Lifelong Learning

innovative technology + self-sustainability

Category: Web 2.0 -My social media

Sychronous and voice experiences

Well how can I not blog about this???

This is a super summary of a hard week’s work of analysing. Week 8 of the ICT I tutor on is about chatware tools and chat projects. The group have spent a week viewing some webhead projects like and using some shared applications together first-hand. Here is a wonderful summary from one of the super ICT colleagues 😉 on the course.

Check out Seth’s Podomatic podcast to hear the group’s collective feedback.

Podcasting – the warmth of human voice

· What opportunities do you see podcasting being able to offer you in your educational setting?

Generally speaking they offer language learners the chance to practice two essential skills: speaking and listening. The content is flexible as they can create it or they can choose from a wider choice of ready available podcasts to listen to.

I feel there is a multi-strand here and we need to remember the context and learning level, outcomes, styles and resources we have available.

Podcasting can offer:

a) Authentic Listening: learners listen to real-life audio content (created by others) Great new opportunities for listening – very much like a more flexible and menu-selected range of audio files tailored to our learners’ needs

b) Real Audience: learners record their own voices and content. The listeners soon become speakers and can post audio comments in reply to what they hear. New ways of recording voices ( a great improvement on the tape recorder) which allows learners added speaking practice and the possibility of sharing their voice new audience and new levels of interaction with that audience new horizons to suit some learning styles better than text communication

Flashmeetin Round Table 090207

c) Audio-on-the-go: lecturer podcasts to catch up on seminar or lesson you missed, tutorial for so many subjects, homework assignments, more listening practice, mp3 files on lessons or relevant topics to integrate or review material covered in class.

Learners can use their PC to listen to it or download and store this audio content to their portable music players in their own time, as many times as they want. Repetition easy and integral.

As I said in the round table discussion tonight on Podcasting & Language Learning hosted by Scott Lockman and in the YG discussion I have used podcasting with learners mainly as a listening resource. The main reason for this is they are academic university students and we do not have recording facilities. Podcasting also requires a lot of time – practising and repeating “parts”, uploading, editing etc which many short exam courses do not allow.

These new resources are much more than just more listening. They are excellent for exposing to a huge range of accents, speaking styles in a click. They are fun like http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/ and quick to follow. For young learners there are issues with level and appropriacy (see Graham and Joe for more info!)

With one class I even found they were interested in listening to the same podcast in several languages. A lot of government information is now accessible as a podcast. For academic students, who have a command of many languages and are training to be interpreters, translators or whatever this is fantastic. Take the one I did on the environment for example from the EU Climate change site http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/ My students found it great to be able to listen to the other languages they are studying after listening to the English one (at the Oriental University of Naples the students I teach will have English is their second language, an Asian language will be their third and maybe fourth and fifth will be Latvian and Portuguese or some other European mix )

I have also trained teachers to set up podcasts. On a recent face to face project training we developed an idea for a project that will be carried out in the UK with mobile podcasting. The idea is called “Talk a Walk” and it is to record their learners’ trip to London in a new perspective, through sound.

These are some of the ideas we brainstormed: London with difficulty/ London in different shoes/ London through other senses. I think it was pretty neat to allow these students to choose the theme, to work in separate groups and then to help them develop it. This is not always possible, we were lucky that this EU funded projects covers the cost of going to the UK. Lucky for some J I just do the training ;-( So the “through senses podcasts” will be on describing art: wall graffiti to Tate Gallery, or describing the food they see and try. The oral record will be done as a substitute to our travel log scrap books! If the school could get the money for videocasting tools that would be ideal but sometimes just voice with no images makes the dialogues or spoken comments richer and for teachers new to ICT it can be easier – although vlogging is getting very simple.

 

· How effectively do you think you can engage students with something like a podcast?

· What (if any) problems can you foresee that may result in your podcast project not becoming a success? What can you do to avoid them?

 

Listen here for my answers (podcasting from Odeo to familiarise myself with it after a long time 😉

http://odeo.com/show/8536743/1060891/download/EVO2007Week4ReflectionsOnPodcasting.mp3

 

Or try this

powered by ODEO

Interactive Whiteboards


metalab040207

Originally uploaded by Valentina 24.

We had a great time experimenting with uploading slides and dragging and dropping (while holding CTR key down!) to the Interactive Whiteboards kinldy assigned to us by Fire Centaur in English Village in Second Life.
educating the educators
I thought I’d try uploading this from Flikr to see if all these ways of uploading work smoothly.

Edublogs vs. WordPress blogs

As I’m not new to blogging or creating blogs I’ve also spent some time this week working on finding out the differences and similarities between blogs created from an edublogs account which uses “wordpress” and blogs created direct from an wordpress account. This will then help me compare the features with 21publish which I find smooth and logical and great for class blogs (see a mini experiment last year)

It’s been interesting to read some of the EVO opnewebpublishing YG comments about the different features and characteristics that are or are not offered by wordpress. We have seen comments on templates, importing, exporting and deleting the whole blog and how easy it is to handle this tinkering as Bee called it! I had already set up an account with both – a year ago maybe with wordpress with an uninspiring blog name http://vale24.wordpress.com that I did nothing with, and a more interesting idea that I had created in Dec and was hoping to develop over the Christmas holidays https://lifelonglearning.edublogs.org .

Well it wasn’t until this week and the great list of benchmarks that I put hand to mouse and got cracking! It was really simple to set up the edublog, choose a nice template (Regulus by Ben Gillbanks) which also had page tabs. Publishing first posts and sorting the blogroll was quick and painless. I then imported the whole blog into the wrodpress one in 2 minutes (literally) and in a few clicks. They are of course comptabile because they use the same platform. One interesting thing happened – as I hadn’t selected the same template yet when I did do so it actually created a second “about” page (which I manually deleted. This double up is simply due to the code reading it as page to import and the template design then setting up the standard. To avoid I reckon selecting template preferences first would help.

As Susan in Florence “noticed the images didn’t get imported and don’t know why.” And Bee replied “Bubbleshare gets imported because it is code that was inserted so it is transported to WordPress just like the posts. Photos that were uploaded from your hard disk to Blogger do not come because they are stored on Blogger’s server and are not part of the particular posts.” My about photo is uploaded to my server space so no problem there but having to reload the photos would be irritating for students but completely logically as far as coding is concerned, as Bee pointed. But if you are importing/exporting to/from edublogs and wordpress they share the same server and recognize embedded image link.

Compatibility is now enhanced between, to and from all these platforms and this is definitely making it easier for users to do what they want.

Edublogs Manage menu options
I was curious to see that the Manage options for edublogs where actually more complex than the wordpress one.

See the screenshot I’ve taken to see the referrers and subscriptions options I have on edublogs but not wordpress. Still need to check out other minute details but widgets, sidebars, commenter approvals are IDENTICAL so far. I have tried exporting form wordpress into edublogs to see and that worked too.

The line spacing though was messed up but this seems worse in wordpress. Will carry on investigating 😉 .

PS Just improted this from wordpress – I’ll be doing more experimenting I can see. Line spacing not recognized althou i checked the html code in the wordpress version before exproting and it had all the right <p>s!

Hello!

A wordpress blog set up to compare features with edublogs , to share and develop further.

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