Archive for the ‘Best Bytes’ Category
Filed Under Best Bytes
According to Jason Ohler (digital storytelling guru), LITERACY is being able to read and write the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. This simple table illustrates the lag time between the introduction of a given media and the adoption by the general masses for their own writing.
| Media Form
|
Red-write lag time
|
Explanation
|
| Text, books
|
Centuries
|
Words were first spoken to the illiterate masses, who, after centuries of listening, learned to read. But it was still centuries before the average citizen was expected to be able to write.
|
| TV, movies
|
50 yrs
|
For the first half century of TV’s existence it took engineers and substantial financial backing to produce and distribute TV material. However, today anyone can create a “TV station” using an inexpensive video camera and a broadband connection.
|
| Web material
|
10-15 yrs
|
During web 1.0 the web was read by many and written by few. But in Web 2.0, non-technical people could create or add to blogs, Wiki or other social media forms with little or no training [exponentially the amount of information, opinions, and social worlds available to web readers].
|
(Excerpt from ICE Cube, Volume 2008, Issue 3)
What does this mean to language learners? It means that increasingly Lab students will be required to read and write in second and third languages if they intend to interface with other nations and cultures. Communities and countries that never had streamlined access to brick and mortar publishing houses will be carefully cultivating their web presence to connect with other communities around the world and create new [income-producing] opportunities. We will miss out on all kinds of opportunities if we don’t know how to read and write in their language. Intercultural web communications (how people of different cultures interact online) will be a big field of study in coming decades, I’m sure.
Filed Under Chinese, Best Bytes
Word is that this is a good Chinese to English dictionary. Our two Chinese faculty have agreed to make a list of their favorite Chinese language web resources, so more along these lines very soon…
Filed Under Best Bytes
We begin this year with a discovery that neither PowerPoint nor Apple’s Keynote play nice with QuickTime 7.5 This, after all my ranting and raving about how cool it was going to be to create podcasts using Keynote slides this fall. I’m pretty sure other EdTech people are going to run into the same issue, so I’ll post here and then link to it where I can.
After two hours of trial and error and reading every post I could find on the topic, I arrived at the magic combination. No, you can’t do just one or two of these items to get this fixed; you must do them all! Hopefully this will help other iMac users out there running Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard).
Step 1. REMOVE “com.apple.iWork.Keynote.plist” from User/Library/Preferences. If you have never opened Keynote before, open it and then delete the first preference file it creates.
Step 2. DOWNLOAD Pacifist at this link, install, and drag to your Applications Folder.
Step 3. DOWNLOAD QuickTime 7.4.5 (yes, you’re going to have to downgrade until Apple comes up with some kind of a patch). When the Installer opens, quit it and drag the .pkg over the Pacifist Application.
Step 4. Click on the lock on the top right corner of Pacifist and Authenticate. Click on the top row of the QuickTime package summary to select it and then click the “Install” button on the top left corner.
Step 5. Twice, Pacifist will ask you if you want to Replace certain items. Select the check box for all future items and click the “Replace” button.
Step 6. LOG OUT and log back in. Open a Keynote file and you should now be able to export video and audio to QT without any problems.
I’m a big Apple champion, but stuff like this, wow. Tries my patience.
p.s. Oh, and another discovery: iMovie ‘08 will *only* work with QT 7.5, according to an error I get on some of the lab machines. Others seem to be working fine with 7.4.5.. so we’ll just have to see…
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 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 German, French, Spanish, Best Bytes
LINGUASCOPE has a nice collection of online radio stations in French, Spanish, German, and Italian-o. Listening to these streams is an EXCELLENT way to help the ear decipher native speaker input. Note: if you use a mac, I suggest downloading the VLC media player to listen to these streams instead of the Windows Media Player they suggest.
Filed Under Best Bytes
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend my first conference in Second Life. I logged in, changed my avatar’s appearance, mingled with some other folks in “THE CLUB” at EduNation (even danced while flying in the air), and then listened to the Plenary session before getting busy with other stuff in the lab. A good experience, overall. Unfortunately many of the sessions were during the night time, but with an international audience of over 300, you can’t really please everyone. Good news is presentation slides will be posted here: http://www.slanguages.net/archive.php
Here’s a pic of one of the gathering places for presentations. You can see how full the room was!
Here’s a shot of me dancing. If you clicked on the DANCE sphere, it gave you the option of selecting one of ten different dance modes.
And this is what my avatar, BeverLee Clary, looks like (for now, anyway).
Filed Under World Languages, German, French, Spanish, Best Bytes
The department has just subscribed to a fantastic little service from Essex, England for language learners in the Lower School. Contact your language teacher or visit the Lab for information about the user name and password. This service can be used at home as well as school. We hope our learners will take full advantage of these services!
http://linguascope.com (Languages for All)
http://linguaprime.com (Languages for Early Learners)
http://linguastars.com (Languages for GCSE Students in the UK - Intermediate Learners)
Filed Under Best Bytes
For the 2007-2008 school year, we have approximately
463 High Schoolers
442 Middle Schoolers
230 Lower Schoolers
enrolled in Language classes (total 1135).
We have approximately
487 students studying French
803 students studying Spanish
92 students studying Latin
128 students studying German
119 students studying Chinese
across the Lower School, Middle School, and High School.
Filed Under Best Bytes
I’ve seen this tool for a few months now, but finally decided to try it myself. I selected random photos from a folder I had from earlier in the year. The output is fun to watch, but way too short! You have to pay $3 per full-length video or $30/year for a full-year pass [booo…]. They should give you 60 seconds at least!
