Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

You have work past the crackle, static, and white noise of the recordings, but RadioLovers is a website that has archived old radio shows from the pre-television days. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, and Laurel and Hardy are just a few among the classic voices kept alive at this site, which features free downloads of the files in MP3 format. RadioLovers features comedies, mysteries, science fiction, and even music programs.

If you are doing a unit around media literacy, this site might even be helpful in showing how entertainment has often been commercialized. Listen to the openings of some of these programs and you realize that the first few minutes are often used to showcase the show’s sponsors. You could easily draw some parallels to the use of product placement in various movies and television shows these days.

For students interested in podcasting, these old radio shows are valuable for learning about pacing of story, voice inflection, and the use of sound effects (which is not often a topic covered in a traditional writing class, is it?)

On the issue of copyrights, the site discloses that it believes the radio shows are now in the public domain and no longer protected. Whether that would hold up in a court of law remains to be seen (or not). Even so, these files give a glimpse of entertainment from times when writing, sound effects, and voice were the prevailing means for delivering a stories to a large audience.

RadioLovers

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Should animals have the same rights as people? Should the English-speaking world adopt American English? There are some topics on which everyone has an opinion. Offering a controversial debate question is a great way to energize your students and open their minds to multiple points of view.

Whether you want to have an impromptu class discussion or explore an issue in more depth, a pair of online resources can serve as starting points. Opposing Views is a veritable marketplace for all things debatable and The Economist is a news magazine with a debate section on its site. Both provide conflicting opinions from verified experts in a point-counterpoint format.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you have a microphone, even a cheap one, and access to the Internet, then you can create a simple podcast. Vocaroo is one such site designed for simplicity. You plug in a microphone, click the green button, and record your voice. Within seconds, you’re listening back. If you stumble over your words it’s easy enough to try a second or third take. Just click the “Record Again” button and the old file is gone, replaced by the newer one.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google is renowned as one of the most remarkable companies in the world. Their search engine, maps, docs, the Android phone platform, are revolutionizing the way information is found, communicated and used. As such, when Google wants to bring in a speaker to rally the troops, they can get top-notch presenters like Steve Wozniak, Tom Brokaw, Neil Gaiman, David Allen, John Battelle, Merlin Mann, and Ken Jennings. Seeing as how they’ve bought up the whole internet including YouTube, they’ve archived videos of these presentations and made them available to the public at Videos from the Googleplex.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features the art of persuasion, common literary references, and $125,000-a-year teachers. More after the jump.

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Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.

26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.

Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.

Everyone’s got opinions. If you’ve ever visited an online message board, though, you know not everyone knows how to express or defend those opinions in a compelling, or sometimes, even logical manner. Learning debating skills will serve students well no matter what they choose to do with their lives. Show them how it’s done — send them to Debatepedia.

Endorsed by the National Forensic League, Debatepedia compiles several hot issues such as abortion, whether schools have the right to search student lockers, and climate change. Participants from both sides of the issue post their argument, leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind. Not only is this a good chance for students to get debate experience, but to also bone up on current events and important issues.

The best way to learn something is by jumping in and doing it.  Encourage your students to get involved in Debatepedia. Post an argument, or even volunteer for an editorial internship — putting “editor” on a resume will look pretty good in the college application process.

Argumentative skills will help students not only on the debate team, but also in writing position papers, as well as in becoming informed members of society. If reading Debatepedia can prevent at least one student from using the “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” argument, you’ve won. -BILL FERRIS

Debatepedia

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Inspire Your Class with the Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century

You may already know about Jott, a fantastic cell phone service that will convert your voice to text. You may have wondered, “how is this useful for me besides giving me another way to make a shopping or to-do list?”

I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool. Please leave a comment below to share them.

Jott for documentation

If you are a administrator, resource specialist, or some other provider of services that demand you document your interactions and interventions with students, Jott can save you a lot of time. Here is an example: at my school, we have been implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) the new federal special education (IDEA) model. This involves a lot of documentation of interventions. I introduced my administrators to Jott. Now, after an intervention with a student, they step out to the hall, call Jott, leave a message, and voila – their message is converted to text, and sent to their email, leaving a paper record. I’ve heard of social workers, and others using it in a similar manner. It’s really great for field notes.

Jott for differentiation

One trick I recently learned is that the speech to text goes both ways on Jott. You can have RSS feeds from news sources, or your class blog to Jott, and it will turn it into an audio feed that students can phone in to Jott and hear. This is great for students who have an audio delivery accommodation on their IEP. Instructions for how to do this can be found by scrolling down to Step 6 Mobilecast. -ALICE MERCER

[UPDATE 1/14/09: Jott will drop all their free services as of February 2, 2009.]

Slideshare on using Jott for RTI documentation

Cellphones in Learning blog

Cell phones in learning wiki

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Do your students need help pronouncing a tricky or unfamiliar word while doing research? Or are you an ESL teacher helping kids with their English pronunciation. If you use Firefox (and you definitely should), you should add the Pronounce extension. Just highlight the word that’s giving your kids trouble, right click and choose “Pronounce” from the menu. Firefox will then speak the word out loud with correct English pronunciation.

We’ve covered pronunciation tools before, such as howjsay. The Pronounce extension has a slight edge for two reasons: since it’s integrated into your browser, you don’t have to go to another website to look up the word, thereby saving you time. And second, the pronunciations come from Merriam-Webster OnLine, so you get the the definitive American pronunciation, as opposed to howjsay’s British pronunciation of words like “aluminum” or “blueberry.” -BILL FERRIS

Pronounce
Pronounce Tells You How to Say It via Lifehacker

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Potato, Potahto? Before you call the whole thing off, consult Chuala

ReadTheWords.com is a great text-to-speech site that allows users to upload or copy and paste just about any text and have it read aloud by one of several computery voices. You have to create a free account in order to access all the features this site has to offer, but its actually quite a simple process for what you get. You can upload any sort of file you’d like to have read, even HTML or PDFs. Simply wait for the audio to render, and you’ve got a neat little embeddable player that you can preview right then and there. Also, you can download the file as an mp3 for use in your iPod or other portable device.

This is a great resource for the visually impaired, but it has the potential to be a great learning tool as well. I’m not saying you should, but you could possibly make your own audio books, if you were so inclined. It could also be a great way to break into podcasting or be a great addition to any blog. Once your recordings are saved, they are then stored in an online file management system, appropriately titled “My Recordings.” Here, you can manage and download what you’ve done, or try out some more of the 15 available voices. Personally, I like Elizabeth. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

ReadTheWords.com 

With all the shorthand OMG LOL business happening in children’s lives, sites like Merriam-Webster’s Word Central help to rectify the damage that has been done. Here, youngsters can get a leg up on building their own vocabulary while having fun. There are a couple of games, including Robo-Bee, which tests users’ language skills and word choice, and BIGbot where you feed the right vocabulary words to a hungry robot based on the definitions given. You’ll also find a Daily Buzzword with complete archive and an RSS feed to keep your students in the know. And as you might expect from Merriam-Webster, there is a searchable dictionary, thesaurus and rhyming dictionary.

One of the niftiest aspects of the site, though, is the Build Your Own Dictionary. In a pseudo-wiki format, this feature allows users to submit their own words and definitions. Some are hilarious:

juggleglug
Function: verb
Definition: to juggle and drink something at the same time. Example Sentence: That clown sure knows how to juggleglug.

and others are more hilarious, and even rather useful:

smorange
Function: adjective
Definition: extraordinary or special and different from other people but wanting to fit in at times. Word History: decided to make up a word that rhymes with orange

Example Sentence: She is very smorange.

There are some great resources for teachers here, too, including information that answers the question: How do words get in the dictionary? Check out the site to find out. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Word Central

Are you still wasting your time reading Instructify?

The preceding question is an example of a logical fallacy called a loaded question. That is, no matter how you answer, it implies you either were or still are wasting your time here. That’s also not counting the question’s most obvious fallacy since, as we all know, reading Instructify is never a waste of time.

If you’re a speech or debate coach, or are assigning a position paper, send your students to FallacyFiles.org. It presents a veritable rogue’s gallery of logical missteps, red herrings and Argumentum ad Hominem attacks. FallacyFiles will help students identify common logical fallacies so they can avoid using them, and easily refute them when their debate opponent tries to slip one in. Only an idiot wouldn’t send their students to FallacyFiles.org. –BILL FERRIS

FallacyFiles.org

My senior year of high school, my family hosted a Thai foreign exchange student. Some mornings I spent the entire ride to school modeling pronunciations for her. She was endlessly fascinated with the sequence of sounds in “oil” (and endlessly frustrated trying to produce them herself) and would have me toil through “boil, broil, coil” ‘til my tongue felt despoiled by the moil of it. I was not always the most patient instructor.

If only I could have offered my eager student the services of Chuala.com, where you can hear looped recordings of standard pronunciations: voila (which looks like it rhymes with “oil” but thankfully doesn’t), tireless tutor. My favorite part of the site is that you’re able to record yourself saying a word and listen to it in comparison to the site’s pronunciation in turn. Students who come across difficult new words in their readings could look them up here, or you could check on the pronunciations of words that have always given you trouble (I practiced with “accompanist”… I never say that right!).

The site offers pronunciations in 9 other languages, so it could potentially be of service in foreign language classrooms. My own searches in Spanish were disappointing, not even the days of the week were offered, but Chuala is a “language community,” so if you find words that are missing you can register to add them yourself.

One word of warning: the woman who speaks the samples is no computerized voice, she’s a total sweet-talker… monitor your time on the site, if you notice yourself looking up words like “cat” you may have fallen victim to her siren song. –MARIELLE PRINCE

Chuala.com

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Whether you’re passing the time on a long commute or powering through a boring novel you have to write a paper on, nothing beats the audiobook. Except of course…wait for it…if it’s a free audiobook. And you can get dozens of those at LibriVox.

LibriVox is an open source project where volunteers record themselves reading books within the public domain. These are then made available for free to anybody with an Internet connection. The LibriVox catalog includes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works. You can find anything from Shakespeare to Shelley to the Sermon on the Mount, so long as it’s not copyrighted anymore. And the nice thing about literature is so much of the good stuff was written a long time ago.

You too can join these novice narrators with just a microphone, some free audio recording software like Audacity, and lots of free time (you can also take the wussy way out by only signing up to read a chapter or two). In addition to letting students catch up on their reading on their iPods, having each student tackle a chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo might be a fun class project.

You’d think LibriVox would have a hard time scrounging up volunteers to record entire books, often an investment of dozens of hours. But if Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it’s to never underestimate people’s desire to hear themselves talk. –BILL FERRIS

LibriVox

Spice up your boring well-used history lectures with the most stirring speeches of the last hundred-odd years. American Rhetoric has assembled a list of the Top 100 Speeches of the 20^th Century. Each speech includes the full text, and better yet, most have an accompanying .mp3 file.

Lend a sense of immediacy to your American history class by listening to FDR’s Pearl Harbor address. If you’re a speech teacher, having students recite King’s “I Have a Dream” or Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance would be a nice change of pace if you’re sick of hearing them give oral interpretations of Fall Out Boy lyrics.

The list’s one drawback: since the list was compiled by American Rhetoric, we’ll have to look elsewhere for non-American gems by folks like Ghandi and Winston Churchill. Not to mention one of the most incisive commentaries on rhetoric itself, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” by the Police. -BILL FERRIS

Top 100 Speeches of the 20^th Century