Do you have the Audacity to go Podomatic or Jing on TeacherTube?

Okay, I am a world languages teacher, but parts of this chapter made me feel like I was learning a new language. I have heard of podcasts, but had no idea there were multiple sites including podomatic and audacity which allowed you to make your own with just a few clicks. I have several ideas for audio files. I thought I might start with two French conversations, one formal and one informal. The students can listen to the conversations and then write down informal or formal along with words or phrases that support their position . I also thought of recording every other line of a conversation and having the students write down a logical phrase to make a complete conversation. I don't have a good mic though so I am waiting to actually create these later. I did find several podcasts for learning French and Spanish on iTunes. I also found sites that contained a podcast followed by questions like Madrid Young Learners that are great examples of how to use this technology in classes. Librarians or reading teachers could publish book reviews of new novels or interviews with a person pretending to be a character in the bool.

Jing is a terrific tool for staff development. Every year we have training about loggin in to the system, saving to the servers, setting up the on-line grade book. Any of these could be done as a screencast and saved to a group folder so teachers could access them any time they need a refresher. (Maybe we could even eliminate a meeting and just let teachers do it on their own.) Who hasn't had an in-service and by the time they get around to actually doing it on their own they can't remember exactly what to do? Jing will solve that problem.

Finally, TeacherTube, the educational version of YouTube, allows video uploads for class use or professional development. This is the tool I chose to use. Two guys from Madrid, Spain were visiting Madrid, Iowa to shoot a television spot. I was asked to help while they were here and I had my flip video camera in my purse. I asked them to introduce themselves. tell where they are from, and what they like to do. My hope is to post this to a blog or wiki like this one and ask for other native Spanish speakers to send me their introductions. I would love to have examples from all the Spanish countries so the students could hear a variety of people with different accents. If you're interested in helping out. Here are the examples below. Once I have a collection, I would add questions such as; Who is from South America? What country are they from? Who is from Spain? What does the person from Spain like to do? etc. I have also found several fun example projects. One of my favorites is the Celeb Roll Call that includes common classroom expressions, the imperfect tense, and negation in the same lesson. These videos were easy to make and upload. I know we have flip cameras available so next year skits will become videocasts for sure!