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.

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.