Day #48 - Listening - what is a podcast?

There was something about reading, singing, memorising but I've never written about listening. Now is time for this. 

One of my favourite way of learning English is listening to podcasts.

First I need to explain you what a podcast is.
It’s a kind of internet broadcast audio material which can be downloaded and listened with a computer or with any kind of mp3 player. Usually podcasts are published on the websites which contain RSS feed which can be used to subscribe podcasts. So you don’t have to come back to a website with podcasts to check if there is anything new. You just subscribe it with a podcacher (a special application like iTunes for example) and every new episode of your chosen podcast will automatically downloaded on your computer disc.

You can find a lot of podcasts for English learners - I’m going to write about some which I like the most.
So check the next post.

Day #46 – Animations with your own voice - Tellagami

Do like an idea of talking avatars? I want to show you another option for creating them. This time it’s for people with mobile devices.

Look at some examples and you’ll see what an application called Tellagami can do. The examples were created during my last trip to the UK. I visited Birmingham and its museum with a group of teachers. They task was to create animations with Tellagami avatars with native English speaker’s voices.

To use Tellagami you need to download it first.

Android users can find it here.

And iPhone, iPad users can download it here.

This time I won’t prepare any tutorials because you can find one on the Tellagami webpage:

https://tellagami.com

I really love this app. You can be very creative with it and on the other hand it’s very easy to use (I used it with preschoolers).

Creating your own Gami (this is a name of an animation created with Tellagami) can be a funny way of using English – you can record your own voice, your own English speech.

Do you have any ideas what kind of animations can we prepare to practice English? 

Do you want me to prepare one for you? Put your requests or ideas in a comment section.

Day #45 - Another "word of the week"

This time I decided to create it in a form of a puzzle.
Look at this information and try to guess what the word of the week is. Remember that I used rhyme in the sentence in the bottom of the picture.

If you want to find what the correct answer is check here:

Day #44 - How to create your own Voki

Playing with Voki (www.voki.com) can be both funny and useful. You can create talking avatars using text or audio narration.

It’s better to start with creating an account, but it’s not necessary. You can just click the Create tab to begin making your own avatar.

 

In the window which opens you can see ramdomly created avatar, but you still can change it.  

To make it look like you want click on the button no. 1

Choose a figure (option no. 2) and accept changes with button Done (no. 3) 

Now it’s time for adding a voice. You can make it in three different ways.

The first one – changing text into speech is shown in the picture below. Type the text and choose the language. You can also choose the character of the voice: male or female, with different accents – British, American, Irish etc. It’s really enjoyable to hear those different versions of the speech. It can also be very educative to listen to the proper pronunciation of the text you prepared.

Be sure that you listen to the genereted voice otherwise at the end your avatar won’t talk.

The second way of adding voice – recording you speech. Click the button with the microphone to see the window from the picture below. Begin recording by clicking Record button (no. 1), check if everything is OK – click Play button (no.2), save the recording (no. 3) and accept all by clicking Done (no. 4).

 

The last way of adding voice – downloading prepared earlier file.  Click the button with the file to see the window below. Choose the Browse button to find the file with recorded voice, and then Download button. Listen to the recording by clicking Play button. If everything is OK choose Done button.

All you have to do now is publish your work and embed it on your website or just sent or save the link to your avatar. But remember it can exist only on the web.