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The joy of recording!

This simple device is becoming a "staple" in my lessons. I plug it to my computer, open Audacity (a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds) and I start recording my students. they usually have a conversation with a partner or they do a little presentation about themselves. They love it because for some reason they love listening to their own voice. So the magic happens: once they have recorded themselves, they listen to their performance and most of the time they want to do it again
because they have spotted a pronunciation mistake or a grammatical error! I mean, how often do you hear students wanting to repeat themselves when they speak in another language??? The recording exercise allows this magical phenomenon to happen! And even better, students love it when they know their recordings will be embedded on the school blog and therefore available for the world to listen to.

This week I have decided to try to use it as often as I can in an attempt to make my students visit the blog and leave comments. I have noticed they do visit the blog but they have not yet stepped into the commenting phase. Do you have any suggestions to make students comment on a blog?

If you haven't tried this yet, please do. You can find microphones at a very affordable price and they are so easy to use with Audacity. You can then save your recordings as .wav or.mp3 files and easily embed them onto your blog or website. You will see your students being motivated to SPEAK ;)

What about you? what do you do to make your students speak in another language?

WAV decoding support in media.io

media.io now lets you convert MP3 to WAV online, as well as

• Ogg Vorbis to WAV
• AAC to WAV

I admit that WAV isn’t the most popular target format but some people have been looking to “decode MP3 to WAV” – search engines simple don’t understand that, if I say “convert WAV to MP3,” I don’t automatically support converting MP3 to WAV. :-)

I know there are some strange bugs that some people (including myself) run into occasionally. If you experience a problem with media.io, simply file a bug, describing what you did and what you expected to happen.

Another tool for PodCasting

I was reading an article the other day and it mentioned this tool called "Yakitome" which is a Beta version and it triggerd my curiosity. What the tool does is that it converts your text into a PodCast which you can embed in your websites. You have the option to create your PodCast in English (US) or (UK), Spanish, French, or German language and female or male voice. You also have the option to select the file output from wav or MP3. The idea of the tool is very clever but I just have one issue with it, the voices sound too creepy. I think they should give you the option to add your own voice like Voki does. The robot sounding voice just doesn't cut it.

The Yakimote website also performs very slow but again this is a Beta version. Hopefully when they launch the full version they will make some modifications because this could be a great tool for educators. Just imagine being able to paste your lecture, notes, or syllabus into this website and having an instant PodCast available for your students, that would be really cool.

A similar PodCast version of this post was created with Yakitome, click Another tool for PodCasting to listen to it.