A place to remember how to set up tools I find useful for my teaching.

Twitter widget

Although I don´t do microblogging with Twitter that much (I forget about it, same as I forget to check Facebook, ha, ha), I decided to go ahead and get the twitter widget. Since it did not have the Motime logo, I clicked on the Wordpress logo and got the html code which I then inserted in the side bar by going to the template. Motime has not set an easier way to add elements to the sidebar. So I just guessed where it should be by adding it between the Cbox code and the  counter code. It worked !!!

Posted by: BertaLeiva at 01:16 | link | comments (2)

Did I strike gold????!!!!

A very active and creative Webhead from Brazil has recommended this site which is solid gold. One can search a favorite song and then embed its code in one´s site, wow, it has great potential, especially when teaching reading with song lyrics. One thing is to have the song video from youtube, but another is to have the song available in just audio and have the lyrics available in another link. Ideally the song could have captions, like some at dotsub like this one by Nickelback.

Thanks Ronaldo for the tip. Here is one song from Foo Fighters, the grammy winners last Sunday and a link to its lyrics , DOA (Death On Arrival) , a bit dark, but enjoy it anyway.

This tool became quite a hit in one of the posts in my present classblog. Check it out here 

Posted by: BertaLeiva at 20:24 | link | comments

Feevy

 I had been noticing a widget in many WiA blogs in the past months and did not quite understand its potential. Well I just embedded it today in my blog for the graduate course on Theory and Methods of ESL-EFL teaching and learning. I only have two students and they have set up blogs to reflect on the chapters we read every week. This way I can check when they post and get to their reflections very easily. I know Bloglines does the trick but this is quite straight forward visually. Feevy is very friendly so there is not much need for explaining steps here. Just sign up, add the blogs you want to follow and copy the html code to embed it in your site. I guess you will need to sign up with a different mail account every time you want to embed a Feevy in a completely different blog community.

Posted by: BertaLeiva at 00:32 | link | comments (1)
web 20 tools

My first Slideshow with Windows Movie Maker

Here it is, finally. Made as an assignment for the EVO_08 video session.  A bit time consuming but it was worth it as I had a lot of fun playing around with different options. Windows Movie Maker offers a rather easy way to make our "videos"  with our own pictures and upload them to Youtube, Teachertube, Google videos, etc. It is very friendly but there are a couple of details one has to watch out for. Here is a site I will check later on that deals with FAQ. I got all mixed up trying to get background music and my voice simultaneously. I tried placing two audio channels previously recorded with Audacity, but could not. So I finally left the music on in the background as I read the script recording it with the wmv mike tool, and towards the end, I just raised the volume of the music manually. Sergio Mazzarelli, our moderator, suggested to save the video, bring it back in WMM and then add the music in the audio channel. Great idea!!! I didn´t know how to create the Ken Burns effect but got it by playing with the features "simplify in, simplify out".

I felt overly conscious as I was recording my voice and still find tons of mistakes I made as a nonnative speaker, but what the heck, I could not go on and on re-recording endlessly. So bear with me and give me as many suggestions as you want. I will take them into account in my next video "production" ;-)

Posted by: BertaLeiva at 17:20 | link | comments (5)
video