VNU Spring 2009 - Day 4

Congratulations on overcoming many challenges so far.  I can see that students made a lot of progress catching up on assignments yesterday.  If  New York City is the 'city that never sleeps', EFL537 is the 'class that never sleeps" :)  It seems like there's always someone awake working on their assignments.

Today I'm  going to try to slow down a bit, but still provide enough additional material for those who are ready for something new.

Today's agenda
  • Another attempt at skype group chat
  • Review of  'How do I...' questions and other comments
  • Delicious Tagging
  • Online Presentation Browsing

We will try again to use Skype for text chat  during class.  Please make sure skype is active on your computer and watch this screencast if you haven't already: http://blip.tv/file/1856013
Just in case that doesn't work, I our 'regular' meebo chat is at the bottom of this page.
Review of  'How do I...' questions and other comments
   These are a few questions that were asked recently - just wanted to share the answers with everyone.
  • When asking a 'How Do I...' question, it's very helpful to attach a screenshot like Van did here and/or give detailed explanations like Hoadang did here
  • When recording audio, make sure to do so at 32kbs  (see audio training page, especially this image)
  • Please do not attach .doc files to your blog post. Copy the text directly into the blog post (screencast here)
  • In case you have trouble downloading Audacity or the lame file, you can download audacity here and lame file here
  • I update the student work page as often as possible, but don't expect to see your work listed there right away (comment here)

Delicious Tagging
For Social Bookmarking sites to be useful, it's important to tag each bookmark.  

When first tagging a bookmark (red arrow), you can add tags like listening, reading, vocabulary, etc (yellow rectangle).   If the bookmark is for this class, please include the tag 'efl537'.  If you it a bookmark that you don't want others to see you can check 'do not share' (orange arrow).



If you wan to edit bookmarks you've already saved, log in to your delicious page, and click 'edit' below your link.  You can then add or change tags.   You should then see tags below your bookmarks (orange rectangle), and be able to look at a particular category of your links by clicking the tags listed on the right side (yellow box).



The 'social' part of social bookmarking is being able to see sites that others have bookmarked and tagged. This is a useful way to find sites of interest.  The numbers with the blue background (724 and 249 in the above image)  tell you how many other users have bookmarked that site.
You can look for book marks by using URL's like:
Take a few minutes to look through the links above or find links related to your topic of interest using this kind of URL structure - http://delicous.com/tag/tag1+tag2
Add site you like to our own delicious bookmarks.
Online Presentation Browsing
Many of you are familiar with creating Powerpoint presentations.  There  are several websites that allow people to share presentations online and (sometimes) download the files for offline use.
I'd like you to spend some time looking for presentations that might be interesting or useful for your teaching. Bookmark any such presentations using Delicious.
Here are a few examples
* These presentations can be downloaded as .ppt files if you register and log in to slideshare.net
You can find  and download more EFL related presentations by searching for English, EFL, or other terms at Slideshare.net

It is also possible to combine audio with presentations. There are also many interesting, interactive presentations at Voicethread.com, but that site might not be accessible from Vietnam.

You can try accessing EFL related voicethread here.

Assignments
  • Create a Presentations folder in your EFL537 folder. (this image shows how to create a folder and it should look something like this)
    Find at least three interesting online presentations and download them into that folder. 
  • Make sure you  have at least 12 sites bookmarked and tagged properly in your Delicious account
  • Complete any unfinished assignments
  • (Optional - if you're still feeling overwhelmed and struggling to compete unfinished assignments, you don't have to do this)
    Daily Report:  Post either a 2 minute audio or 1-2 paragraph blog post telling Jeff which skills or sites have been most useful so far and what you would like to learn more about during the remainder of our course.
Tomorrow & Thursday
  • If  enough people are comfortable creating audio files, we will record small group discussion about your Day#2 readings.  
  • We will begin learning about site building using Wordpress.com , Posterous.com, and Wikispaces.com