http://www.rhodes.edu/academics/16284.asp

I’ve been using VoiceThread throughout the semester. I use this tool for a number of reason with my beginning German class: It’s easy, free, and allows the students to express themselves despite their level of language competence. I introduced the tool by making new vocabulary items from the book available to them. Students told me they find this very useful, as the book does not provide them with any audio resources for the vocabulary displays and items. Here’s an example":

The next step was to comment on a picture of a dorm room. They each had to leave a voice comment for homework. This was pretty easy for them to do and didn’t take much time, but this way they would get a little bit more familiar with the tool and sign up for an account.

The third step was for students to create their own narration. The task was to create a multimedia collage about themselves (in the past this was a poster, but I like that the students narrate their story rather write). Here’s an example of a finished VoiceThread, created after about 4 weeks of beginner’s instruction:

What’s next? It’s great that now that the students are familiar with the tool, it can be very easily used during the coming semester and in the intermediate and advanced stages.

Click on the player button to listen to today’s post about Audio Pal. (It’s a short post…). More to come soon, I’ve been busy in the past weeks and have some great new tools I want to share.

http://www.audiopal.com

A question we hear as language educators all the time: “How do you pronounce that?” But what if we’re not around? One good web 2.0 solution is Forvo, a collection of several hundred thousand words and pronunciations in many languages. It’s social software at its finest: native speakers add the content, and even the origin is recorded on a Google map mash-up. I found it quite useful to look up some French words that I needed to pronounce, but had no idea how to. 

http://forvo.com/

As an important part in the first days of learning a new language, comprehension generally comes before speech production. It also helps students to listen to what was said in class again. So here is an easy way to do this. I put up the vocabulary displays and read them carefully, and circle the items as I speak them.

It takes a few minutes each day, but it allows students to get some more practice if they wish to have it. Also, I can just embed the same items next year again…

I’ll be talking about other uses in the coming weeks. This is certainly only one of the few ways to use tools like VoiceThread.

Posterous is a neat little tool that lets you start an instantaneous blog. You can e-mail anything to a pre-defined e-mail address: text, pictures, audio files in mp3 format, and other files such as pdf, and they are automatically added to your blog. You don’t have to sign up, but if you wish to get a customized URL (the web address), you can set your password and you’re good to go.

So if you want your students to blog, but want to keep it simple and/or don’t have any tech support, this is a great tool. Or you set up the site and students simply e-mail in their text, voice recording, photos, etc.  Simple, elegant, and effective, that’s how I like my lang tech tools.

More to come very soon from now on. Have a great weekend.

Link to Posterous

I’m currently working on a completely new boot camp manual. I will be writing more in the weeks to come, and this site will become the main hub for my research and the new publication. Eventually I hope to publish the manual in print as well, but for now it will be freely available as a PDF download. I might even put up finished chapters while I am writing the manual.

More to follow. For now I’m glad to have some time again to move this project forward again.