ESL SUPERBLOG / ebblogging

Bad news: my Florida Gators lost. Again. Good news: I found a few new maps of the intarwebs. courtesy chrisharrison.net Enjoy! [via digg]

Hello again from Denver! Here’s yet -another- list of free apps that I hope you find as interesting as I did … bFree: a freeware program built by UNC-Chapel Hill that allows you to open a Blackboard course’s archive file, to view the documents in a usable file structure, and to extract files individually or in [...]

Good morning from Denver, folks! I’m attending a NITLE-sponsored Moodle Users Group, and we kicked off the conference last night with a presentation by Jason Cole, author of the book Using Moodle. He made a couple of really interesting (read: controversial) points, including that, like Apple, we as educators should be looking to put ourselves out [...]

I know, I know - it’s Tuesday and we haven’t had a new episode of Tech-o Tuesday in what seems like forever! Well, Felix and I have been incredibly busy and / or sick, but we’re scheduling the next episodes right now. In the meantime, I finally found an evening to sit down and read [...]

Joost, a freeware application that lets you watch TV-on-demand on your computer, recently lifted its invite-only restriction. Now anyone can download and install it from their website! It’s available for Intel Macs and PCs running XP or Vista, and it has a small but interesting selection of international programming: a Chinese entertainment channel, Arabic movies, [...]

Good morning LLU readers! This weekend Felix and I are in Sherman, TX, attending a NITLE event at Austin College called ‘Technology and the Language House Curriculum’. We gave 4 hours worth of tag-team technology sessions yesterday; today I’m [mostly] off the hook but Felix has two technology sessions yet to give. Hooray for Felix! [...]

photo credit Ahoy, me hearties … if you’re tired of swabbin’ the deck and would prefer not t’be walkin’ the plank, there’s lots of ways to parrrrrrrticipate in today’s festivities: The Official Talk Like a Pirate Day website Another TLAPD blog The Wikipedia entry A Pirate’s Day gathering on Second Life (Aazy’s Place) Sing along to the theme from Disney World [...]

While Gimpshop has been growing on me as of late, rumors of Photoshop Express still have me excited. No official announcement has been made, and we don’t have many details. Early screenshots reveal a GUI that looks as intuitive as iPhoto, but a bit more useful: (photo credit) It seems geared towards the low-to-intermediate user, which is [...]

G’morning folks: The audio from Language Lab Unleashed, episode #21, is now available for your listening pleasure. We had a great conversation ranging from the roots of language learning anxiety (and how it’s different from other kinds of learning anxiety) to how to overcome it in the classroom. Right-click here to download or use the audio [...]

For those of us who were brought up typing papers on computers and whose handwriting subsequently looks like chickenscratch (hey, I can read it), handwriting recognition may never be an option. But the rest of you might be one step closer; IOGEAR has recently released a digital pen that may make handwriting recognition easier and [...]

Apparently Skype is having problems… according to their website, logging in and downloading of Skype software has been temporarily disabled and will be for the next 12 - 24 hours. No word yet on whether this will affect tonight’s scheduled broadcast … I’m hopeful they can fix this in less than twelve hours, but I’m [...]

For all you iPhone fanboys and -girls… The German company Shape Services has just announced a beta version of IM+ for Skype that supports iPhone hardware. Non-beta versions are already available for Blackberries, handhelds running PalmOS, and Windows Mobile Pocket PCs (among others). Maybe this will help nudge Skype to speed up development on future Skype-for-OSX [...]

Happy Tuesday everybody! Here’s this week’s episode: Download audio file (Techo_Tuesday_3.mp3) (or right-click here to download the file.) For this week’s episode, Felix and I reviewed several free and/or open-source audio recording tools for your use: Audacity DL Recorder GarageBand (Mac OS X only) Audio Recorder (Mac OS X only) Windows Sound Recorder (Windows only) We also mentioned a couple of free audio conversion [...]

HA! [joyoftech via gizmodo]

Some folks in Venezuela have gotten pretty creative in delivering books to remote villages in the Andes: instead of bookmobiles, use mules! It’s an environmentally friendly simple solution to a big problem, using the resources they already have. But here’s the most ingenious part of the story … Somehow there is already a limited mobile phone [...]

Hi folks! We’re back from vacation and (making our way towards) getting caught up. For Tech-o Tuesday #2, I’m joined by our co-blogger Felix for reviews of four web-based audio tools that require no special software installation: Skypecasts, Chinswing, Odeo, and Yackpack. I also mentioned in the show that we’d post a link to third-party tools [...]

What is Peter doing in these photos, anyway?

The Changing Role of the Teacher-Technologist: How connected learning, meaningful collaborations and reciprocal apprenticeships are changing the FL teaching/learning experience (Barbara Sawhill, Oberlin College) Tensions Social software / collaborative technologies are now safe to use for teaching / learning / exploring without worrying about their expiration. These tools (blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc) allow many voices to [...]

I’m -supposed- to be working on a presentation we’re giving tomorrow … instead I’m checking my RSS feeds and surfing YouTube. Shhh, don’t tell Barbara! [Oh who am I kidding, she knows how big a dork I am.] But to make up for it, and in the spirit of many of the presentations we’ve seen [...]

Teaching Language and Culture with Computer Games (Felix Kronenberg, Pomona College) Why game? to motivate, to provide immersion, they result in choices/decisions and active participation, repetition without being boring (Civilization I - Felix learned the term ‘irrigation ditch’ that he never would have otherwise), have great narrations, good examples of language use to introduce new cultural aspects, [...]