http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll salvete • 欢 迎 • bienvenue • willkommen • bienvenido Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:27:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'd like to take this opportunity to plug this year's ArtsFest, which will take place next February 26, 2009. We've got a fabulous committee of students working on the project. Watch as the project evolves over the next few months and sign up to be a workshop leader or faulty ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/10/03/artsfest-2009/ Jing is a free tool for creating quick screencasts. The free version limits you to 5 minutes. Here is a 5-minute review of the subjunctive in Spanish that I did with Jing with an open browser and a Pages document. It occurs to me that this would be a quick ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/10/02/jing-for-the-language-thing/ Ever want to listen to current events in Spanish? Try El País TV. Stretch those ears! http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/10/01/news-in-spanish/ abcteach.com has some fun worksheets for younger language learners in French and Spanish. Young students might teach their parents a thing or two if they did these together. http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/25/cool-site-for-younger-language-learners/ For each answer you get right, FreeRice.com donates 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger! Practice in French, German, Spanish, or Italian. You can do the same thing in other subject areas. There are 10 levels of difficulty. Not a bad strategy for broadening world consciousness, ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/18/feed-the-world-study-your-vocab/ At this year's TechWeek, 10 new faculty signed up for a UCLS WordPress blog. Blogging is new to most of the faculty in this department, so we'll see how often they end up using them to post homework assignments. Blogs can be a great tool for one- and two-way communication ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/17/new-faculty-blogs/ Ms. Liang recommends the following websites for learning Chinese: http://www.languageguide.org (theme words with pictures, Chinese characters, pinyin, & audio) http://www.nciku.com (Featuring real-life situations with dialogues) http://chinese.hm68.com (Highlighting culture, history, poems, myths, games, and more) http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/games (Learn how to write 60 basic Chinese characters) http://www.minmm.com/minc/classes.php (English translations included) http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/online.htm (An index for all the Chinese learning websites ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/16/chinese-websites/ There's a great post on ReadWriteWeb about Web 2.0 tools for picking classes in college, rating professors, estimating your chances of getting an A, taking notes, generating bibliographies, collaborating on group assignments, and of course, staying in touch with friends. Be sure to read the comments below the article. I'm also ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/12/college-prep-20-iknow/ Using keynote, you can sing short songs or read poems to help students associate sounds with spellings. Here's an example. http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/09/09/key-a-note/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/08/28/jason-ohlers-take-on-literacy/ 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... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/08/27/chinese-to-english-dictionary/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/08/26/a-pain-in-the-arse/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/06/12/photosoup/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/06/06/europa-tc-star/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/30/media-media-media/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/28/slanguages-2008/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/22/new-subscription-to-linguascope/ 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. http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/13/soft-but-interesting-numbers/ 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 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/09/animoto/     http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/05/01/may-day/ I find this an interesting and logical approach to learning a new language: careful deconstruction. He takes 8 phrases, runs them through an online translator, and looks to see what kind of grammatical difficulties arise. It's not a bad idea. For students and parents out there who are willing to ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/04/25/independent-language-learning/ I was working with stop motion on a white board a few months ago with Diane (our fabulous Lab liaison). I think Stop Motion could be a really fun way for small groups to demonstrate simple dialogs. As with all storytelling, it's important to have a good storyboard (which I ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/04/08/stop-motion-for-dialog/ Check out tutorials on iPhoto '08 by Apple and Atomic Learning. One of my favorite features in iPhoto '08 is the ability to compare different shots easily in full screen mode. And we can finally customize the stinkin' Ken Burns effect, so that it stops and starts where you want ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/28/new-to-iphoto/ iMovie is easy and fun. Now that iMovie '08 is installed in the Project Area, students will be working more with movies to apply their language skills. Tutorials about iMovie '08 (the newest version): iMovie '08 (Apple) iMovie '08 (Atomic Learning) Tutorials about older versions of iMovie: iMovie 2 iMovie 3 and 4 iMovie HD iMovie HD 6 ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/27/new-to-imovie/ We have Photoshop installed on two computers here in the lab. Students are welcome to use these stations for language-related projects. Photoshop is especially useful for cropping, re-sizing, rotating, and special-effecting photos. If you are new to Adobe products, I suggest watching the excellent tutorials at the Adobe Design Center. ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/26/new-to-photoshop/ Take a few minutes to click through these links and you'll have a good start. What is a Podcast? How to subscribe to a Podcast [Courtesy District 62] How to get music from iTunes to your iPod (Video) How to get music from iTunes to your iPod (Written) An Introduction to Audio Podcasting on Atomic ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/25/new-to-podcasting/ Have you ever created a bookmark in your Safari or Firefox browser? What do you do when you find a cool page? Do you regularly organize your hundreds of bookmarks into folder after folder? I don’t. Not anymore… Discover the beauty of Diigo.com [NEW AND IMPROVED Version 3 released last week], which ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/21/diigocom/ As opportunities arise, I encourage students and teachers to use images from flickr.com that are already in the Creative Commons. Creative Commons has a wonderful search page for finding media on the internet with Creative Common licenses. Use this the next time you need an image or sound file for ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/20/more-on-copyleft/ Ms. Spaltro's Latin classes reenacted the assassination of Julius Ceasar today, with Mr. Horvat and Mr. McFarlane serving as Ceasars of the day. The students will be editing all of the footage next week, but for a sneak preview of the AM enactment, watch this. http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/14/the-assassination-of-julius-caesar/ Ahh, the glory days of verb conjugation. Yesterday, Sra. Salas-Damer showed me a pan of brownies that one of her classes gifted to her as an apology for not turning their homework in the day before. Instead of writing "lo sentimos" [we're sorry], they wrote in pink frosting "Nos sentamos" ... http://blogs.ucls.uchicago.edu/wll/2008/03/13/nos-sentamos/