carlatech

A variety of articles - updates on e-learning in K-12.

Why do the terms "nature," "landscape," and "wilderness" have such positive connotations in German? Why do humans yearn for nature and protect it? How does this differ from culture to culture? Dossier article from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung

The website says "Set up a voicemail widget on your website or add the voicemail application to your Facebook page" - Like the AudioDropbox, but sends it to your email?

I have no idea about quality - but it looks like you can also create your own.  Compare to RubiStar?

Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) is now putting it's journal articles on iTunes as a free podcast.

Another way to make yourself an interactive whiteboard, without the whiteboard - or if you have a whiteboard, a way to have walk around the class control of it.

links to widget creator, handbook and more resources for using iBooks Author

If you would like to try creating your own game!

This was mentioned in Julie's talk on gaming for language learning, but I don't know anything about it.

You can interact with many different devices

This is a site that allows you to take a poll very easily.

I like the immediate nature of the results.

2 examples from French classes

This issue - Languages, Cultures and Virtual Communities - has a number of articles on CALL and online learning.

We had a request for a one-hand only keyboard layout.

With CaptionTube you can create captions for your YouTube videos. It's easy to use and it's free. Offer viewers a transcript to read. Improve discoverability and searching for sales and training videos. Create and edit closed captions in multiple languages. Export captions and upload them to your YouTube account. Simple and secure sign in using your Google account.

Watch videos with subtitles in your language, upload your videos, create your own subtitles!

Abstract: This paper sets the stage for the articles selected for the special issue "Language learning and social media: (r)evolution?". Starting with some definitions of mainstream terms like "social media", "web 2.0", "social web", "social networking sites (SNS)" and "web 2.0 language learning communities". The purpose is not to "reinvent the wheel" by suggesting new definitions, but to synthesize definitions of mainstream terms and juxtapose them to similar concepts from CALL literature. We then critically discuss three key features of web 2.0 technologies (user participation, openness and network effects). Despite the fact that these three features were present to some extent in technologies prior to social media, we examine whether they take on a radically different meaning in the social media era. Research insights are discussed in the last section of the paper.

Abstract: This case study is based on an investigation into the use that a group of language learners made of Livemocha.com, a Social Networking Site through which language exchange is enabled via social media applications. The learners created profiles in the website and proceeded to interact with speakers of their target languages, reporting back on their experiences over a 10-week period. As communication between language partners can take place through several different channels, and can be asynchronous or synchronous, written or spoken, it was considered that the preferences of learners with different personality types (as indicated by responses to a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire) might be accommodated. Several studies have suggested that the anxiety that some language learners feel when communicating in L2, especially when speaking, is reduced in online environments. Under the premise that a reduction in anxiety may lead to an increased "willingness to communicate" (MacIntyre et al., 1998), the principal objective of this project was to examine the type and frequency of online interactions that the participants engaged in with other speakers of their target languages in the Livemocha language learning community.