Apr
28
Forvo has the potential to be a really cool and extremely useful site. The objective of this site is to be able to give you the correct pronounciation of all the world’s words. If they can achieve even half of this, Forvo would become a tremendous resource for people learning a second language, or for picking up obscure words in your own language. After all, who really knows how to pronouce all those weird words in your average Shakespeare play?
Unfortunately, at the time of writing this Forvo had less than 14,000 words in 181 languages in its database. This means the chance of finding the word you want is fairly slim. However, don’t despair. There is a provision to ask for new words to be pronounced, and there even seems to be a way to join and offer pronounciations yourself. It’s kind of a Wikipedia for pronounciations, I suppose.
If it lasts, Forvo will become one of the coolest language resources on the Internet.
Apr
25
Quizlet
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I’m fast becoming a fan of a little site called Quizlet. Quizlet lets you create virtual flashcards which I initially thought was a complete waste of time.
However, I have more than one student that loses his or her review sheets. This means they get home and tell mom or dad they have nothing to study from. A virtual set of flash cards certainly helps out with this. All I have to do is tell the parents where they can find my virtual flash cards and the problem is over.
I’m discovering there’s a few games that can be played with the flash cards sets I created, but they’re problematic. Flash cards obviously have very specific definitions, and computers don’t understand if you’re close but have slightly different wording.
Even so, I like this tool and expect I’ll keep using it. It gives even my most disorganized student immediate feedback as to whether they know some of the material or not.
Apr
24
Game Day Thursday: Planet Green Game
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I’ve noticed lately that an increasingly large number of my delicious links that I’ve bookmarked but not explored are games. I thought I’d try to check these out every Thursday. I think games are a cool way to learn so this way I learn about the games and maybe I can use a few in class.
Today’s game is the Planet Green Game. It’s a nifty little online Flash game, brought to you by Starbucks. The game is all about Global Warming and what you can do to reduce your “carbon footprint.” If you’re a global warming skeptic like I am, they’ve got a slick commercial message at the beginning to help you understand why you couldn’t possibly be right.
Putting that aside, the game is reasonably slick. You go through town on foot, by bike, or using some form of motorized transport and visit different locations to improve their energy efficiency and reduce the production of pollutants. There’s some games to play to achieve this such as answering simple questions or playing a matching game.
After having your students run through the game you have a good spot to start a conversation with your students. Is this worth doing? Are the solutions suggested reasonable? (For example, would alternative energy like wind or solar power be practical in Northern Canada?) Do the added costs outweight the benefits?/Is this good stewardship? Even the sponsor of the game could be an interesting discussion topic. Is it intellectually and morally honest to encourage other people to be “green” while most of your business is based on selling coffee in disposable cups?
The game is a nice look at what we can do to change things around the globe, and a good jumping off point to discuss which of these possibilities we actually should do.
Apr
23
More of our class videos
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This is the latest stop motion video project to be handed in. You can see the later video projects have been learning from the mistakes of the earlier ones. Here there’s actually a story being told, and there’s relatively smooth motion with a fair bit of action. The video, unfortunately, seems to be out of focus. I’m not sure if that’s due to the quality of our webcams used for this project (they’re really low end), or whether that’s because someone couldn’t figure out how to focus the camera.
It’s fun, and we’re all learning. That’s what school’s about, isn’t it?
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