Authentic listening material

Odiogo, which I have installed on all my blogs, is a wonderful tool to make podcasts out of your blog posts automatically. Once installed, which is extremely easy, you don’t have to do anything anymore. Odiogo receives information about new blog posts through RSS and converts your new blog posts automatically to podcasts. This ususally happens within a very short time, sometimes minutes, sometimes hours but definitely whithin a day.

At the moment, Odiogo only works with English text and there is no choice of voices. However, the quality is quite good compaired to some other similar services.

The podcasts can be listened to online by simply clicking on the listen button on top of each post or they can be downloaded as MP3 files and used offline.

Odiogo has two main uses:

1. If you are a teacher you can easily create original listening material from your or your classes’ blogs. Students can, thus, not only read the posts but also listen along. The quality of the voice is good enough and the words are generally pronounced correctly. Students can even practice a bit of intonation. Another advantage is that it helps proof-reading and finding mistakes. It happened several times to me that while listening to the Odiogo podcast, I detected spelling and even punctuation mistakes. So, students could listen to the podcasts of their own blog posts or of their peers’ while reading along and try to find and correct mistakes themselves or give each other feedback. Peer and self-correction is often much more effective and less demotivating than teacher correction and also helps them to become autonomous learners. The podcasts will automatically be updated with the corrections.Even if sometimes words or sentences are pronounced incorrectly, Odio can be a great teaching tool for raising awareness, which is so crucial for learning to take place. Students will sometimes be puzzled by how Odiogo pronounces something or how it stesses sentences. This will hopefully make students either look up or ask for the correct pronunciation. They will, sometimes, find that they had been pronouncing a word the wrong way for a long time without noticing. And sometimes, though rarely, they will be correct and Odiogo wrong, which can be extremely motivating. It will students also give the chance to detect differences between American and British or other Englishes. Odiogo uses mostly an American English pronunciation.
2. Odio is also a great tool if you want to make your blog more accessible so that visually impaired visitors can listen to your blog posts.