Making Ed Tech Accessible Since 2007
Posts tagged EFL
Podcasting with Language Learners
01 week ago
At the 
end of 2011 I travelled up to Innsbruck, Austria to do some teacher training for one of the top language schools there, Die Sprache. We looked at a number of handy ICT tools for language teachers, with a focus on Podcasts. I thought I would share the slides from our training session here on the blog, so that other teachers who are thinking of using pod casts with language learners can take a look through and get a few useful hints and tips.
The presentation is basically broken down into three sections:
- The first is a quick run through of what pod casts are and why they are (a really good) tool, suitable for language learners.
- In the second section we look at podcasts used for active listening practice. Personally I think the fact that there are so many different topics of podcast available, as well as those made specifically for language learners, means that there are a great way of introducing regular listening practice to your learners.
- Then the third and final part of our workshop looked at using the brilliant Open Source sound recording software, Audacity. At first sight audacity can be a bit intimidating. I don’t really mind admitting that I only ever use about 5% of Audacity’s capabilities, but the ability to edit and mix sound recordings really make your recordings sound more professional. At the end of the day I’ve used Audacity with a class full of 15-year-olds, and it went very smoothly. A surefire sign of simple software.
Please feel free to take a look through the slides, and even share them with your colleagues if you wish. If you have any questions or if anything is not quite clear, please do ask any questions in the comment section below (these slides are of course designed to be used in a face-to-face seminar with me present, online they lose something.) Of course, if you would like me to come to your school to deliver this seminar in person, just drop me a line for a quote:
Twitter: @sethdickens
email: i n f o (a t) d i g i t a l a n g . c o m
Podcasting With Language Learners
View more presentations from Seth dickens
Finally, I promised the teachers at Die Sprache who taught languages other than English, that I would find a few podcasts suitable for them. I didn’t find a great deal of sites, but here’s what I’ve found so far:
Radio Lingua Language-learning – Possibly the best group of language learning podcasts I’ve seen yet!
Schlaflos in München – der Podcast mit Annik Rubens – A very classy podcast from Munich.
http://www.andreasauwaerter.de/ – Andreas Auwerter’s Posdast
Podcasting for Learning » Zwei neue Interviewpartner im Bidcast online – Andreas Auwerter’s blog about podcasting
In addition to these links, I also have a list of links that (might) useful for teaching German and Spanish on my Delicious account:
- German http://www.delicious.com/sethdickens/german
- Spanish http://www.delicious.com/sethdickens/spanish
If you know of any more links good for teaching these languages, please do let me know in the comments.
Best of The BETT – Part 4
02 weeks ago
For the third in my series of Best of the BETT interviews I spoke to Anne Gilleran, from eTwinning.net. I’m happy to say that amongst the hundreds stalls at BETT, eTwinning’s area was a real breath of fresh air. Their service is a real help for language teachers who want their students to get some authentic speaking practice, it’s also huge (currently there are more than 150,000 members) and best of all it’s free. In their own words:
eTwinning is the Community for schools in Europe. Teachers from all participating countries can register and use the eTwinning online tools (the Portal and the Desktop) to find each other, meet virtually, exchange ideas and practice examples, team up in Groups, learn together in Learning Events and engage in online-based projects.
I’m a big fan of free stuff that makes teachers’ lives easier and I’ll definitely now be looking into eTwinning.net further. I’d like to see how I could work it into some of the seminars I teach at the moment.
Anyhow, over to Anne, who describes (in a very noisy BETT conference hall) exactly what eTwinning.net does:
Tomorrow’s post will be my last, but I’ve saved the “big one” or scoop until then. I was very lucky to get an interview with William Florance, the head of Education at Google for Europe The Middle East and Asia.
Best of the BETT – Part 3
02 weeks ago
In this second in our series of interviews from the BETT 2012 interviews, we hear form Simon Lee, the UK Head of Sales for Livescribe, the manufacturer of the incredible SmartPen.
I use a Livescribe SmartPen myself, and I can attest to how useful they are for helping you to concentrate on what is being said, not taking notes and so on in meetings. More importantly though, at least for this blog, they’re invaluable in 1to1 language lessons, where the teacher will be able to quickly and simply play back errors to the learner, so that can correct themselves, whether it be pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar mistakes. Without fail, after every single sales meeting I do for English360, the people I’m talking to ask “what’s that amazing pen?” or something along those lines!
In this interview, Simon tells us why Livescribe came to BETT and what teachers have been hearing from him this year:
The next interview in this series will be with Gareth Davies, the CEO of an amazing virtual learning environment that I’d never heard of before, Frog. Great name – and not a bad looking VLE either 
Open-Source Online Classroom
53 years ago
When you think of online language education, you first think of a teacher and a class of language students, all talking together via a video link, right? Well, the reality unfortunately is a little different.
Unless the school or university you work for has a lot of money to invest in hardware or software (which your students are going to have to end up paying for in higher course fees) you’ll probably be teaching languages online with tools that look very much like a traditional webpage. This is great when we don’t need to talk to our students “live” , but when we do, surely we can manage better than this?
I found Dimdim recently, which allows you to create your own video conference and online meeting classroom, for up to 20 participants, for free! There are no complicated downloads for the meeting participants and no expensive hosting packages for the teacher or school. Dimdim also includes all sorts of useful features for online language teachers like a whiteboard, one to one chat and group chat as well as other handy features like a shared desktop, PowerPoint and PDF file sharing.
For those of us that want unlimited numbers of conference participants, you can even download all the files needed for free and setup your own online meetings server. You will need your own webhosting , something that many schools will already have, you may also need to upgrade the webhosting service you have to a more powerful package, but when you compare this to the prices of commercially available online meeting and conferencing packages, you are still likely to be saving a large amount. You can also then start to fiddle about with the look of your Dimdim server so that it matches your school’s identity and look.
I must admit, I have only tried out Dimdim with one other person so far, but it seemed easy enough to set up. I had hoped that I would be able to see the video of all participants, but the video broadcasting is only for the teacher. Dimdim do say they are working on a version with “Multiple Presenters,” we’ll have to see.
I did like the fact that you could choose whether to allow your students to only have audio or text chat, students can “put up their hand” to allow them to attract the teacher’s attention, the teacher can also decide how many participants can speak at one time (online lessons can get chaotic if everyone talks at once.) There are a host of other useful features, certainly too many to list here.
If you’d like to try out Dimdim with us, please feel free to come along to an online meting I have setup at 09.00 C.E.T. on Saturday 28th June. We will be discussing how you could use Dimdim with a class, and will try out several of the features of the software.
To access the meeting, simply follow this URL: http://tinyurl.com/6zlrt7
Looking forward to meeting you online soon!
Recent Comments