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

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.