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November 7, 2009

The joy of recording!

This simple device is becoming a "staple" in my lessons. I plug it to my computer, open Audacity (a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds) and I start recording my students. they usually have a conversation with a partner or they do a little presentation about themselves. They love it because for some reason they love listening to their own voice. So the magic happens: once they have recorded themselves, they listen to their performance and most of the time they want to do it again
because they have spotted a pronunciation mistake or a grammatical error! I mean, how often do you hear students wanting to repeat themselves when they speak in another language??? The recording exercise allows this magical phenomenon to happen! And even better, students love it when they know their recordings will be embedded on the school blog and therefore available for the world to listen to.

This week I have decided to try to use it as often as I can in an attempt to make my students visit the blog and leave comments. I have noticed they do visit the blog but they have not yet stepped into the commenting phase. Do you have any suggestions to make students comment on a blog?

If you haven't tried this yet, please do. You can find microphones at a very affordable price and they are so easy to use with Audacity. You can then save your recordings as .wav or.mp3 files and easily embed them onto your blog or website. You will see your students being motivated to SPEAK ;)

What about you? what do you do to make your students speak in another language?

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Filed under  //   Audacity   blog   device   devices   embed   microphone   motivate   mp3   record   recording   speaking   students   voice   wav   web tool   websites  

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June 21, 2009

The power of web 2.0 tools

Today, I got very exciting when I checked my email box and found an email form one of my year 8 student (12-13 years old) saying:

Hello, miss, here is my montage. I would like you to know that I couldn't find a music that would fit in my presentation, I tried my best.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the presentation.
Take care
bye

See My Montage 5/25/09 online.

For the past few weeks, I have worked with my year 8 class on a project about holidays. I asked them to prepare a spoken presentation about what they usually do on holidays and to add pictures on One True Media. It allows you to create a presentation with pictures and sounds (a bit like Animoto). I recorded my students' spoken presentations on Audacity and saved them as mp3 files. They then added their voices to their One True Media presentations. All of this was class work and I never asked my students to finish the work at home. So I was very happily surprised when I received this email on a Sunday evening! This student had got to one true media on her own and finished the presentation on her own! This is the first time it happens to me and this is all due to the power of web 2.0!

What about you? Have you had students working on their own without you having "to bribe" them? Do you think web 2.0 tools engage our students much more?

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Filed under  //   Audacity   french presentation speaking   holidays   languages   learning   mp3   One True Media   photos   pictures   presentation   recording   sound   students   teaching   voice   web 2.0   web 2.0 tool   web tool  

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May 31, 2009

More Wordle with year 7 (11-12 years old).

Last week, we finished the topic about school with my year 7 classes so I took them to the computer room and asked them to type some of the topic's key words on Wordle.

I had already tried this lesson previously in the year and it had been a success, and this time because my students knew the tool already, they enjoyed it even more ;)

Wordle: Module 5

The only drawback to Wordle is that there is no search option. It makes it difficult to look for students' works to then embed them on the school blog.

I went onto Wordle's forum and found this comment from Rob Elliott 
"As long as you always save your wordles to the gallery with the same 
username you can search for them by entering the following into your 
browser address bar: 

http://www.wordle.net/gallery?username= 

adding your username after the = 

That is currently the only way to search for wordles."

I knew my students' usernames so I followed the instruction above. This is something to keep in mind when working with Wordle.

Also, check out 23 Ways to use Wordle in the MFL Classroom by @spanishsam on Twitter. It is full of great ideas!

And you? Have you used Wordle in your lessons?

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Filed under  //   11-12 years old   blog   French   idea   lesson   revision   tips   web 2.0   web tool   wordle   year 7  

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May 14, 2009

Using BOOKR for an IT lesson.

I had a productive day today in the IT room. Because it doesn't happen that often (i.e. computers don't work, the Internet is off, this site is blocked ....), I thought I would blog about it ;)

I used an easy web tool called BOOKR. Again I read about this on Ana Maria's blog
Ana Maria is an EFL teacher and works at a language Institute in Brazil, she also played a big part in the online course Images 4 Education. You can follow Ana Maria on twitter @anamariacult


BOOKR allows you to create a simple photo book using pictures form Flickr and adding captions below the pictures.

So, why is it an "easy" web tool?
  • First, you don't have to sign in/register, you can start straight away. It is a big bonus for me as some of my students still don't have email addresses or I presume they have one from school, but they still don't know they have one!
  • Also, there are no fancy designs, backgrounds, sounds, you just add pictures and captions. Some might argue it is boring but I find students don't get too distracted by those effects and they can really focus on the task, which is to create a photo book in French.
  • To Find and add pictures, students enter keywords/tags in the tag box at the bottom of the screen, they can then choose a picture from Flickr. So no going on Google to find pictures but in fact reading a football website!
  • Finally, when students have finished their photo books, they publish it and all they have to do is to send an email to myself. I then get a link in my mailbox to their photo books and I can either copy and paste the code to the school blog, or save their url links. Esay, peasy!

I parted my lesson in two. First part, I gave students a template of the text they had to write in the captions (they are year 9/13-14 years old low ability groups, so they need a bit of extra help), I showed them a photo book I created and explained to them how it worked. Second part, students went into the IT room, went onto www.pimpampum.net/bookr and created their photobooks.
At the end of the lesson, I asked them to send their work to my email address. And at the end of the day, my mailbox was full of BOOKR messages! I then embedded the best photo books on the school blog. Job done!

I am very happy with myself and the students because for once I have some IT work to show and view!
Also, the students worked hard and were engaged in the lesson, which is quite of a challenge at the moment as most of them won't study French next year.

And you? Have used any "easy" web tools?






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Filed under  //   bookr   Flickr   French   IT   lesson   photo book   photos   pictures   teaching   web 2.0   web tool  

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