Recordings

This past couple of days I’ve been playing with audacity and recording some mp3s that a student had asked me to record of texts. He wanted this so that he could listen along as he read the texts and practice listening and reading together. It was a fun experience, but hearing my own voice recorded was a little weird. Roberta told me that it sounded exactly the same but for myself it was a lot different. Using the program is easy and once setup with the headset it’s really only a matter of setting the recording levels and playing the record and stop buttons. The sound quality was good and I burned off the files onto an audio cd to give to the student so he can listen and give me some feedback on it. Hopefully he wont find any serious problems with the sound quality itself. Really I was more concerned with the speed of my voice and how easily he could understand me. I’ll find out what he thought about it when he has grammar class with Roberta next week.

Conversation class

I work at two English schools and one of my students has class only on his own with either myself or Roberta. He learned English more or less by himself and mainly our classes consist of conversation classes, one with me and one with my wife. Today he asked if he could give me some texts and if I could record them onto a cd so that he could listen to my voice as he reads along with the text. I like this idea a lot, I’d already toyed with the idea and after the Easter hols I’ll get him to print the texts for me. I already have the program to record the mp3s so I can convert them to an audio cd with Nero. I’m going to use Audacity for this, it’s free and very easy to use. I had a few problems finding how to record in Odeo but a friend of ours uses it a lot and gave me a few pointers. I’ll try both online and with the audio cd too, just because I’d like to try the Web 2.0 side of it as well I have a book of texts and short stories that I’ll record and upload and then use a WordPress site to host them for my students to use. I think it’ll be a lot of fun experimenting with this Although I’m British I speak both British and American English with an accent that seems to float somewhere between the two of them, my students tell me that its easier to understand me sometimes than the Models hahaha!! I’m not sure what my voice sounds like recorded, this should be good for a laugh

Internet problems…

I’ve been having some problems with my internet provider here in the city. Well more than a little, it hardly works. It took me a couple of days to finally get into WordPress. We’ll call them this afternoon to tell them to get their arses out here to solve the problem.

This week I took on a new private student who more or less learned English by himself and now wants to have someone to practice with. He needs to practice reading and listening to so he usually brings texts with him and we work on them together, alternating between him and I taking turns to read the text and my correcting his pronunciation. I’m going to make some podcasts for him to use as well, At the moment I’m looking for a good place to host the mp3 files and them I’ll link to them in another WordPress blog that I’ll create just to use with him, well with only him just for now. I’ve been checking out Odeo and also Podomatic to see how their service is. I’ll probably search around a few teachers forums to see what they are using as well.