NaraJALT2024

Personal finance is a lot like health: if you have good habits and a decent routine, staying healthy is fairly easy and you don’t need to think about it very much. If you don’t, it can seem almost impossible to even get started. If you are living in Japan there may also be a language barrier (even if your Japanese is good, the concepts and vocabulary of finance may be too much).
Luckily personal finance is pretty straightforward, and with a few key concepts and habits you can set up a financial foundation for your life that will allow you to have fun now and also ensure that your future self is not miserable.
This simple presentation will go over ten things you should probably be doing with your money in Japan, including saving, investing, financial planning, retirement planning, and more. We will cover NISA and iDeCo (including the very welcome changes for teachers), and there will be time to ask questions.

This session will cover essential Google tools, tricks, and automation specifically designed for educators. For 30 minutes I will go over 30 different tricks and then answer any questions and we can share other good ideas together. It doesn’t matter if you are a newbie or a Google Certified Innovator; if your school is a Microsoft or Google School. Learn how to leverage Google’s free powerful features to save time, enhance productivity, and create a more interactive classroom environment. We’ll explore practical tips and you’ll leave with actionable strategies (and my slides so you don’t forget and can teach others).

This presentation looks at introducing traditional Japanese arts as a formal part of the international student curriculum. The presenter draws on his experience of coordinating such a program for inbound students at a university in Osaka. Cultural exchange in authentic environments is the core component of the program, and the benefits and challenges of facilitating such courses are discussed.

This presentation introduces an initiative to integrate ChatGPT into summary writing classes for engineering graduate students. It will explore how ChatGPT is used to complete summary tasks, with a focus on the design of prompts and individual learning outcomes in English. We explore a pedagogical example where learners use ChatGPT to refine summaries they initially created without the aid of generative AI or machine translation tools. This method focuses on the challenging task of paraphrasing and demonstrates how AI can support inductive learning in prompt engineering. Actual data will be presented to illustrate the effectiveness and impact of this approach.

The highest frequency English words are arguably the most important words for EFL learners to know, precisely because they are used so often. However, upon entering university, to what degree can teachers assume that learners already know these words? I present the results of a recent study that I conducted, which suggests that word frequency rankings are far from perfect predictors of Japanese university EFL learners’ word knowledge, even among the highest frequency 100-word groups. I discuss how other word variables (e.g. word length), as well as teacher intuition, can aid teachers in making reasonable assumptions of their students’ abilities.