Session 6: Using Audacity to teach speaking

Today we learnt some way to arrange reading-aloud activities for students on the Internet. I am going to introduce two of the tools here and show you how wonderful they are to practise speaking with students. This has been my concern and I always think that it is difficult to teach oral English. The reason is that it is hard for me to give individual attention to every student and provide them with instant feedback during the lesson due to the limited time.

1. Fluency Tutor

Fluency Tutor is an excellent tool for teaching and learning! That's actually what I have been looking for! Really blessed to get to know this reading-aloud tool for teaching listening and speaking! 

With reading materials of different levels in Fluency Tutor, you can choose those that suit your students. Students can listen to the text in various speed. It is very useful for the students with weak English foundation to start practising in a slow speed, and then try the normal one. Moreover, you can find a dictionary function there which provides you with English meanings. Apart from that, the function that i find absolutely amazing is that teachers can freely create or edit their materials according to the students' ability. 

2. Audacity

It is amazing to use Audacity to make audio files. Actually, this is my first time to produce my own sound track with Audacity. Hard to imagine that this is much easier than I thought.

Enjoy my audio! Here is the script from Ecclesiastes 3 (NIV)

Ecclesiastes 3

A Time for Everything

3 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

²     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gogfyaxa5sgqqcb/A%20time%20for%20everything2.wav?dl=0

As you can see in the picture below, it is not difficult to create and edit your sound track with background music and sound effect. Learning is fun with multimedia elements, especially when reading out by your English teacher! With interesting sound effect, it does a great help in creating a full-filled lesson! Besides, we can also give out the sound file to our students through Dropbox or online learning platform so that they can also listen and imitate the recordings anytime and anywhere they want! More importantly, for teachers, we don't need to repeat the same material a hundred times before every student is able to read it out! haha!! Killing two birds with one stone!!

Session 5: Great tools for practising listening

Today we have learnt some fantastic free online tools for learning English listening. Actually, it is useful not only for our students but also for myself! It is great to know that there are lots of resources such as Podcast, Flocabulary, TED Ed and EDpuzzle available for us.  I always want to find more listening resources which are fun and suitable to their levels. I sometimes use TED Talk videos with English and Chinese subtitles during lessons but it is a bit difficult to design follow-up questions. However, with Edpuzzle that Paul introduced to us tonight, I can create some learning questions while playing the video. That's so cool!

Session 4: Ideas for teaching vocab and using mind maps

Vocab building has always been a teaching issue for me as students often encounter difficulties on how to expand their vocab and memorize them. Students often tell me that it is hard to learn the pronunciation and the spelling. However, this problem could be solved since Paul introduced some new ways to teach us to learn vocab.

Padlock is amazing to collect ideas from students! Their ideas will be shown on the screen immediately after they input the words using tablets or mobile phones. Also, it is great for revision as well since the words collected can be classified into different categories by dragging and dropping the boxes easily.

Quizlet is another wonderful tool you can use to make learning vocab fun since it has many built-in functions such as flip card, matching and test. Isn't it fantastic? You just need to input the vocab and the definition. Quizlet will automatically create everything for you!! There are lots of vocab games using those words you just input for students to play! Most incredibly, it contains pronunciation function as well! I will definitely introduce Quizlet to my students.

Want to make a mind map easily? Use Bubbl.us
You can make use of bubbl.us to make a mind map which can be expandable or collapsible! Here is the link.
https://bubbl.us/?s=7279117#MzY2MjM3Ni83Mjc5MTE3L2NiNTM3NWMzN2E1NGIwZTY1YmRjN2RmYzE3NDZiYjE5?X

Since it is so easy and useful, I can't help creating two more mind maps for my student. As you can see in the following photos, it can be expandable or collapsible!

This is the next one.