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.

Through Twitter I found this beautiful little tool called Wordle. I don’t know whether it is useful but it’s definitely fun and looks good. After a long day typing text and being serious it might be just the right tool to relax a bit and be creative.

Had to right that boring letter or have been working on that assingment for days? Why not copy it to Wordle and make a piece of art of it? It makes a beautiful cover for the assignment. I can also imagine other uses, like writing some key words about a person and making a postcard of it to send to that person as a greeting. The teacher could also make a postcard out of the students’ essays or blog posts and send it back together with the grading to say “thank you” for their efforts. Of course, students can also make their own after finishing an assignment. These can be exhibited in the classroom or on the class blog and the class can vote for the most beautiful one.

Here is a Wordle piece of art of this post :

Follow this link to see my assignments turned into colourful word clouds.

Updated on 25 July 2008:

José Picardo had an interesting idea on how to use Wordle in a lesson. He created Wordle clouds of two online news articles on the same topic. Students in pairs described to their partners what their article was about by looking at the tag cloud. Dictionary work was also planned in. A very creative and engaging pre-reading task in my opinion.

In one of the comments on José’s blog I found another interesting classroom activity with Wordle. A class of 5-7 year olds went on an excursion to an art gallery. Then they brainstormed and voted for the words that best described the event and created a Wordle picture with those.

In 2007, I did my Cambridge University DELTA (Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults) course and took the exam. This was the logical step after having done the CELTA in 2003.

I started preparing for the DELTA long before the actual course by doing research on the Internet, reading about various topics and taking an online teacher development course. What I found most difficult was to find insider information about the DELTA course. There were very few personal accounts. There are also no exam preparation books on the market for the DELTA as there are for all the other Cambridge exams. There was some information scattered on the Internet but it was difficult to get a real picture of what the course really was like.

This gave me the idea to create the Project DELTA Wiki as a platform for information about the DELTA. So far, there hasn’t been much participation but I hope this will change with time. So, if you are about to take the DELTA, you have the diploma already or you are a DELTA tutor, you are very welcome to contribute to the Wiki with your personal experience, your knowledge or with your questions.

One of the things that helped me a lot during the DELTA was to see sample assignments by former DELTA candidates. This is why I have decided to publish my DELTA assignments online on my website. On the Wiki you can find a link to more sample assignments by other former candidates.

Recently, an online teacher friend of mine, Mark Bain, was reflecting on his blog on what teachers can do in one-to-one classes while their students are reading or writing. A situation that many tutors are in and find challenging. Here is my reply:

I’ve read your post with interest because I had similar thoughts when teaching one-to-one. This is why I never asked students to read longer text in detail in class and also mostly avoided writing and instead set it as homework. This was not very satisfactory as students would often not find time for homework. Another problem was that these writing tasks were very traditional; students would write and I would correct. Only later did I learn how I could help and guide them through writing tasks so that they would really improve their skills.

What can be done?
Reading:
You could do a kind of jigsaw reading or information gap activity. Your student could read part A and you part B. Then, you could tell each other what you’ve read. With longer texts this could be repeated.

You could even both read the same text/paragraph, clarify vocabulary only where necessary and talk about the content. Alternatively, you could read about the same story from different newspapers and then find out about the differences in the story, the style, vocabulary, etc. The Internet makes it easy to find different accounts of the same story.

One technique that helps students improve their reading comprehension is being read to aloud. Typically, teachers let students read aloud, which is often not very helpful. However, research* suggests that if the teacher reads a text aloud, students reading comprehension improves. By doing this, you would be actively participating in the reading, could justify it to your student (research), and you would feel better 
* Amer, A. A. The effect of the teacher’s reading aloud on the reading comprehension of EFL students. ELT Journal Volume 51/1 January 1997

You could also spend some time in class on writing each other letters and reading and responding to them instead of speaking. These could be formal or informal letters or even a discussion. Your students would practise both writing and reading, you would be busy with a relevant task.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which you can move around freely with your Avatar, a figure that represents you in this world, interact with others and build complex three dimensional objects. It is called a serious game and there has been a lot of hype about it. So, last year, I signed up to find out for myself what it was all about, after hearing that educators had discovered it for teaching and learning purposes.

I have to say, I was rather disappointed because of the poor graphics, the empty places and the steep learning curve. I had also no idea how to find those educational places. Most places I managed to find were deserted. The first conversations I had with “residents” were also not very promising. 

It took a couple of months for me to give it another try. I learned how to move around watching some Second Life tutorials. And after attending a life guided demonstration during a six-week EVO BAW08 course, I finally started to understand its significance for education. I was intrigued by the possibilities it offered for distance and language learning.

I started to collect teaching tools and to learn more basic SL skills. An online teacher friend from Mexico, Maru suggested to meet once a week to learn and share our experiences. This was a great motivator for me. Shortly afterwards, we were joined by Alicia, a teacher friend from Uruguay. 

Then, in May 2008, I created the Wiki as a logical consequence to have a repository for all the ideas, news, links and tools that we talked about in the meetings. The core of the Wiki, however, is the “lesson plans and ideas” section. During the SLanguages 2008 conference, many SL teachers pointed out that lesson planning for SL takes much more time than in Real Life and participants were also asking whether there was a platform to share these. So, we decided to open the Wiki to more educators.

Since then, it has generated a lot of interest among SL newbies as well as experienced SL educators, also from researcher at some universities who are interest in SL’s role in education.

The life in-world meetings take place every week at SLT/PDT 11 am (GMT 6 pm). If you are a language teacher interested in Second Life and would like to join, contract me.

Here is a slideshow which Maru created with the text I had written to demonstrate one of the educational tools in SL, the SpeakEasy HUD:

| View | Upload your own

Someone on Twitter mentioned a new Web 2.0 tool that they liked. The tweed went on like this: “Now I’m thinking of how to use it my class” This reminded me that we educators should be careful not to use technology as an end but only as a means. I think we teachers, especially those who are technology enthusiasts, need to stop sometimes and thing why we use the Internet and technology in our classes. It is easy to get carried away by our fascination for the tools themselves and simply use them because we like them and to offer something new to our students.

I am not saying we shouldn’t embrace technology and experiment with new tools. To the contrary, I’m all for experimenting but this should not happen to the expense of our students. It is our responsibility as teachers to not make false promises to our students and make them believe that simply by using the latest gadgets they will learn faster and become better.

We should try to see educational technology, Web 2.0 tools, MUVEs like Second Life for what they are — tools to help improve learning and teaching. Used appropriately, they can be extremely motivating and empowering.

As language teachers, we often use timelines to explain and practise verb tenses. Dipity is a wonderful tool that can make timelines really fascinating and engaging for students.

You can search for interactive timelines on different topics (history, films,science, celebrities, etc.) or even better, you can create your own timeline about your life or an event and add pictures, text and links

Students can create their timelines and share it with each other. These timelines can be used to practise verb tenses while at the same time practising presentation skills. Students can practise all four skills:

• speaking (presenting their timeline)
• listening (to presentation)
• reading (the entries)
• writing (a summary of the events, an essay based on the timeline)

It’s great for content based classes,too. Or why not work together with the history teacher. Students can be asked to collect links/data in English on the topic covered in the history lesson and produce a timeline, which can, then, be used in the English lesson. This way, students will practise their language skills and review the history lesson.

This is collaborative learning at it’s best.

You can embed the timelines on your web site or blog and also create RSS feeds.

If you are lazy to create a timeline manually but you have a blog or use twitter, picasa, etc., you can also simply use the RSS feed to generate a timeline automatically (see my example).

vBusiness Expo is a four-day event about using virtual worlds for business and education. Today was the first day. There will be presentations, talks and panel discussions. After the serious part, there will also be informal social events like business fashion shows, music, etc. Good for meeting and talking to new contacts and networking.

This is the first vBusiness Expo happening in SL. Clever Zebra, the organiser, is planning two Expos in a year from now on, one in spring and one in autumn.

This is one of a series of courses about technology in the classroom organised by Nüans Publishing, Ankara taking place in Bursa. Today‘s seminar was about digital storytelling and podcasting and was presented by Derya Erice, who is, like me, also a member of the Webheads - an international vibrant group of educators interested in and using ICT and Web 2.0 tools in education.