Episode Transcript
Ixchell Reyes 0:00
The DIESOL podcast.

Brent Warner 0:02
Digital Integration in English is a Second or Other Language.

Ixchell Reyes 0:06
Episode 34 – Punctuation!

Brent Warner 0:24
Welcome to DIESOL. This is Episode 34. We are your hosts, I am Brent Warner.

Ixchell Reyes 0:30
And I’m Ixchell Reyes. Hey, Brent. How’s it going?

Brent Warner 0:34
Good!

Ixchell Reyes 0:35
Pretty good. Pretty good.

Brent Warner 0:36
February.

Ixchell Reyes 0:38
It is!

Brent Warner 0:40
It’s gonna be a another short February. I hope you’re ready for it. everything going okay? What are you up to?

Ixchell Reyes 0:48
Um, yeah, everything’s going okay. I’m not. I’m not I know TESOL’s coming up soon. Are you going?

Brent Warner 0:56
TESOL’s coming up soon? My head is in so many places. I have no idea. No, I’m not going.

Ixchell Reyes 1:04
Yeah, I’m not going either. But are you doing anything with CUE? You know, CUE is also coming up.

Brent Warner 1:10
Yeah. So we just had the Orange County CUE TechFest, which was great that that just wrapped up. And then I’ve got local CATESOL things going on. We’ve got a presentation going on there. I’m just I’m just a volunteer for that. I’m not doing any presentation. So that’s kind of nice. And then I’m a featured presenter for CUE for the big CUE conference, which is kind of cool. That’s exciting. So yeah, but that’s in March. That’s still a little ways away. I got some time to plan for that.

Ixchell Reyes 1:45
Yeah.

Brent Warner 1:46
All right. So Ixchell we got a few things… This might be a little shorter episode. We are, you know, shorter month, maybe a shorter episode. That’s okay. But we’re going to talk a little bit about punctuation. So let’s, uh, I was trying to think of like a joke to talk about punctuation, but I’m just going to already joke, I know, it was gonna be like it, but it has to be, you know, it’s like a visible, you know, it’s like, I have to move my finger or something to punctuate something. But anyways, let’s move over to the topic. All right, punctuation. So here’s the thing. So Ixchell we’re trying to go back for this episode, we wanted to go back to the classic format, you know, do a little bit of research, find out some about the topic, and then, and then offer some ideas. I did some research, some not I want. It’s been a pretty busy few weeks for the beginning of the semester, but I was trying to find resources, like professional articles on punctuation are pretty few and far between. People don’t talk a lot about punctuation even I mean, and I’m sure there’s gonna be a listener out there who’s gonna find something and go, why don’t you know about this classic study, but I really couldn’t find very much. I don’t know, do you have any classic resources on punctuation?

Ixchell Reyes 3:08
I do not. And I wonder if maybe it’s, I mean, I don’t feel super excited when we when we talk about research on punctuation. So I wonder if it’s because maybe that’s embedded into writing research instead?

Brent Warner 3:26
Yeah. So here’s the thing, right? We’re gonna be talking about punctuation. But punctuation is totally context dependent. And many people. One, I mean, you have, you’ve got your, you know, prescription lists, and prescriptivist, and all these things like, hey, I want to have this absolutely. These straight hardcore rules about punctuation. I am not that type of person. I see different uses and punctuation. You know, being online, of course, like we see all sorts of crazy uses of punctuation that’s like way outside of the standard rules. I try to toe the line with my students about like, Hey, we need to have proper punctuation to help us understand. But there is a lot of wiggle room inside of using it too. So. So I want to talk to my students more about you know, the grammar and the use of language and how the sentences are being put together. And then how the punctuation affects that. More than just like okay, here are the, you know, here are here is the full list of all of the punctuation marks, by the way show. How many punctuation marks are there in English grammar?

Ixchell Reyes 4:42
Hey, this sounds like something that you would ask me and

Brent Warner 4:46
Okay, I see your hand moving. Hold on. You’re You’re googling no googling.

Ixchell Reyes 4:51
I’m going to guess about 2020

Brent Warner 4:56
name Amol

Ixchell Reyes 4:58
period, question mark. comma, semicolon, colon,

quotation marks.

Parentheses bracket? hyphen.

Brent Warner 5:14
Good. Eight or nine

Ixchell Reyes 5:19
ellipsis? Did I did say period? I did say comma? apostrophe?

Unknown Speaker 5:25
Yep.

Ixchell Reyes 5:27
How many is that?

Brent Warner 5:28
I think you’ve got about 10.

Ixchell Reyes 5:30
I’m halfway if I Well, according to what I quote again, yes.

Brent Warner 5:35
Okay, I’m just gonna, you know, because our listeners are on the edge of their seats. The real answer is 14. Oh, okay. Yeah. And all what are what was I missing? I read them in order of the order that I was trying to mentally go through the list. I’ll just read them off for you, though. Period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, semi colon, colon, dash. And the dash is kind of suspicious, because there’s also like, the M dash, you know, and dashes, like hidden inside of there. But there’s this, this resource just calls it dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, braces, apostrophe, quotation mark, and ellipses. That’s your 14. So normally, I would not ever present that as a list of students. But it’s kind of cool to look at and go, yeah, here is the full list. Here’s the things that we see in there. And you might have a little bit of like I said, with things like the dash and the M dash and the N dash, you might have a different, you know, count on that a little bit. But I think that’s pretty fair. So so you could kind of work through different parts of these things. But I want to talk a little bit about myths around punctuation. And I think a lot of teachers. Not necessarily they buy into these myths, but they do perpetuate them. So what are some of the myths or some of the things that you either you have taught your students or that maybe you’ve heard people say, to students? Are you more or maybe even more likely, you’ve heard your students come bring back to you and say, Oh, this is the rule. I know.

Ixchell Reyes 7:20
Yes, you know that. That’s a good, that’s a good point to cover. Because I’ve had students who will tell me, after a semi colon, you capitalize something because it’s a it’s like a period. And to deprogram this defense from thinking from, you know, from, from not sticking to whatever rule they thought they learned overseas or with another instructor is really hard, because they think that you don’t know the rule. And again, we’re talking about punctuation, depending on context, right? So oftentimes, students may not even know how to use the semicolon. I’ve also seen it where Oh, yeah, nobody uses the Oxford comma anymore. And so yep, that

Brent Warner 8:06
made a strong comeback. I thought it was no more argument there. But

Ixchell Reyes 8:10
I think that that’s just gonna be a forever thing, because I still have colleagues who are not fans of the Oxford comma,

Brent Warner 8:15
what I mean, how do they justify, you know, the sentences that clearly need an Oxford comma?

Ixchell Reyes 8:22
I have not had that conversation yet. Okay. That’s something that my students repeatedly bring to me. And they’ll even bring me examples and, and then I’ll have to go through the whole explanation of a depends on what you know, well think about it this way. And then showing them examples, as you said, Where, where if you are talking about a legal case, that comma, that Oxford comma could cost somebody money, time in jail. And so those are the times when we have to reflect on why, what the purpose of that punctuation is. Right?

What about you?

Brent Warner 8:59
So there’s a couple of them. Also, semi colon, semi colon is the nasty, the nasty. Goblin of punctuation there, I guess, but I’m one of those. One of the ones that students get taught, I think, by, you know, maybe overseas or maybe, I don’t know, I don’t know where they’re coming up with this. But, you know, if you’re, if you’re not sure, if you should use a colon or a period, just use a semi colon. It’s like, Oh, wait, what? Like,

Ixchell Reyes 9:26
oh, but then you get like those essays that have like semi colons everywhere, everywhere,

Brent Warner 9:30
because the students have never learned when to use a cent a period properly. I mean, it’s very often students are guilty of like, crazy run on sentences. So they try and kind of parse it apart. Yeah, and so so you’ll see some some things like that. And it’s like, well, where did you learn this? And they’re like, Oh, well, because if you’re not sure, and so it’s like, I am very amused by the idea of like, not being sure. And so just like, you know, it’s like, it’s like, playing darts blindfolded, you’re like, maybe this will work. And I’m Michael Cohen. I’m gonna make a Chrome plugin that just throws semi colons. So that’s one. And then another one is putting a comma where you breathe, right?

Ixchell Reyes 10:21
Which isn’t heard the on,

Brent Warner 10:22
It’s well meaning advice and there’s certain parts of it. But like, the question is, where do you breathe? How long?

Ixchell Reyes 10:31
Yeah,

Brent Warner 10:32
how long does is a breath?

Ixchell Reyes 10:32
And of course if you’re, if you’re coming from a language that doesn’t pause and you know, after a verb or after, I don’t know, whatever grammar structure, how would you know where to put that?

Brent Warner 10:43
Right, right,

Ixchell Reyes 10:44
or where to breathe?

Brent Warner 10:45
It is a nice I, I talked about that idea a little bit with my students when we’re talking about run ons, because because I’ll try to like exacerbate a whole sentence and just be like, first-I-went-to-the-beach-and-then-I-saw-a-dog-and-the-dog-was-really-cute-and-so-I-went-tried-to-pet-the-dog-but-the-dog-ate…, you know? Right? And I’m like, well, there’s no letting up of the idea, right. And so yes, there needs to be punctuation to separate these ideas inside of there. And that kind of helps them see a little bit, but that doesn’t actually help them know where to put right periods, and where to separate with commas and things like that. And then the second thing is like, if I run a marathon and start talking to you, then I’m going to have punctuation in every, every other word inside. So it’s kind of a silly, silly thing. But you know, there are a few…. I like to talk to the students about and we’ll get into the ideas on activities in the second part. But I like to talk to the students about the idea of context dependent punctuation, right? So it’s not really about teaching. punctuation directly, here is exactly how you use a an ellipsis. And here is exactly how you use this. It’s like, well, what is the purpose? What are you trying to do? No, I’m trying to show that you know, this idea is trailing off in my creative writing, okay, well, then you might actually use an MCs or something, right? And this is how you do it, or also really good when students bring it to me, although I’ll say that students tend to bring them in kind of context independent, too, right? They’ll show you like, two words, and then a punctuation mark. And they’re like, Why? Why is there a bracket here? I need a lot bigger sentence or even the paragraph to understand that.

Ixchell Reyes 12:37
Right, because oftentimes, yeah, it’s dependent on the sentence before it or the thought that came after it, and maybe on the, you know, the feeling that the writer wanted to evoke, as they’re telling you, whatever it is, they wrote.

Brent Warner 12:52
Absolutely. So a couple resources. And Ixchell if you’d like to share yours, too. I’m going to start off with a book that I grabbed, which is like, you know, of course, if we’re talking punctuation, it’s going to be nerdy, but it’s called the best punctuation book period. And it’s just kind of cool. It does, it does. So if your student is a straight up grammar nerd student, or if you were a grammar nerd, or you know, which listening to the show, it’s pretty likely. It, it does break down every single, you know, grammar or punctuation mark and how the grammar works inside of it and the different uses of them. So I’m looking at it right now I got the I got the Kindle version of it, and it’s like, okay, so let me skip to a section just as as an example. So quotation mark, okay, quotation mark, it’s got quotation marks to indicate direct quotation or dialogue, quotation marks to indicate unusual or ironic meaning, quotation marks for words discussed as words, right? So the example there’s the word, quote, Pip is becoming less common, right? And so, in many ways, it really does do you know, it’s kind of what the students asked for is like, just give me a full list of everything that happens, like, well, this book might be a good example. And they’re kind of fun. It’s it’s written lightly, but it’s pretty thorough. So so that’s one pretty good resource.

Ixchell Reyes 14:25
That is pretty cool. And I am hoping that you’ve heard of the book called Eats Shoots, and Leaves.

Brent Warner 14:32
Yeah!

Ixchell Reyes 14:33
Yeah. So it’s a it’s a classic for those people who are into punctuation and grammar really, because it also shows you and kind of… what

Brent Warner 14:48
It’s pretty dry and sardonic

Ixchell Reyes 14:51
Yes, like sarcastic approach to punctuation. But again, it it shows you what a misplaced comma I might do for a sentence or and so that that’s kind of a classic. I think a lot of my colleagues, we either had to read it or it was assigned to us, or we just picked it up because it was an interesting book.

Brent Warner 15:13
Yeah, I remember when that first came out, and I think, Well, my memory of this is old, but it was at the time when, like, just buying a book was not something I could easily afford to do. So I remember seeing it at the bookstore – if you remember going to bookstores – and like, I want this book. But can I really justify paying, you know, $13, or whatever? It was for it like? So? Yeah, that that is a – Of course, I did eventually get it. But yeah, that’s a great book there, too. I’m going to share the oatmeal.com I think a lot of people follow him from his Instagram account. I haven’t. I’ve been following him for a long time. And way, way, way, way back when he was kind of not first getting started, but like, you know, before that, I think before Instagram and everything, he was doing all of these comics and things. And one of them was, he had a whole series on grammar and different grammar posters, he still sells them on his website. And so he’s got a great one that’s about the semicolon. And so I actually have it, it’s up in my office, I haven’t been in my office for a year, but but it is pretty nice to kind of look at and go, Okay, well, as students are going to insist on using the semi colon, let’s talk, let’s talk them through this poster. And again, you know, I think this is kind of a common theme is that people find this this fun, light language to make a kind of a dry subject doable. So they talk about this idea of, you know, how do I use a semi colon? And he says, Well, you know, he explains it normally. But then he gives example, sentences, it says, My aunt also had hairy knuckles, semi colon, she loved to wash and come and comb them. And she taught me he’s talking here about like, an independent clause connected to an independent clause, and it’s all separated. But he’s using He’s like, he’s kind of gross or wild or imaginative. Image. Yes. And I think those things are really powerful, right? Like, because those are the things where you’re like, Oh, that’s gonna stick in my head. It’s gross. Yeah. But it kind of, you know, it’s gonna be there. And I’ll remember that a little bit later. So. So I would encourage anyone to go wild with their imagery, or trying to teach some of these things. So I think that, you know, that’s a way to reach students some more to

Ixchell Reyes 17:40
Yeah. And then I found out kind of like a basic website called I mean, it’s, it’s just very basic in the way that it looks at the punctuation guide.com. But it when you click on the different types of punctuation, and actually, I think they have the list more than what you had, but I didn’t I didn’t count them. But it does, when you click on one of the symbols, it gives you the correct or the correct way to use it. And then it has lots of examples. So if someone wanted to look at, like you said, ellipsis, you could see lots of different different explanations, and so that they talk about MLA and APA versus APA. So maybe a little more everything all in one page, which I kind of like especially for students who are looking for specific examples. And then to contrast, contrast them with others.

Brent Warner 18:33
This is actually really nice, Ixchell, because there’s no ads, it’s not like cluttered up with a bunch of junk, it’s super clean. So

Ixchell Reyes 18:42
I like that if you click on any of those symbols, at that, once you go to the page, it gives you a menu at the top of just the symbol. So you can click back and forth. And it’s kind of a nice visual, like I like it. Sometimes, it’s not like you said a lot of the if you head over to like the OWL at Purdue, for example. Or Purdue Owl, the writing website, and I love it. I love that website, too. But that’s got a lot more stuff. Sorry?

Brent Warner 19:10
They started advertising, they started running all these ads on there. It sucks, but

Ixchell Reyes 19:15
yeah, so this is kind of like a clean, basic punctuation guide. And it would be something like I guess in the old days, you would purchase the leaflet from a bookstore with all of the different examples and you just stick that in your notebook. So you could refer to it. So this is just a digital version.

Brent Warner 19:32
I like yeah, that’s really nice. So that is that is the I think the golden find. You know that because you really, you can just send that to students, the punctuation guide. It’s really useful and I do you get students who ask those types of questions, and it’s like, Well, okay, you know, you want that list. Here’s the list, right? Yeah, it’s easy, easy to see because it’s all just one page. Each each one is one page and easy to look at. So thank you for finding that one. That’s great.

All right, we don’t have any reviews right now, which, you know, we’re still looking for that 2021 first 2021 review, get us across the line here. But a couple ways to support the show. Number one, shell, as we said, reviews are great. They really do.

Ixchell Reyes 20:27
We love reviews we love sometimes we get ideas on our, for our episode content from reviews. So if you’re, if you’re looking for a specific topic, drop us a review. We love reading them, we love hearing back from the audience, and we love you know, coming up with new ideas based on what the audience would like to hear.

Brent Warner 20:48
Yeah. And then the other thing is, we’re still playing with the Patreon thing, a couple people who are supporting us, so thank you so much. And, you know, we’re trying to figure out ways the continual ways that we can offer some, some benefits of that. So we did our first our first kind of deep dive into a tech. And that was fun. It was just cool to just sit down and just go, Hey, we’re gonna spend an hour and we’re just gonna see what this tech is like and see what we can do and what ideas we don’t really give ourselves enough time to do that, like that. So I actually had a good time doing that.

Ixchell Reyes 21:25
Yeah. And again, if you don’t fit us that time to explore, and I think, you know, then we can save you some time. If you if you want to check something out. You’ll know whether it was a win or a doozy

Brent Warner 21:39
Yeah. We’re calling it what would we call like the qualifiers

Ixchell Reyes 21:45
qualifier?

Brent Warner 21:46
Now the qualifier is going with the DIESOL theme qualifiers, see if it’s good enough to actually use in the classroom. And so the first one we did play

Ixchell Reyes 21:55
with and don’t tell.

Brent Warner 21:57
Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s a secret for the Patreon supporters. Alright, Ixchell, so we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, just some some basics of ideas around punctuation, some of the myths some of the things, but there’s still, you know, we’re talking about the digital side of things, right? How do we, how do we get some tech involved in here to help students better understand or have opportunities to play with punctuation? Let’s start with you.

Ixchell Reyes 22:29
So one of the apps Well, one of the one of the tools I like is Hemingway app. I know we’ve talked about it before, when we were discussing writing. Hemingway app is even though it’s called an app, it is a website, a web tool. And it analyzes paragraphs and writing, it will color code in about I think there’s like three or four different levels of analysis that it does, but it shows it whether a sentence is too difficult to read, or whether there’s too many adverbs. And what a teacher might do, here, or a student might do is type in, the student can type in their sentence or their paragraph, I would say a paragraph, because then you can see the relationship between ideas. And as it’s analyzing, and color coding, the teacher can now point out or ask the student to point out what that piece of punctuation is doing to the text. And you can then replicate that sentence and see what it does in terms of color coding, because now, you might take something out like a transition, and you won’t have a comma there. But you might have a comma joining two clauses that gives you the same, the same relationship.

Brent Warner 23:42
Right, right. Yeah, that’s super smart. I, you know, I like that because it highlights it and brings it up right away as they’re typing, right. So they can start seeing, okay, this is what’s going on. So that makes a lot of sense. I like that idea. And it’s, you know, it’s still writing based, it’s focused on the writing, but then you can, you can analyze individual points right there.

Ixchell Reyes 24:03
Right. And I would say that also, this is kind of, it’s nice to have, because it’s very simple. And I know that a lot of our students are going to go on to writing courses where they’re going to be using something like a turn it in editor. You know, there’s a lot of editors out there, but those are so complex, and there’s so many items that pop up once it starts analyzing grammar. So Hemingway app is a nice one to sort of start getting them used to seeing how text analyzers work, so that they’re not overwhelmed. Nice.

Brent Warner 24:35
So one that I was thinking about, is exploring through means right so I think we all see these pretty regularly on Twitter, Instagram, whatever Facebook, like, you know, these grammar and punctuation means that help they can help students understand like, Hey, this is what’s going on. I think the classic example is, you know, the difference between less seat, grandma versus Let’s eat Grandma, right? So like calling out, hey, Grandma, let’s eat versus we’re going to eat our grandmother for dinner. And there’s a lot A lot, a lot, a lot of different means. And I think a lot of you know, all of our listeners see these things. And it’s just a matter of kind of collecting them and saving them. You can do all sorts of fun things with with these memes. But I think one of the great ones is you can just have it as a warm up activity. So right now, you could just pop it in on a share screen on zoom, or whatever it is that you’re using. And then you can have students try to share what the joke is, right? And there’s a couple other parts inside of here. So are they understanding the joke one, and they can kind of share that with each other, they can talk it through, or they can type it in the chat. But then they can also a little bit understand some you know, English language humor, and and that that’s a cultural part where they really understand, like, I don’t understand jokes, right? jokes are so hard huber’s so hard for me. And then if they start to break that apart with some simpler language, and a little bit of punctuation inside of there, it doesn’t really feel like they’re doing punctuation activities, it just feels like they’re talking about how a joke works a little bit and whether they can understand that or not. And whether or not it’s funny to them, too. So lots and lots of these. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes 26:18
So I also wanted to suggest jam board. I know jam board is one of our go twos for a lot of things. But so you’re talking about explaining perhaps why a comma is necessary. And one thing that I used to do in the face to face classroom is the teaching hyphens when you should hyphenate a word, especially when you’re talking about descriptive nouns. For example, a red pencil case versus a red hyphen pencil case, what’s the difference between the two. And you’ll get a student who knows it who’s landed before and they’ll be able to explain, but it would be really great because there will be students who don’t understand. But now if you’ve got jam board, you can have the students select pictures, and then explain the difference between the two. So that gives you a nice visual. Plus, you’re collecting something that you can show other students.

Brent Warner 27:12
I love that. Yeah. Cuz they can

Ixchell Reyes 27:14
Only because, yeah, the visual is so important. Or I think there’s a you could use headlines and have the students find funny headlines or vague headlines. For example, Man-eating Tiger versus “Man ‘I’ve been; eating tiger”. And, and so and that, you know, gives the students a chance to explain and then others to come up with, with different examples. And they don’t have to draw anything, they could just simply go on the internet and find something or they could draw something.

Brent Warner 27:46
Right. Yeah, that’s great. I love that too. Because with the visual add on there, that that makes them think about it and separate the two ideas inside of their mind. Awesome. So my next one, we talked about it quite a bit. And even a blog post on it the emoji power paragraph.

Ixchell Reyes 28:04
I love this.

Brent Warner 28:06
I was you know, it’s like, you can just go wrong with emojis. But the great thing like you could just apply or you know, assign a punctuation mark inside of the emoji parrot power paragraph, right. So you can say, Alright, we learned how to do so we just did the jam board, we learned the difference of the hyphens. Now, here is here are the three or five emoji. And I want you to use a hyphen while you’re, you know, linking these these ideas together. That’s it. Right? So all you’re doing is just throwing in one extra little challenge one, one punctuation challenge. Yeah, leveling up, level up, we’re dropping nytro in there, right. So all you’re gonna do is just add a tiny part to it. This if especially if the students are already used to the emoji power paragraph, then you say, hey, I want you to show me that you understand this punctuation, one that we already talked about, added in, make it work. And then they can they can just go wild with that and their creativity is the limit.

Ixchell Reyes 29:09
Another really kind of a basic tool, but it’s I just think that all teachers should have access to this one and at least play around with it is Cammy Cammy annotations. You can use it obviously with PDFs, but I like to have just a blank PDF. And students are creating sentences, you can have you since you can collaborate with them in real time, you can have them go in there and highlight a comma or highlight a part of a sentence that’s divided by a semi colon and then discuss simply discuss what that punctuation is doing to the relationship between the ideas. And because it saves everything in the cloud. Now you’ve got notes that students can download. And also you can keep her you know, further other classes that you might have in the future. But it’s a very, it’s an easy tool and it’s free, and so on. Anything that’s easy and free? Cammy Cammy is just good for, for a lot of a lot of things. Actually not just that.

Brent Warner 30:09
Yeah. So my last one is Padlet. So we, you know, we recently got Padlet activated on our campus, I’m super excited about that. I know, it’s kind of the, the free version is very limited to I think three padlets. But yeah, you can delete that. I mean, I, I’ve seen lots of teachers do is like, I just need one at a time, I’ll delete it, I’ll make a new one. But what you can do with Padlet is you can set up some columns, right, so the each column could be a punctuation or a writing goal, or whatever it is, but I’m going to say a straight up punctuation, right? So hey, here is a, you know, show me that you know how to use a comma here, show me that you know how to use a semi colon and a colon, right? So you’ve got them all separated by each other. And then you’re going to ask students to write, you know, maybe similar sentences, but with different punctuation marks, and how do they need to change the sentences in order to do that under each column, right. And so then they can see what their classmates are writing also, so they can kind of look and see examples and maybe, you know, use that as some inspiration. But it could just be a real straightforward way for them to go. Okay, this is basically just a graphic organizer, super simple, but they could play with that as a way to have quick and easy goals to get into and Padlet can offer a lot of flexibility with that, too.

Ixchell Reyes 31:39
Okay, it is time for our fun finds. And today’s fun find. It was from someone on Twitter on my PLN and I’m so sorry, I’m terrible at remembering where I who exactly I learned it from, but I don’t think it was used as time. But this is and then I was like that CEO Oh, that’s not the website. And then I was like that do and it’s a gift creator. A lot of people have are creating or a lot of teachers are creating gifts of themselves. And, and this, this has a lot of options. And it’s very, it’s a simple website that you can use to create a GIF of yourself that you can put somewhere on a slide deck or on your Google Classroom header or something like that or a website though nice. I thought that was really kind of another cool tool

Brent Warner 32:34
to have it with a transparent background like on a green screen or something.

Ixchell Reyes 32:37
Yeah, nice can do that. You can remove the background and you can add text and it’s pretty cool.

Brent Warner 32:43
I want to make some some podcast-dancing gifs. I think that’ll be great. Alright, so mine is I never thought I’d say this but over you know over the winter break I really came to love Santa’s Butt. I found a true pleasure some true true joy…

Ixchell Reyes 33:04
Santa’s Butt. all about it.

Brent Warner 33:08
So there’s (laughing) there’s a beer called Santa’s Butt which is

Ixchell Reyes 33:19
I knew it’d have to be either beer or coffee…

Brent Warner 33:20
It is a beer. Yeah. It was great though. Like I was so surprised at how you know it’s heavy so it’s just a such a dumb joke, but I love it. So anyways, Santa’s Butt is a you know, they give out these kind of seasonal beers I guess whatever they are in during the winter time. They have this one called Santa’s Butt, it’s a porter. You know, it’s it’s a good time for if we’re still in the cold season. It was very, you know, heavy but enjoyable. And if you are into a little bit heavier, darker beers. It seems to only be seasonal. So the thing is that I found it at what is that call place called? World Mart.

Ixchell Reyes 34:12
World Mart.

Brent Warner 34:15
I think it’s World Mart.

Ixchell Reyes 34:16
Okay. How about Cost Plus?

Brent Warner 34:19
Yeah, the same type of place, right? Maybe Maybe they would have it there too. But basically what happened is, I went in there with my wife during Christmas season and I got one it was pretty expensive was like six or $7 I’m like, Okay, well, I enjoyed it, but whatever. And then we went by recently and she’s like, Well, you know, they might still have some and it’s after Christmas. So let’s go take a look. And they were $1.50 each.

Ixchell Reyes 34:44
Nobody else wanted to buy Santa’s Butt?

Brent Warner 34:46
Nobody. Poor, neglected Santa’s Butt. So anyways, it’s February. It’s the season of love and and I recommend going and finding old unloved Santa’s Butt. (laughter)

Thank you so much for listening to the show. You could win a one of a kind DIESOL pin by leaving us a review on Apple podcasts as we said, and if you’re giving us a shout out in any other way, make sure you tag us on social media. For the shownotes and other episodes you can find us DIESOL.org/34 so the number 34 and of course you can listen to episodes at VoiceEd Canada that’s v o i c e d.ca. We are of course on Twitter. That’s our number one place for for us. So the show is @DIESOLpod and I am @BrentGWarner

Ixchell Reyes 35:46
I am Ixchell @Ixy_Pixy that’s I x y underscore P i x y.

In Azerbaijani, Thank you Is Sag Ol. Sag ol for tuning into the DIESOL podcast.

Brent Warner 36:00
Thanks everybody.

Ixchell Reyes 36:01
See you soon.

Punctuation causes all sorts of disagreements among native English speakers, and despite seemingly straightforward rules, there are always exceptions, variations, and style differences. Still, students need help understanding when and where to use different forms of punctuation, and many rely on well-meaning myths that should have been thrown out years ago.

In this episode, Ixchell & Brent explore some resources to build a foundation with, and some tools that you can use to help students explore and build on their punctuation knowledge.

Resources

Ideas / Activities

  • Memes:

Fun Finds

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