting things into it. I suggest that we try it out for a few weeks. If after that it dies a natural death, so be it. Your interest and needs are the only reason for keeping it going.

Do let me know what you think!