An Israeli student earned the title of the 'world's best speaker' while competing in her second language of English.
Jan. 09 - A University of Haifa philosophy student, Anat Gelber, has earned the crown of the "world's best speaker" in her case, in English as a Second Language (ESL). She gained the title at the world rhetorical championships held in Dublin last week Gelber, 25, had previously twice gained the designation of "best ESL speaker in Europe," in 2003 and 2005. A graduate student, she had honed her oratorical skills as a member of the University of Haifa Rhetorical Society for the past five years. This debating club, set up only eight years ago, is considered one of the most successful in Israel. On the way to the title, Gelber was forced to deliver fiery speeches in English - not her native language - on such topics as the situation in Pakistan, atomic energy, the right to fertility treatments, animal rights, and illegal immigration. "In order to succeed in a competition like this," she explained, "you need not only speaking ability but also extensive knowledge and a mastery of everything that is happening in the world today."
Will Richardson has an article, Tech Tools for Learning, published in Access Learning, which you can download from his recent posting here. His opening paragraph reads:
Over the last few years, our relationship with the Web has been changing dramatically. Simple new technologies like weblogs and podcasts are allowing us to not only create content like text, audio, and video more easily, they are also allowing us to publish and share that content on the Web with very little effort. Instead of a “read only” Web, we’re entering the age of the Read/Write Web, where contributing knowledge is as easy as consuming it. Being able to publish worldwide this easily does raise legal and ethical issues for educators to be aware of, but it also facilitates a whole range of new learning potentials for students and teachers in the classroom. Here is a quick look at some of the technologies that are changing the way educators think about and deliver instruction.
He has quite a bit of information on technology tools for education (RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasting, and streaming video with links) packed into 4 pages. Recommended.
Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.
Performancing can allow you to post into Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and Live Journal, and guidelines for using Performancing are available from Jed Brown. Of course, one can simply go about posting the normal way.
Peformancing will eventually incorporate RSS feeds and Technorati tags, too. The advantage, I suppose, is the convenience of integrating all of one's web tools into one application, the browser. But I must add that keeping up with the greatest and latest in web technology takes a considerable amount of time. Right now, I'm trying to decide on which personalized web page to go with: Yahoo, Google, or Netvibes. Then, if something else comes along, will I take the time to investigate that one, too? Will Flock, the first browser incorporating a blogging editor, come back with something even better?
On a sidenote, Firefox has many extensions available, such as Flashgot and del.icio.us. One of my favorites is NoScript, which provides an extra layer of security:
Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site).
A few posts below, I mentioned Netvibes, a personalized web page service that allows for RSS feeds. Actually, Google and Yahoo have the same service, although Hinchcliffe said Netvibes was much better than those and other existing ones. One advantage of Netvibes is its integration with Writely.com, an online collaborative word processor. Students working together on the same paper could do so at writely.com, and whenever someone updated it, they would receive notification at their netvibes site. Netvibes already have modules ready to receive feeds from Gmail, Flickr, the weather, a variety of blogs, bookmarks, and those of one's own making. And there's a module for notes. All in all, it's an easy-to-use web resource that can promote students reading, analyzing, and synthesizing (and thus writing) skills.
One is Netvibes, a free, customizable web 2.0 homepage service that allows for data feeds. I've been thinking about how to introduce students to RSS feeds to promote more reading, analysis, and synthesis. It can also integrate with writely.com, an online word processing site.
Another free one is Rallypoint, which promotes online collaboration via the creation and editing of web pages. Those subscribed to the pages can receive email notifications when a page is edited.
Ross Mayfield (Many2Many) commented on some social software applications a few weeks ago.
MediaTuner: a rich media RSS aggregator/player that handles text, podcasts, videocasts, etc. (free) Blog.mac: a weblog editor designed for the Mac ($29.99) Free vlog tutorial mefeedia: an aggregator for videos
Will Richardson, in his "RSS Magic" post, comments on RSS feeds being the "glue" that hold blog conversations together. He sums up the potential for class interactions (within and without) well:
And maybe that's the new strategy, get teachers and students rss-ing first. Give them a framework for understanding how disparate looking pieces of content really aren't as disconnected as they seem, and that there are new ways to find and collect and archive ideas from any number of previously unknown places.
A new software tool Digg combines elements of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. From their site (via Ulises Umejias):
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
This seems to combine all the software tools into one. But what's different is that the users decide which articles are the best.
A new software, Talkr, transforms blog text into podcasts. Talkr states:
"Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast."
"I took the couple minutes register, and the next thing I know...I was listening to posts from kairosnews.org being read to me in a quite pleasant voice. I was actually pretty impressed by the intonation skills the synthesizer had."
Duncan Riley of The Blog Herald writes about content theft. (This seems to go far beyond plagiarism. Perhaps bloggers need character education?) It seems that quite a few, Duncan says perhaps millions, blogs are using RSS feeds to steal content for posting on their own blogs, at times for profit. In fact, some sites even advertise that ability. Duncan posts this ad from an anonymous site:
Never hire another writer again and always have fresh up to the minute news and articles from your industry on your web pages. Add one line of code to your website and your pages will update themselves forever.
I don't think I'll need to worry about content theft, at least for the near future, but I like one solution posted by Paul Short in a comment to Duncan's entry. He says to add a copyright comment to the content itself:
(C) 2005 Blogherald.com If you’re not reading this in your news aggregator, this material has been stolen. Please contact editor at blogherald.com so we can take immediate legal action.
I imagine that once the thief notices it, they'll just delete it, as Rob Lewis in another comment to the entry said.
In a pilot project, elementary school teachers are using PDAs loaded with diagnostic software to assess students on reading proficiency for immediate feedback and adjustment of lessons. I wonder how that could be adapted for first year composition.
On RSS feeds, Elise Bauer has a good introduction to them and lists some software that can do it easily. Although I can do a single RSS feed with Tinderbox, I haven't learned how to aggregate them all into one document yet. That will be an going project. For now, I will use iBlog to do it. iBlog, although blog software, is also an RSS reader, and a good one at that.
You may have noticed in the previous posting on Blogging controversy that the font in the quotes are different from my writing. I haven't quite figured out how to get them the same. I'm using HTML codes blockquote and font. The blockquote worked, but it made the font too large, so I inserted font, trying to control the size and style, but for some reason, I can't get it to be just what I want.
Today, I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to make an RSS feed in Tinderbox, the same program used for making this blog. For those unfamiliar with this term, it's a way of having the news from your favorite websites sent to you automatically instead of you going to them. It's supposed to be a time saver--not including the time in setting it up, that is. Anyway, I went into the manual and followed each step carefully: create a note, put the news web address in the document preferences, set the attributes to fetch, and then just open up the note. Well, I followed those steps and it didn't work. I double-checked, quit the program, double-checked again, and it still didn't work. Finally, I gave in and emailed Mark Bernstein, the creator of the program. I dislike querying him until I've done my best to figure something out. I imagine he's busy enough as it is. Even so, he emailed me back in 2 hours. (I need to add that a quick response from Mark is the norm.) I had placed the web address in the wrong place. It should have been in Attributes. Tried it, and it worked. One word from the expert is worth a 1000 attempts by the novice! Thanks, Mark!
Technology is both bane and boon. It's great for communicating widely and quickly, but the learning curve is steep and takes time. I spent 6 hours learning to use iBlog, a fairly simple program, and now I'm spending even more learning to use Tinderbox, even with the aid of templates. I have to admit, however, that much of the steepness is due to not reading slowly and carefully. Regardless, isn't learning a major part of the reason I'm a professor: I like to learn--at least if time is available after preparing for classes, looking at students' work and giving them feedback, and attending committee meetings.
ESL Writing & Technology
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Share headlines from your file with other sitesSun, 14 Oct 2001 19:22:49 -0500http://backend.userland.com/rss092en-usOnline math tutoring in Spanish
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Flickr for low-level EFL students
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15-year-old bilingual author
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This weblog is primarily to help focus my students on concepts, assignments, and technology that we are covering or eventually will do. It will cover what we have done and where we are headed. And it will chronicle my own learning processes with technology and writing. If you'd like to comment, please do. If you'd like to read more theoretical discussions, go to my blog Explorations in learning (see below).
