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.

Yacapaca

I have been looking at a new website called Yacapaca the last couple of days or so. I Had a few little problems figuring out how to get going with the site but once I understood how it worked I really liked the idea and I’ll try to get some exercises into it probably for my Touchstone students. I probably won’t do any for my CCAA groups as I have loads of online stuff already up and running for them and I think my kids would benefit from having more grammar stuff online. It reminds me quite a bit of hot Potatoes, the graphics are very nice and cute too   If your internet is a little slow it can take a while for the exercises to load and this is where I like HP more as the pages seem to load quite quickly from this suite of programs. I’ll try to get some stuff up and running on it in a few days, just really so I can see how it all goes together and then if my students want to try it out, I’ll get them to test it and see what they think

Also this week I will start recording some podcasts for one of our private students using Audacity. He gave me a few texts to read and record for him so he can then read the texts and follow along at home. I am curious to see how he likes this and will see what he tells Roberta after he’s tried it out. Audacity is an excellent free program and well worth getting if you’re a language teacher for sound or voice recordings and editing.

Hospital

This morning I had to spend the whole morning at the hospital getting some blood tests and an ultrasound on my leg to see how the treatment for my thrombosis was going. It was a long morning, I spent most of it either being prodded for blood or in the ultrasound and I have to have yet more tests over the next couple of weeks. Apparently there has been slow improvement which now means I will take  the drugs for another fifteen months to see how that helps. They told me that its quite possible that I will have to take these drugs for the rest of my life. Tomorrow I’ll start a new regime of drugs, I’ll soon be a walking pill box hehehe!! Monday morning is my next appointment and it’s also in another city, luckily its the same city Roberta’s grandmother lives in so we’ll probably stay over and visit after my exams. Hopefully soon it’ll start improving more rapidly.

We have a private student who has asked me to read from a book and record some of it for him to follow along as he reads the book. I finally managed to get around to playing around with Audacity last night to see how it works. It works very well, it has a strange thing though, you cannot record to the same file twice from what I can tell. I looked in the Audacity forum for help and saw another person asking about this and he got the same reply. Its all about cutting and pasting stuff together. This cutting and pasting it does very well. We couldn’t tell where the join was between the two sounds I recorded. It converts to many file types, I’ll try out the setting it had for standard audio cd quality. From what I heard in the tests last night this should be more than file for whats required by our student. I’ll try to get a chapter done and get it over to him to see how he likes it and if its loud enough for him. Should be some fun, now if I can only find time to do the podcasts I want to do for my students

Online exercises

I’ll start this week to create more online exercises for my Touchstone students. I’ll use the same software as before, Hot Potatoes, Quizlet, etc. I think they will be mainly grammar reviews and stuff as in their last written test this was where they seemed to have problems. To be honest not studying and a small minority who talk all of the time in class probably counted for some bad grades too but it only takes a few minutes run run off the exercises and upload them to the site. After created 400+ exercises and setting up the site making the alterations is very easy. The homepage was created with a Publisher theme so its easy for me to edit and change it and all the main files I don’t have to change, just upload and thats it. I’d like to do more or less the same way I did for my CCAA students, with the Touchstone being beginners though I’ll stick to stuff I know they have a few problems with just for reinforcement. If I get the time I’ll try to upload a few this weekend.

Also I am still trying to find the time to create the podcasts and do something with this, it always gets pushed to the back burner simply because this site isn’t really required as part of my students courses, only as an extra thing that I want to create only for some extra stuff and also for a bit of fun too   I really must find the time to at least start as soon as I get a decent amount of free time.

Our PS2 went on the blink last week and today if we get time we are going to see about getting it repaired. A students father told us about a place in our city that fixes them and we will go see how much it’ll cost to get it up and running again. I like the PS2, I use it at night when Roberta is at the uni to pass the time. We have Guitar Heros 3 and we have never played it hehehe!!

Worksheets

Today I spent the evening making a few worksheets for my students. I like doing this although I don’t have Roberta’s artistic flair for this kind of thing lol. I have beginners and like to give a lot of extra vocabulary to them on top of the new vocabulary from their books. Seeing as I found Eslprintables I like to upload a copy there so other teachers can also use it too as well my sharing theirs. At the moment the site is having uploading problems but I’ll upload the files tomorrow if I can’t today. I want to have a look and see what extra vocabulary sheets they have their about weather as a lot of my private students are agronomists and work outside a lot. For these students I like to give a lot of extra vocabulary in the form of worksheets, I stumbles on a site called WiZIQ that looks quite interesting, I’m going to see if it can be used to also give some extra support for me students.  I like experimenting a lot with stuff online, for me this is a good way to get to teenagers as they live online and i like to have stuff in place so they can use it if they want to. I try to make sure they don’t feel pressured to use the online stuff, I think they won’t really feel like using it if I do this and make sure I tell them if I update or change anything – such as adding the Quizlet activities – so they can go look in their own time. This week is midterms so hopefully they’ll use the sites to help revise for the exams both this week and next.

Remember a while back i posted about making some podcasts and hosting them online for my students to use? I’m feeling a little disappointed that I haven’t gotten around to starting on this yet. The website is ready and I’m all signed up at a podcast host site but just haven’t had the time to get anything done with it yet   My time seems to run away before I get around to doing anything with it, I have everything ready and just need to get started. It’s coming just as soon as I can find some free time to get some stuff done

Classroom 2.0

I have been a member of Classroom 2.0 for a while now. It’s a website dedicated to teachers who are looking for other teachers using Web 2.0 stuff to pass on information and share new ideas. I like this site a lot. I always discover something interesting in it that gives me a lot of ideas for things to do with my students. I have been thinking about using WordPress with a few ideas I got from the Classroom20 forum to create a kinds of podcast site for one of my newest English students. My main class with him usually consists of the two of us reading a book together, first I read and then he reads so that he can listen to my pronunciation so he can correct this. The second class he has in the week is with my wife, Roberta. This class is mainly because my Brazilian Portuguese sucks and they cover all kinds of things that we don’t include in the class with me. I am toying with the idea of creating some podcasts of short stories for him to listen to, either online or to download, as well as some questions about the podcast story to see how much he understood. I have downloaded a program to use to create the mp3s, I decided on Audacity. It’s not a big download and is easy for me to use without any complicated setups, etc. I think it will be a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll expand this to use with my other students later I’m going to look again for a site to host the mp3 archives. I tried a couple but wasn’t too impressed with them hahaha!! I’ll have a look during the week to see what I can find.

Google sites

There used to be a website online called Jotspot and well over a year ago Google bought the site and it fell off the face of the internet. I got an email from Google this afternoon inviting me to join the new Jotspot, it’s now called Google Sites. I tried as I was curious to see how it had turned out but found that it wasn’t possible to join it and apparently now it is a pay site instead of the free site from before. you have to pay for a domain name now. The old Jotspot was a wiki site but now I’m not sure what they will do with it. I’ll stick with Wikispaces as Its been great since I signed up for it. I never had a problem with it and the help section is excellent. I couldn’t even find a help section that had anything useful for Google Sites I also have an account at Pbwiki too, I haven’t really done anything with it though as Wikispaces sort of took over as my wiki host when I found just how good it was. I like Google stuff a lot and use many of their sites, etc but this new thing I won’t use at all as it’s too much like hard work. The wiki I’m experimenting with on my server is easier to get into than Googles Sites website hahaha!!

I noticed that the cloud function in my WordPress site is working, very nice. I Turned it on but hadn’t really looked at the site itself until this afternoon and saw it working. Very cool hahaha!! I saw another WordPress site that had podcasts embedded in it, WordPress supports this but you only host the mp3s here if you upgrade the space so I was looking this morning for another place to host the mp3s and tried Odeo but its a lot of work to get the stuff recorded as the site seems to have some links to the studio part of the site missing :-S I’ll have another look around and see if I can find something better to use instead.

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.