Filed Under World Languages
jasonlips
Well, here we are: at the end of a very academic year. The main purpose of this blog has been to share what I’ve observed working with World Language faculty and students. I’ve seen both groups take great strides and it has been gratifying to watch their progress. It’s not a bad idea to skim through our Twitter list of teacher activities and note just how much they’ve been doing as a group to expand their tool set. You’ll find a lot of hard work by everyone involved tucked into those little Twitters (almost 400 of them)!
I am very grateful to Diane Jackson (Lab Liaison) and Steve Farver (Department Chair), as well as my colleagues in the Information Systems group for supporting the department’s technological expansion this year. IS has been particularly patient and responsive as we’ve worked through more than a few miles of uncharted territory. Many kudos to them for their unsung hero-ess-ness.
And please stay tuned! This blog will reopen on August 18, 2008 when we meet again as a department for our 5-day Curriculum Development and Technology Training. ‘Till then, friends..
SPOTLIGHT:
UCLS Graduation 2008
Our own Department Chair, Mr. Farver, receives an Honorary Diploma!
Filed Under Best Bytes
Photosoup is neat little web app that talks to Flickr and pulls a series of photos together from the Creative Commons based on the tag you entered. Then it creates a word search puzzle based on the other tags associated with your tag. Here’s a puzzle I generated by entering the word France. You look at all of the pictures (up to 17) and search for the words in the puzzle.
I found out about this via a Diigo conversation. Somebody on the list made a great suggestion. Why not have students create unique tags for a series of photographs or images that they create, say “8grspanish” + “menu”. Then create a puzzle based on those tag words and share them with each other.
The fun never ends… =)
Filed Under French, YuperStars
Mme. Schneider’s eighth-graders do a fun project where they try to recreate famous Impressionist paintings. These are really great.
Filed Under Quotes
Let me be a little kinder,
Let me be a little blinder,
To the faults of those around me,
Let me praise a little more.
—Edgar A. Guest
Filed Under Filmmaking Club
Calling all students, parents, staff to drop in at the Lab tomorrow 11:30AM for a fun revue of the different projects the Filmmaking Club has been involved in this year.
Where: UH207
When: 11:30 AM, Tuesday, June 10
Why: Because George said so
What: THE GREAT ESCAPE (final version!)
What else: a nice little thank you to everyone involved from Claire & Club
Filed Under Best Bytes
EUROPA is a site dedicated to language learning, teaching, and translation in the European Union. Multi-lingualism is a priority in the EU, but interestingly, English, French, German, Spanish and Russian still represent over 95 % of languages taught. Apparently learning Chinese is as much a novelty over there as it is here..
The site links to TC-STAR, which features an initiative to rapidly improve speech-to-speech technologies. Their intro here:
The TC-STAR project, financed by European Commission within the Sixth Program, is envisaged as a long-term effort to advance research in all core technologies for Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST). SST technology is a combination of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Translation (SLT) and Text to Speech (TTS) (speech synthesis). The objectives of the project are ambitious: making a breakthrough in SST that significantly reduces the gap between human and machine translation performance.
From what I can see, if this project stays on track (focused mainly on European Spanish, European English, and Mandarin Chinese), we could see some amazing technology in the next five to six years that would enable us to “speak/hear in tongues”. So keep your eyes out for translation products that could potentially impact “face-to-face and over-the-phone use, speeches, documents (or web sites), cross lingual retrieval in audio streams, etc.”
I think the face to face would be most interesting. Imagine taking your iPhone with you to another country, enabling a certain language pair, and then having native speakers speak close enough to your phone mic that you could listen to their input as well as a real time translation, probably in the the voice of ALEX’s son.
Filed Under World Languages, Latin
Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) improved its speech synthesis with a new voice named ALEX. A decisive improvement over KATHY, BRUCE, and FRED, ALEX even recognizes commas and pauses accordingly.
Take Shakespeare’s sonnet, for example:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
===
Can you read my comma, thank you.
Can you read my question mark?
Can you read my question, Mark?
Can you read my question mark
Here’s Alex’s interpretation.
[Right click to open in new tab, Safari won’t truncate the file.]
Now add to that, an iFlash deck that Ms. Spaltro compiled from her Latin classes. Here’s a movie of iFlash in action, changing card sides every 4 seconds or so. Only I checked a box in preferences that has ALEX reading words that students hadn’t recorded. See if you can tell the difference between ALEX and the humans (hint: ALEX sort of messes up the Latin pronunciation).
QT movie of iFlash
iFlash is a great tool for memorizing anything. The students have fun building these decks. I highly recommend it for nailing those verb conjugations. =)
Filed Under Questions
SnapZ Pro: Snapz Pro X allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime movie or screenshot that can be emailed, put up on the web, or passed around however you want. This is the tool used in the World Language Lab to create training materials for the World Language faculty. That said, I am increasingly drawn to ScreenFlow. It’s more spendy, but well worth it. May have to switch, though we all love Ambrosia. iShowU is another screen capture app.
SnapzProX
Filed Under Latin, Spanish
This is what the lab looks like when we have 3 classes working in the Training, Project, and Instructional Areas simultaneously. See Mr. Reubelt’s Spanish Class, Ms. Pelliteri’s Latin Class, and Ms. Spaltro’s Latin Class busy at work/play/ish.
And here’s a copy of the activity that Mr. Reubelt was doing with his 7th graders on DiLL that day:
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SITUACIONES: Ejercicios en laboratorio
=========================
You will be matched with random partners for each of the following situations. You and your partner will have 2-3 minutes to discuss what you will each say in your dialogue. Then, when you hear the signal, both of you should begin recording the dialogue. You will have 2-3 minutes to record each dialogue.
These are the situations for which you will create dialogues:
1. It’s the last day of school and you are talking with a friend about what each of you are going to do over the summer. (Remember to use voy a + infinitivo when discussing
future plans!) Use as many verbs as you can and be creative.
2. One of you is a famous actor and is being interviewed on television. The interviewer
will ask you about yourself, your family, friends, etc. Ask as many questions
as you can using the question words (qué, dónde, adónde, cómo, cuándo, etc.). Also
try to use as many adjectives as you can to describe people and things.
3. It’s the first day of classes and you are at a new school–in Oaxaca, México! You
make a new friend and he/she asks you about your life in the US and your school. Try
to use as many school-related words as you can, as well as gustar to describe what you
like or don’t like.
Filed Under Quotes
In about the same degree as you
are helpful, you will be happy.
—Karl Reiland
