This is the reflective (mostly) blog of Adam Sutcliffe, a teacher of Modern Languages at The Gordon Schools in Huntly, Aberdeenshire.
All opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own. Any complaints should be expressed directly to the author.
Every year I say to myself that I should just ease into a new school year.
Every year I do precisely the opposite.
Not only do I, the Champion (along with my colleague Ed, the Mentor) have to get everyone in the school enthused and trained up with Glow (whilst learning it all again myself) I will have to learn how to use my Smartboard (when the bloody projector gets fixed.) And as someone who is inclined to use technology in his classroom I am obviously not wanting it to be a glorfiied Now I know Isabelle has done a lot of research on this and I have already started to delve into her del.icio.us, but I would be more that grateful for ant language related Smartboard links that you would like to send me.
It seems ages ago that I blogged about an idea I had to get my S4 pupils to create resources that could, eventually with some finessing, become resources available to French speaking visitors to Huntly.
As usual the best laid plans never quite work out as intended, but we have managed to put together something. Preparation of this has been dragged out by trips, sports days, college taster days etc., etc and pupils have got fed up of me reminding them that page 131 of Equipe will be of invaluable assistance. The original idea was for the kids to record their guided visit, but time ran out. However, as is often the case a relatively simple solution presented itself via the web. Readthewords.com, a text to speech service which read english, french, spanish and german...and it free. I think the voice quality is not bad at all and the recording can be embedded or downloaded to an mp3 player perhaps.
The other part of the -plan was to create a google map for each group's tour. Sounds simple doesn't it? Well maybe not too simple, but something which should be do-able by "digital natives" (sorry Marc Prensky but this weeks lessons are proof positive that kids still have to be "taught" some of these skills, that they are not simply born knowing how to deal with these things.
Anyway, the first thing each group had to do was to create a google account. Quite straightforward if they have a personal email address accesible in school (hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc), impossible if relying on school email because the required verification message takes over 24 hours to navigate its way through the server filters. Next challenge was simply to use the interface. The screens in the ICT room were a bit on the small side and didn't make the task 0f positioning placemarkers all that easy.
Another challenge which needed a solution was that of photos. For IPR reasons I didn't want to (couldn't) use photos already on the web and each group needed photos of their places to visit to add to their map. I had wanted to send them out with their camera/phones and take their own pics, but on taking advice I found I would have needed 6-7 adults so ensure an adult accompanied each group...grrr! So what did I do? Got on my bike and killed 2 birds with one stone. I was going to do some training at lunchtime so I just did a bike ride around Huntly and took the pictures myself. I then uploaded them to drop.io. The beauty of dropio is that not only is it free (up to 100mb) but you can get embed codes for the pictures, but also I was able to write the instructions as a note added to the drop...not that any of the pupils actually seemed to read them, plus ça change.
Thus the kids were free to use photos which they could then embed on their placemarkers. Luckily (for me) no one got as far as adding lines on their map, because that can be a pain.
Having gone on about all the problems faced I am really pleased with the results. If time had allowed I would have spent more time in the computer rooms and gone through all the skills needed to do this before letting them start the task itself.
I'm not sure whether I was surprised or not but the girls engaged more with this activity. The boys were really quite frustrating at times, constantly opening up new windows to play games. When I asked whether they had ever done anything "creative" on their computers at home not many were able to answer yes, mostly content to play games.
As I said at the beginning the idea has not quite turned out as expected but here is an example of what one group created. Perhaps in the future, now I know the issues involved, my classes can produce a resource which visitors could access on their mobiles via the web so as to enable them to follow the maps and listen to the tours at the same time...I'm thinking it might be something my Higher class could get its teeth into when we get to this topic area.
Let me know what you think. How could this be improved on?
Here is what Sarah, Louise, Samantha and Katrina came up with. (Thanks to Juliett in Readthewords for her lovely voice.)
I got to thinking the other day in my register class as one of the students pulled out his iPhone, other mobile and iPod. Although this pupil was a bit of an exception to the norm, most kids have a mobile phone on them at least.
I have already had my students using them to help vocab learning via simple audio files, but I wanted to go further and allow them to see either a picture which illustrates the vocab or the word itself. Here is my solution:
i set the garageband file playing whilst recording the keynote slideshow (I could simply have narrated but it wouldn't have had the music)
Hey presto a narrated vocab slideshow which I then exported to quicktime
I now needed to convert this in somehow to an acceptable format for mobile phone (3gp). My first idea was to use youconvertit.com to simply transcode the .mov file. This didn't work as the 3gp option isn't available for this conversion. I then thought I'd try to convert it from an online file, so I uploaded to blip.tv. BUT youconvertit isn't compatible with blip.tv urls. However with blip I was able to download an flv version. Using this I was then able to convert to 3gp...unfortunately this didn't work very well, the file was corrupted somewhere...and it was all getting a bit complicated.
THEN it dawned on me . Ok so it cost me £20, but it will be worth it. It worked like a dream. I just opened the .mov file and then exported it as a 3gp file. The reason why I say it will be worth it is that now I will be able to convert all the vocab guide podcasts ( which I want to redo) to mobile phone files to give out to students.
Result!
And here's the proof...sort of.
In case you are interested the film is below in the previous post.
At the moment with my S3's we are going to produce audio guides to the many and varied(??) tourist attractions of Huntly - The Family Town. I have recorded a basic one myself to use as an example with the class and I have also put together very quickly a google map.
Here's the question, does anyone know of anyway to marry the 2 so that the map can be set up to 'follow' the audio so to speak, or so that the lines trace out the route as the guide takes you along it. I thought about Google Earth but that is out as it's not on my class pc and it would take at least 20 years before our sole technician got the time to install it. Any mash ups I could use?
Last week The Boss gave me an excuse to mess around with animoto again. He has to give a presentation to a cross service conference about the work the e-learning committee in Aberdeenshire's education service is doing. As his spot is in the death zone (afternoon, after lunch) he wanted something jazzy to represent why kids seem to like learning with ICT.
So he asked me, and I immediately thought of animoto. I was to do it from the secondary perspective and link it with a colleague's work in the primary. Although fun to do it was a bit of a bind at times.
I recorded some of my pupils opinions on my Marantz pmd660
I wandered around school and took some pictures of kids in action with ICT on my Sony Ericsson k800i
imported audio files to garageband and edited the best bits
created some slides in keynote and exported them as jpeg images
used another garageband file to create a kind of dancey techno track
Then I got the stuff from a primary colleague. She had spent a good part of the day filming students in her school and asking why they like ICT. There are some wonderful quotes I wanted to use but unfortunately the audio on the mini dv was so corrupted as to barely useable. I only managed to salvage a few short bits about Google Earth. But this is what I had to do. I am sure some of it would have been easier with Quicktime Pro, but I don't have it...yet.
Just the other day I was wondering whether it would be possible to embed documents on my school's Connecting Classrooms wiki, rather than uploading and taking up precious storage space. At the time I couldn't find anything. Then thanks to Cool Cat Teacher I fell upon Docstoc.
You can use Docstoc to embed any .doc, .pdf, .xls, .ppt into any website which will allow embed codes. You can also change the settings of the embed. It's also free to sign up and all you really need is a username a password and and email address.
I know you can embed presentations and spreadsheets from google docs but I couldn't see whether you embed word documents, so this was a great find.
I've just been mucking around in Yahoo widgets (thanks to Mashable) and came across this Yahoo! widget which enables the user to access 52 Francophone web-streamed radio stations from around the French speaking world.
The list of stations includes all the Radio France serious ones, plus stations such as Fun Radio and NRJ which would appeal more to our students. On a personal level I am pleased to see that Radio Nova is in there. I listened to this all day every day when I lived in France and I blame it for my interest in African music, brilliantly eclectic (or it was back then) and very weird. You also get the benefit of programme info on a lot of the stations.
As a language teacher I'm constantly on at students to get as much experience as possible at listening to a foreign language...even if they don't understand everything. Its a simple matter of getting the ear atuned to the rhythm of the language. By installing this widget students have an enormous, easily accessible choice of French listening material. Listening for pleasure, no task attached, just listen and see what you can understand.
audiko is a simple service which helps you to make a ringtone of your favorite song!
Create kids speakings (eg verb drills, or vocabulary etc) and then transform them into ringtones. I won't go as far as saying all students would find this idea a cool addition to their mobile but it could definitely have its uses.
Obviously with a service such as this there are copyright issues and students should not be encouraged to use commercially available material to upload.
Upload an audio file, and it will take you to a wave form (see below) all you have to do is slide along the wave form and find the bit of the foem you want. Easy.
Click on create ringtone and it does what it says on the button. Here's one I prepared earlier using Yanick's 5x table rap. Once your ringtone has been created you can;
download it to a computer
download it to an iPhone
copy a wap link into your mobile to download it directly
or as I've done here embed it on your blog.
I'm not sure if there's a limit on the length of clip, but 30 secs is enough time to conjugate the verb "avoir" in the present tense.
The great thing about it is THERE IS NO SIGN UP SO NO IDENTITY PROBLEMS.
In this second post relating to how web 2.0 apps can help in the Foreign Languages classroom I am looking at, for want of a better term, audio resources. I have used this term loosely to include recording applications, sites to help jazz up recordings (free music and sound effects), podcatchers and even a set of rubric(s)(sp?) to help assess student produced podcasts. Again its a bit long, so please have patience and most of all I hope you find it useful.
GabCast This is a super little application for podcasting, particularly if you don't have access to a computer. Why? Well because you can cast your pod by phone. Call the access number (dependent on which country you are in) record what you want to say and that's about it. If you want to know more details about how this works and some of my ideas about how to use it in a modern languages classroom you'll have to click the player to listen to it. Once you have recorded your thoughts and had them published you can share them with the world via your blog, facebook or myspace pages by embedding the player. Gabcast! So Much to Learn...So Little Time #1
GCast Gcast is pretty much the same as Gabcast, except that there don't appear to be different access numbers dependent on where you live. It also seems you have to input a US telephone number as a security check. I used a friend's number which worked fine. Couldn't get it to work with my home phone. It give you 2 ways to create a podcast, i) by using your phone and ii) by uploading audio. Once you've done that you can add music to it by creating a playlist...just fiddle around and follow the links it makes no sense me just telling you here. Learning by doing! THIS ISN'T AN EDITING TOOL. Any way this is what I came up with by phoning in a message and then adding a song from the associate website, GarageBand.com (see below.)
Voki has had quite a lot of coverage in the edublogger world, particular with Sharon Tonner'sVoices of the World project. Basically you create your own avatar and let it speak. You can upload an audio file from your computer, record directly via a microphone, phone in a message (USA only I think) or text in what you want said.
From an MFL point of view this is a superb application. It allows students the creativity of designing their persona and it also allows them a certain level of anonymity...great for the shyer members of the class. Kids get a kick out of seeing a cartoon like figure talk with their own voice. Obviously as this is Web 2.0 you can share your Voki's either direcly via email or mobile phone, or embed them in your SN site or blog. Here's my French speaking Dubya:
vozMe is quite a nifty little tool. I transforms text into an mp 3 file that you can listen to or download. Obviously its a computerised voice, but it is still of reasonable quality. Here I copied the first couple of paragraphs about Spanish from Wikipedia and created the mp3.
Ok not strictly a web application, but this is the portable version of the very popular and super useful audacity audio editing software. By portable this is a version you can carry with you wherever you go on a flash drive. Just download it and transfer it to your pen drive (along with the Lame MP3 encoding file.) You can then quite simply use audacity on any computer, unless of course you work in a school and even as a teacher you are not trusted to upload anything onto the empty 60gb of hard drive you have available...oooppps a touch sarcastic there!
A simple way of hosting your podcasts. In the free version you get 500mb storage, but you can pay and get more. Podomatic alows you to upload your podcasts to their servers, and it then creates a feed for them to enable listeners to subscribe. Aside from hosting your podcasts on a blog style page, podomatic lets you embed episodes in your own blog. In an MFL context, this is a great way of storing students audio work, which enables the wider world to listen and comment on it. I think podcasting is one of the best things we can do in language lessons as it encourages Speaking and more importantly give the Speaking a purpose and an audience. Therefore anything which can facilitate this is most welcome.
Joe Dale uses podomatic to host his students' grammar podcasts. Here I've created a channel for my son's funky times table podcasts.
I chose this site more as an example of what could be created in podcast form, rather than a specific application. This site features downloadable audio guides to cities around the world. What I like about this site is that anyone can contribute. I therefore thought it would be a fantastic way of getting kids to use their language skills to prepare audio tours of their own area, for foreign visitors. This would also incorporate so many different skills and curriculum areas (eg history); involving planning, preparation, scriptwriting, proof reading, recording and editing. And of course providing a real purpose and audience for their work. Obviously students could just as easily upload to their guides to their own blogs, web spaces.
This is a superb site not only for podcast production but for listening to new music. All the music on the site is free to download, as long as you cite the performers appropriately according to the Creative Commons licence under which the work is registered. As we are not supposed to use copyright music from the charts to funk up podcasts, the music from this site can be used. Ok so its not chart stuff, but if you are producing a podcast to highlight the rules for French -er verbs, you wouldn't want Marylin Manson to growling away whilst you speak. Search jamendo for some nice French accordian music to set the scene.
If you check out my presidential widget in the top left of this page the track on that came from Jamendo.
Similar idea(ish) to Jamendo, but this is pretty much all instrumental stuff and all composed by the same bloke (Kevin McLeod.) There are some nice stress free tunes to add as backing to your podcasts and again they don't cost a penny, unless you want to make a donation. Again you must credit the composer somewhere or somehow in your podcast. Kevin even tells you how you should do this in the FAQ.
For those of you unlucky enough not to have a mac and and so be unable to use garageband, soundsnap is for you. It's an online library of thousands of downloadable sound effects, loops and weird noises. Most can be downloaded in either wav or mp3 format. And guess what? They're free, and they are all original. Specially recorded for the site by users. Obviously it could be a bit of a chore to find what you want but there is a tag cloud to help give you an idea. It could just be a great source of funny stingers for students to add to their podcasts. Once they are downloaded, just import them to your audio editor (eg audacity) and BOING, WHIZZ, POP you have a souped up podcast.
Now then you've done all that work and got your students hard at work producing aural masterpieces just itching to be released to a waiting world, you still have to assess them in some way shape or form. One way, if you don't have to produce any formal assessment is to get your kids to assess each other. Peer assessment. AiFL in action. However maybe you need to assess the work in some formal way. Ann Bell of University of Wisconsin drew up an assessment rubric for podcasts. Obviously this is aimed at university level students, but the ideas are there. If you wanted to use it in an official capacity I think you would have to obtain her permission as the rubric is copyright.
I got to thinking the other day in my register class as one of the students pulled out his iPhone, other mobile and iPod. 
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