My Personal Best

I've been blogging on this site now for just over a year, so I thought that just before I head off on my holiday for a couple of weeks, I would leave you with what I feel were some of my best postings over the last year or so.Creating audio-visual monologuesBack in April 2007 I wrote about a nice bit of free recording and lip syncing software that...

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Dictation goes Web 2.0

Yes and why not? Seems hard to see how this would be accomplished but it certainly does seem to be the case at the Listen and Write - Dictation website. What's more it seems to have been done in a pretty impressive way too.This site features quite a number of audio files all of which can be accessed through quite a cleverly designed dictation activity....

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Skype Part 1 Recording Audio

This is the first in what is going to be a series of postings looking at Skype and the range of plugins freely available for it and how these can be used for teaching languages and creating ELT materials.As most people know, Skype is a freely available VOIP program which allows users to make computer to computer 'telephone calls' for free. What many...

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Games With a Purpose and a Social Network

Well who would believe it? A social network built around playing word games with online partners! This may not sound like a great idea, but I have to say that I'm impressed! Gwap (Games With a Purpose) is a collection of 5 basic word games...

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Pronunciation goes 2.0

I've been looking this week at Forvo, which is a kind of web 2.0 pronunciation site. The site allows users to request, and add audio clips of the pronunciation of different words from a huge range of languages, so if you want to know how a...

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IATEFL Online Conference 2008

Well apologies to any regular visitors who have noticed the lack of activity her over the last week. This is mainly because my time over the next couple of weeks is being consumed by one of the biggest meetings of English language teachers...

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Soundscapes from Soundtransit

Sound Transit is a really wonderful formulation of an idea. It's not just a huge collection of Mp3 sound files from all over the world, but the sounds have been tagged by country and described and a visitor to the site can take a sound journey...

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Interactive presentations

I’ve just been looking at a really interesting on line tool called Voicethread.What's Voicethread?Voice thread enables users to create online presentations using their own images. It also allows the creator to add audio or written text to the images and give access to other people to leave audio or text comments on the presentation. This is a really...

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Subtitling your video clips

I’ve just been looking at a really excellent Beta site called Dot SubThe site is an interesting adaptation of the Youtube model. People can upload videos (up to 300Mb) and share them among limited groups or with everyone.What’s really interesting though about Dot Sub is that it is aimed at subtitling and translation for people with hearing problems....

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Voice in Second Life

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying out the new voice client for Second Life and despite a few remaining bugs with voice groupings it seems to work pretty well. It is sensitive to distance and location! If you turn around while someone is speaking to you, it really does sound like they are behind you etc.It is possible to put groups / pairs...

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Creating audio-visual monologues

Flipz TV is a really useful piece of free software for creating entertaining audio-visual materials.The software enables you to record your own audio monologues and lip-sync them with a choice of animated talking heads. It then turns them into small Flash files which can be run in a web browser. These can be put on the Internet, run form your computer...

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BBC online media training

I’ve just seen that the BBC has released a lot of its own internal staff training courses and made them available free online at: http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCourses.aspWhat's on the site?I’ve had a look through the courses and they really are good, especially if you want to work with audio for podcasts or video for projects. Some of them are...

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