Blogging English 2

Monday, November 27, 2006

e-tivity 6: feedback

I don’t know about you all, but I really enjoyed hearing your voices online. It was a nice change to listen to your ideas and impressions rather than read them. You seem to have all discovered that the “podcastsphere”, as Alice alls it, is just as vast as the blogosphere and that it takes time and a critical eye to sort through all the podcasts online to find some worth listening to. It’s interesting that many of you chose the same podcasts – must mean they’re goog. Furthermore, you, but I as well, found new resources by reading about the different podcasts everyone found. (Just so you know, the CLA spent months building up a repository of good resources for language learning while all they needed to do was to get you guys to do it for them!)
Some of you mentioned that people seem to speak slowly on podcasts and that some were relatively easy, but if we collect all of your selections in del.icio.us I’m sure there’s something useful for everyone.

Annalisa found a site where there are videos from www.youtube.com. This site is similar to Flickr in that it is a repository where people place their video clips and tag them, but rather than images it is all about video. Just as is the case in Flickr, you can copy videos from YouTube into your personal blogs. It’s not an assignment, but I suggest you do a little searching for tags in YouTube and see if you find anything that interests you. There’s a lot out there and you could even add something to your blogs! By the way, anyone know why it’s called YouTube?

Finally, Barbara says she hates recording her voice, as do I. I know it’s difficult and I know what it feels like to listen to one’s own recorded voice but having audio on a blog really does add a human element.

If you’ve got time when you’re not doing e-tivity 7, since we couldn’t meet this week, I’d love to hear your impressions on recording your voices and listening to your colleagues’ voices online. What do you think about adding audio files to blogs? Please send comments if you get the time.

Job well done, everyone!

Sarah

P.S. Svjetlana, if you are having technical problems with uploading an odeo file, let me know and I’ll see if I can help!

2 Comments:

At 11/29/2006 6:05 PM, Blogger Giorgia said...

Dear Sarah,
I've to tell you that I was worried about the previous activity! I hate recording my voice and then..listening to it I realized how bad is my English pronunciation! For this reason I think it's very useful (although I prefer writing!) even though sometimes it's a problem, I think, just for technical reasons (in the labs in Maldura there is always lesson and I have not the microphone at home...I think that if I had it at home, perhaps I would often try to record my voice, as I'm alone and no one else can listen to me!).
Instead, listening to my peers I realized that they are very good!!..Their pronunciations, their intonations are good! Someone was clearer than others, someone was less sure than others but on the whole I think there aren't big problems.
I only hope I'm not the only desperate case!
Have a nice week,
Bye
Giorgia

 
At 11/30/2006 6:39 PM, Blogger Sarah said...

Dear Giorgia,
Don't worry, you're not alone. Everyone hates recording their voice, especially in a foreign language! My Italian is great but when I hear my recorded voice in Italian I realize how utterly American I sound. But that's ok, it's part of who we are as second language speakers. You all did a great job! If you want to try recording from home :-) I could give you my mic for a few days.

Let me know,
Sarah

 

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