Summercore Blog » Foreign Language Teachers http://summercore.edublogs.org Humanware Tips and Tricks Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:28:53 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Two Cute Web 2.0 Sites http://summercore.edublogs.org/2008/02/20/two-cute-web-20-sites/ http://summercore.edublogs.org/2008/02/20/two-cute-web-20-sites/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:05:31 +0000 summercore http://summercore.edublogs.org/2008/02/20/two-cute-web-20-sites/ One of the best things about Web 2.0 is the ease with which they fit into the curriculum, ranging from Foreign Language to Lower School Reading. There always seems to be a way to incorporate these sites into a digital storytelling project, an exploration of verb tenses, or a strategy for summarizing skills learned in class each week.One of the two cute sites is blabberize.  This is not the best site ever, but it can be used for many purposes. Simply upload a picture, draw a circle around the mouth, record a sentence or two and there you have it: a talking picture. Think of its uses: talking animals telling about their habitat, students describing a recent event, a political candidate voicing an issue. Try it. The second site is Bubbleply. This site allows the user to add pop-up bubbles to a youtube video. You can choose when and for how long the bubble will appear. Bubbles can include text and hyperlinks. Again, think of the many ways to use this site: a history class can annotate a famous speech, a French class can dub a commercial, a lower school reading class can add bubbles to a video of a class trip. The link feature makes this an even more powerful tool for upper school students, who can create links to websites, maps, and other resources.

]]> http://summercore.edublogs.org/2008/02/20/two-cute-web-20-sites/feed/ 3 Web 2.0 for Foreign Language Teachers http://summercore.edublogs.org/2007/12/10/web-20-for-foreign-language-teachers/ http://summercore.edublogs.org/2007/12/10/web-20-for-foreign-language-teachers/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:41:02 +0000 summercore http://summercore.edublogs.org/2007/12/10/web-20-for-foreign-language-teachers/ Foreign language teachers have so many possibilities open to them because their pedagogy mirrors the creativity allowed by Web 2.0. Voicethread is an obvious example; teachers can upload images for students to describe, and then students can listen to the responses of their classmates and their teacher. Voicethread can also be used for digital storytelling, so students can create their own narrated fairy tales, myths, and short stories.

Then there is Vozme, an amazing web site for Spanish teachers. Teachers or students can copy and paste or type Spanish text into the web site and then hear it read back to them. I am told by many Spanish teachers that the reader’s voice is terrific, absolutely perfect Spanish. Students can copy in segments of papers they are writing to hear them spoken aloud, or teachers can copy and paste an article from a Spanish newspaper, or a poem, or a section of a novel for students to read and listen to simultaneously. The sound files can be saved as mp3 to be downloaded into an ipod or e-mailed to others.

Yet one more interesting site is Overstream. Overstream allows students and teachers to add subtitles to youtube videos. Students can provide the foreign language text for a French or Spanish video, or they can mute the sound of a commercial, music video clip, or coming attraction of a movie to provide foreign language subtitles. Easy and very cool!

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