October 24, 2008
Example of Student Podcasts
Here is a quick example of a student interview in Spanish. This interview is from the first month of school. students recorded the interview on an ipod nano with a microphone. interview-in-spanish
This is another example done towards the end of a school year where students needed to do a movie review in Spanish. movie-review-in-spanish
The podcasts were planned, written, and practiced in class and only needed 1 day in the computer lab to record.
Enjoy!
May 11, 2008
Voki Speaking Avatar
Here’s a cool website that I found that allows students to create a virtual version of themselves and then add speech to it. Students can either type in what they want their Voki avatar to say (including with a variety of Spanish accents!) or they can record their own voices with either a computer microphone or any telephone!!
See my side bar for an example of a Voki where I recorded my voice and one where a student typed in the information the Voki would say. This activity took about 30 minutes in the computer lab, the students then emailed me their Vokis and I gave them a grade. They REALLY enjoyed it and were fully engaged and practicing Spanish!
Can you think of any other uses of this tool? Place a comment or suggestion below! Hasta luego!
Let’s start at the beginning
Hola! Well, I was trying to figure out where to start. What should be the first post for this blog? What is the most important thing I want to share with other Spanish teachers. And here it is…Social bookmarking on del.icio.us . Why was this my first choice? Because I want this blog to be about collaboration and sharing resources above all else and social bookmarking is a great place to start.
So, What is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking is a way to save your websites and store them on the web instead of in your web browser. For example, if I save a website to my “Favorites” tab in Internet Explorer I can access that website from my computer but not my computer at school. If I want to share a website with a friend or colleague I need to email them the links individually for them to access them. So, what if I have 20 websites that I have found on my computer at home that I want to access and share with others…what do I do? Well, the answer is probably nothing. It is way to difficult to export my links and import them to my “Favorites” at school. I definitely don’t have time to copy and paste all the links and share them with other people. Del.icio.us social bookmarking solves both of these problems. First, I store all my links on the web at the del.icio.us website so I can find them at any computer with internet access. When I want to share my links with another teacher, I can just send them to my del.icio.us link and they can have access to all of my resources.
Lastly, not only can I share my links with others but I can access other peoples tagged websites who have similiar interests as I do. I can search the del.icio.us website for all resources tagged “spanish” for example. Not only will I see what other people have found and saved, but I can then click on the user and see what other links they have saved! I now have access to hundreds of people who have similiar interests and ideas that I do. Below is a great tutorial video found on www.teachertube.com to get you started. I highly recommend using this great educational and collaborative tool! If you’d like to see what I have tagged go to my del.icio.us links at http://del.cio.us/olahmich
