Photo Albums did help

It's important and helpful for language teachers to know their students' names, but it'd be quite difficult if you have 8 classes a week, meeting a total of around 200 students. Impossible, I thought at first at the beginning of this semester. I'm never good at remembering names.

I tried my iPod touch (I don't have an iPhone) to help remember their faces and names. During the first classtime, I had the students text me their names with their photos attached. I added to each photo the name, and then copied the photos in the iPod Photo Library.

The albums looked great. The photos can be displayed one by one as an automatic slide show, and you can use the photo albums as flash cards. That worked wonderfully. It was quite easy for me, poor at remembering names, to remember 30 names (and faces) in 10 minutes on my way to school (^^)

To add, you may have them introduce each other, take each other's photo, and talk something about the partner in their message. I tried that in some classes, which helped break the ice, it seemed. I saw them exchange their mobile addresses naturally (which I didn't expect), talking more about each other.