Archive for the 'voice' Category

Fring - Skype calls and more from mobile phones

Published
by
Seth
on May 28, 2008
in gadgets, ict, language teaching, tools and voice
. 2 Comments

Many language teachers who use ICT and web 2.0 technology in their lessons , especially those involved in distance learning, will be aware of Skype. It’s a handy way to make calls to many countries around the world at rock bottom prices (as low as €0.017 per minute, pretty good heh?) What’s more, if you and your friends all have Skype on your computers, you can chat for free for as long as you want.

I’m sure lots of teachers have also heard of Gmail and the Google Talk service that Google provide too. Twitter is another useful tool for teaching up and coming service that many people have been talking about recently.

“Eh, so what’s all this then, a list of silly names?” I hear you ask :-) No, nothing that droll.

Fring is a wonderful little program that combines all of these chat tools (or silly names depending on your point of view) together in one place. What’s more that place is your mobile phone.

“What?! My mobile phone? With Skype, Google Talk etc all installed on it?”

Yep, absolutely. No more expensive mobile phone voice calls, no more over priced sms and what’s more you can have proper text chats just like you do with MSN messenger etc (which btw is also included in Fring.) Now hang on, is this too good to be true? Well, if you have a 5 year old mobile phone, it might just be. If, however, you have a newer “Symbian” phone or a fancy iPhone (as I think the lucky Carla Arena has) you will be able to use Fring.

“So how do I find out if I can use this Fring thing with my phone?”

Fring has actually been around for more than a year now and is slowly, but surely increasing in popularity. There are many more phones that can now use Fring, and they aren’t actually all the most high tech, whizz-bang models. Have a look at this list of Fring phones to see if yours is on it. There are loads of them from many of everyday manufacturers, not just the fancy iPhone types too! :-)

“Wow, my phone is on the list, surely there must be a catch somewhere?”

Actually yes, there is. Fring uses the data connection on your phone (your phone’s internet connection.) If you pay a lot for the amount of data you use on you phone, Fring is not for you. However, f you have a free (or cheap) data plan, or if you have a wifi connection on your mobile (like the iPhone) then Fring could be a great idea for you.

Fring for Teaching?

Imagine all the things you or your students could do with Fring. You could organise quick and simple conference calls no matter where you are (no waiting by the computer just to chat to your students.) You could organise regular 10 minute text chat sessions with your students, again you could be anywhere to do this (teaching English from the pub is closer to becoming a reality!) Fring is also slowly starting to introduce file sharing via your mobile too, so you could send a picture or Powerpoint file to your students pre-lesson, then get them to discuss it in a group text chat.

I’ve been using Fring for almost half a year now and I’ve had no problems with it at all. There are two things that I love about Fring: the fact you aren’t tied to a computer and the fact that it rolls so many chat and voice services into one. I’m sure it will take a little while for us to regularly start using it with our students, but in the meantime it’s a great gadget for us cash-strapped tech-teachers to enjoy!

Do post a note here if you try using Fring on your mobile. I’d love to hear of anyone who’s used it with their students too!
All the best,
Seth.

Voicemail in your blog - Get A Buz

Published
by
Seth
on May 17, 2008
in blog, ict, tools and voice
. 0 Comments

For a While now I’ve been thinking of different ways that students can have asynchronous voice conversations outside the classroom. I’m convinced that this would help a lot of my adult learners to improve their English more quickly, as IMHO it’s the short, weekly exposure to a foreign language that they get in traditional 1.5 hour lessons that is holding them back. If they could get online a couple of times a week and take part in an asynchronous conversation, a bit like an oral blog, I’m sure that it would help them to recall more vocabulary, create interest in what they are learning and give them a focus for their studies.

I wrote a while back about a great called Evoca. But it is a bit labour intensive, requiring the Evoca account holder (the busy teacher) to manually embed the code for any replies they got to their voicemails if they wanted to share them with the rest of the class. This led to me not using Evoica that much after first discovering it.

“Get A Buz,” despite it’s silly name, provides bloggers, MySpace users, and in general anyone with a website to include a voicemail type of widget, that would allow a teacher, or one of the students, to start off a discussion. Other class members can then listen in their own time to the discussion and then add their comments. All of this happend automatically, with the teacher only having to upload the code to the blog once, and then they can simply follw the discussion and reply to their students wherever relevant.

Here’s an example of a “Get A Buz” plugin below. Click on the “Hear My Message” to listen to my recording, then please feel free to leave me a reply too:

The things I like about “Get A Buz” are:

  • It’s a great way to get students speaking L2 outside the classroom. This will be really valuable to them IMHO.
  • It’s pretty straightforward to use. As long as you know how to embed a bide of HTML in your blog page you can use it.
  • Once you have set it up, it “Just Works” there is no need to perform ongoing maintenance on it.

The things I don’t like are:

  • You only get 3, free “Buzzes” per account. This means that you can’t start new discussions over and over again without either paying, or re-registering.
  • With large classes the conversation threads could become a bit lost and it might be difficult to follow who is following who.
  • It’s not possible to get rid of one “pre installed” introductory voicemail which is essentially just an advert.
  • Most Importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of notification / RSS feed etc to let the teacher and students know when a new comment has been left. This could be a a bit of a pain if the teacher has to check the site for new messages.

All told, I think Get A Buz is a cool little tool to use, especially as it’s very straightforward to set up. If anyone uses this, or any tools like it, leave me a comment to let me know what you do with it. I’d love to exchange teaching tips!

Seth.

Update: Be aware! Get a Buz allows you to create up to three different personalised “greetings” for your voicemail, but each and every voicemail player will record and play the same messages.

In other words if you want to use Get A Buz with more than one class of students, make sure you get several accounts with Get A Buz and use a different account with each class. Otherwise all your messages from all your different classes will become mixed together as one (as has just happened to me!)

Seth


Disability and "Voz Me"

Published
by
Seth
on November 21, 2007
in ict and voice
. 0 Comments


I found a really interesting tool yesterday called Voz Me.

It’s basically a simple text to voice synthesizer that you can plug into your blog so that it “speaks.” I was a little sceptical when I found it, as the speech it produces sounds pretty artificial, although admittedly it does sound bit better than Microsoft’s own brand voice synthesizer included in Windows.

I now think it’s interesting not so much as a language teaching tool, though it might also be interesting also for language students to listen to their writing read by a computer, but more as a tool to aid user-accessibility.

A good friend of mine teaches a severely autistic boy, who cannot speak except to copy mono-syllabic sounds one by one. He is, however, an exceptionally talented writer, whose prose I could never match in a million years. This boy can express himself in such fantastic, imaginative ways that you would never guess that he has any sort of disability at all. In actual fact he finds writing quite difficult and needs the help of an assistant when he types as he cannot withdraw his arms from the keyboard easily.

We were talking together the other day about blogs, as I thought that it might be a good way for this boy to anonymously publish his work and get a readership for it without the stigma of “disability.” He is fully concious of his disability and often tells people, via his keyboard, “Even though I make look like this, I’m not stupid.”

Then I started thinking, this Voz Me tool could really work wonders for this boy. He would not only be able to write his amazing stories and share them with people, but he would also be able to hear them read by someone. This would be surely be really interesting and stimulating for him.

So I went about setting up a blog and including the Voz Me tool in its template. It works very well actually, but unfortunately it only has an English and a Spanish version at the moment. When reading Italian text (my friend’s autistic boy is Italian) the voice sounds awful. It’s got a real comedy English accent!

So, now I’m going to look around for an Italian equivalent of Voz Me for this boy’s blog. I think it would be wonderful for him to be able to “Hear” his own stories being read out loud, even if it sounds quite artificial. In the meantime, have a listen to this post for yourself. It’s not bad sounding is it? If you want to try this tool out on your blog or website, you can download the script from: http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en.

The tool itself is very clever. It allows you to both listen to the text from a blog posting as well as download the voice recording as an mp3. ( you can see the small “Hear this post” link at the bottom of this posting here - give it a try.)

So the verdict: Voz Me is perhaps too limited for teaching languages, but certainly would be very useful to some teachers. As with all these web 2.0 tools, the only thing holding us back are our imaginations. I’m sure there will be some clever uses we can put this tool to in our classrooms as well.

Seth.