Self-recording

I was trying out Odeo last night, it wasn’t very successful though. The site took a long time to load, recording wasn’t all that good and it wouldn’t save afterwards. I thought it was maybe my internet connection but other websites loaded just fine. I switched over to Podomatic instead and found that they had ftp so I could record on my home pc with Audacity ad then upload straight to their servers – a lot better   I set up a new WordPress site that will mainly host the links to the podcasts so that my student can easily find them. I have to type up some questions for the students to read as they listen so they can test their understanding of what they are hearing. I’ll ask Roberta to record a few too, I think it’ll be good fun hahaha!! I was trying to find a good theme in WordPress for the site, I was really looking for a three-column theme so I would have plenty of extra space to add other things outside of the main posting area. I found one that was being used in a WordPress site that Roberta reads/listens to a lot that had a really nice theme. I didn’t really want to use the same one but I couldn’t find one that was similar   I’ll use this one for now and change to another later on.

I have to get the texts from my student that he wants me to record for him next week, in the meanwhile I’ll try out recording myself and see how good/bad I sound   My students from Cambridge get a cd with their student book and if its installed onto a pc you can listen to a model and then record your voice to compare to the original. Some of the children said they sounded really strange after hearing themselves recorded for the first time hahaha!! They still experiment with it though, I think its good for them to want to try out this kind of stuff at home so that they don’t have a fear of new technology.  I1ll have to see if I can find some kind of game or activity we can do where the students get to record themselves, I’ll browse the internet to see what I can find if I have time over the weekend.

Internet problems

My isp came this morning to install a new modem for us that we hope will finally solve our connection problems once and for all. They took our external modem and fitted us with a card modem similar to the kind of slot modem for notebooks. The idea was that our external modem was really heating up and the new one inside the case uses less power and has the benifit of the two big coolers in our case helping the board and modem to stay extra cool. We will test this for about a month to see how it works out. Fingers crossed that it’ll all work out just fine. We prefer the radio internet as we rent our house and when we move its easier to get them to just take down the antenna and move to the new place for us, and this is for free I left the computer downloading when we came here to the school, some podcasts one of our friends has been making about fights that his languages students seem to get into every day at the local uni. Its all in portugues so a little hard for me to hear everything but man this group seem top spend a lot of time fighting or arguing. I’m surprised that they manage to get any work done in their Letras course hahaha!! I’ll have to go visit this class one day just for the fun of it