Lesson Planning and Sharing System
Time is precious, and as teachers we often desire to have spectacular lessons to teach, but not enough time to start from scratch. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel with Nagano AJET’s collaborative lesson sharing system. Our new lesson sharing system was designed and developed specifically for English teachers by former English teachers to save you time. We hope to collaborate on building a resource to help all English teachers in our community.
With the targeted search options you can drill down to the most relevant lessons in seconds. Clicking on the folder icon opens the preview window where you get all the key points, description, and actually get a visual preview of any attached documents. Since the lesson details appear in a popup overlay, your search doesn’t go away. It makes it very easy to quickly preview all of the lessons in your search without having to set up your detailed search parameters again.
National, Nagano, and AJET News
The news page automatically populates with national Japanese news and news articles specifically related to Nagano written by the top news journalists in Japan. These articles are all written in English. In addition, we will periodically write news articles about Nagano AJET news and updates when appropriate.
Region Details
Nagano is broken into 4 regions: Chushin, Hokushin, Nanshin, and Toshin. Each region is rich and unique in its history, culture, and what experiences they have to offer. You’ll be able to digitally explore and learn about the four regions and then go out and experience them for yourself. You’ll find articles that cover the various ways to travel around Nagano, whether you have a car or not. Check it out!
Events
Our event calendar is an interactive way to find events you may be interested in joining. From city festivals, to club events, school related events, and Japanese holidays; you’ll be able to easily coordinate schedules to plan your adventures in Nagano.
Daily Life Articles
The Nagano AJET Committee writes and curates an ever growing multitude of articles and informational blogs to provide up-to-date information beneficial to foreigners living in Nagano. Everything from driving and getting around, to guides on how to navigate the medical system, and guides for contracts and visas can be found in the Nagano Life pages.
Teaching Articles, tools, and resources
As an organization of English Teachers, we would be remiss if we didn’t have articles that covered methods and tips for teaching in Japan. Here you can access resources to unlock your teaching potential and get ideas to improve your teaching experience in Japan. We are also developing online tools to build new lessons and manage your day in your personal account.
Studying Japanese
There are several options for learning Japanese out there. Though it is a long term goal to develop actual Japanese skill learning tools of our own, for now we cover the experiences we’ve had with the existing learning platforms/methods out there as well as provide guides on getting your JLPT and CLAIR Certifications.
Future Features
Our Webmaster/content manager has ambitious long term goals for the Nagano AJET website. There are many functions and tools that would be helpful to foreign residents in Nagano, and our online team is dedicated to developing tools and resources to make your life in Nagano more enjoyable.
Here are a few of the resources we have plan to add in the future:
Digital Recipe Book - This will have local recipes from all over Nagano prefecture so you can not only eat the local cuisine, but get hands-on experience and learn how to make it yourself. It will also be customized to convert measurements, make suggestions for substituting ingredients, and have recipes that use limited kitchen space and equipment (we’re looking at you, “kitchen” in the hallway).
Trip Planner - Taking our growing databases of points of interest throughout Japan and travel methods/data, the trip planner will be a tool to help you plan your adventures throughout Nagano by giving you personalized suggestions and tracking your Nagano Bucket List.
Job Finder - For those of you wanting to stay longer or otherwise needing to change jobs, the job finder will point out the available jobs open to English native speakers, as well as jobs that may in the future expand outside of just teaching as Nagano has seen an increase in diversity of international jobs particularly around Matsumoto, Okaya, and Hakuba areas.
Real Estate Finder - Whether you need an upgrade from teacher housing, you’re changing jobs and need to move, or you’re moving in Nagano and need to find your own housing, this tool will assist in the search for foreigner friendly housing.
Nagano AJET Second Hand - Most of us only stay in Nagano temporarily, so often items need to be purchased as you move to Nagano, and sold when leaving. This tool will act as an organized searchable tool to post items you need to get rid of and find items you are wanting.
Workspace Tools - The workspace tools are all about organizing your work life. You can input your work schedule, which days you’re at which school, and set reminders for yourself in your personal calendar(potentially linked with Google/icalendar). Information on your schools will be readily available based on the schools you’ve marked as yours including important school specific events that will be added to your calendar.
Editing tools: Your workspace will also have editing tools to create new lesson plans based on the textbooks used at your schools. These lessons and materials can then be saved in your account’s files and even published to the Lesson Share to collaborate with others.
Japanese Learning Tools - When in Japan…It would be beneficial to understand and be able to communicate with others around you. We aim to build Japanese language learning tools over time. We will start with simple flash cards (digital learning and printable) for vocabulary/kanji, and grammar using Nagano references, so you can also learn about Nagano culture as you study.
Over time we hope to make these tools more sophisticated to the point where we’ll even have kanji writing practice (for stroke order and penmanship accuracy) and even speech recognition to correct pronunciation.
A Collective Effort
New ideas and suggestions on how to improve existing tools are always welcome. Feel free to contact the webmaster here with your ideas on improvements and/or new useful tools and resources. Please keep in mind we are a non-profit and our online team is small, so changes and especially new features will take time if they are implemented. If you are interested in volunteering your time/skills to help us improve our site please contact our webmaster.
Tech Support: Contact the Webmaster
Having a technical issue using our site? How can we help? You can also use this form to contact the webmaster directly for any inquires about the site itself.
If you're having issues, please give as many details as possible so we can narrow our investigation which can speed up our response.
