Technolandia - Technology for Foreign Language Teaching

Back to School

Hey there! I hope you all had a great start to the new year and that all of your students are excited to be in your classes and ready to learn! Okay, am I wishing for too much? :)

Today, I wanted to share two items with you to enhance your use of technology in your classroom.

First, for those of you who started class blogs, you need to know about Feedburner. This is the free service I use to allow my students and other readers to subscribe to my blog. This is the gadget you used to subscribe to this blog.

1. Go to Feedburner and type in your blog address into the textbox and click "next."

2. Follow the instructions you see. You will have to create a free account to be able to use this service, but you won't receive any spam or unwanted email from signing up.

3.At this point, being new to the service, I would click on the link at the bottom beside "next" that sends you directly to the management page.

4. You will now go the "Publicize" tab and click on the "Email Subscriptions" tab on the left hand side.

5. Once you click "Email Subscriptions" and scroll down a bit, you will get a box full of HTML text and then a drop down box giving you the option to place a widget on your blog for subscription. Since most of you used Blogger, that is what you will choose and follow any prompts after that point.

This will post the subscription box on your blog. You can then log onto your blog and move it to whatever location you want, but the hard work is done.

Now, your students and parents can subscribe and receive your blog posts directly in their email box!

The other item is a slide show I found created by Zaid and hosted on Slideshare (also a great tool you should know about) that shows off a lot of web resources for pretty much whatever you might be looking for. To get an idea for how Slideshare works, click on the advance buttons directly from here and the slideshow advances without having to download a file or open up Powerpoint.

101 Free Learning Tools

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: thinking tools)

Well, it is Monday morning and there are just a few hours left before we are back in school. Please enjoy your free day! And, let's see some comments about how those blogs are going! Adios, Amy

Text to Speech Applicaitons on the Web

PLAY THE SOUND FILE ABOVE TO HEAR A RECORDING OF THIS BLOG POST AS YOU READ.

Hello again!

I've just finished playing with and posting something I think has a lot of potential for us as language teachers who want to use more technology in our teaching. The site I found is www.readthewords.com and the way it works is very simple. You can create a FREE account and either type in text you want to use or upload a document, and with one mouse click, the site converts your text into an audio file you can either download or embed on a blog or website. This application supports English, French and Spanish in either male or female voices and with different accents. I am posting my first attempt with the app here so you can take a look: http://alenord.typepad.com . Take a look at the post, play the audio and read along.

As always, please comment, ask questions, or start a discussion of ideas by submitting a comment to this post. I can't wait to hear other ideas you have!

Happy Sunday,

Amy