Group items tagged

"However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me. To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful-and the technology will continue to improve with time. In addition to automatic captions, we're also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don't have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks."

"A set of Shakespeare resources, including podcasts, historical materials, and even online digital versions of the bard's texts."

"The 2012 Guidelines are available online, supported with glossed terminology and annotated, multimedia samples of performance at each level for speaking and writing, and examples of oral and written texts and tasks associated with each level for reading and writing. ESL teachers will be particularly interested in exploring the English Proficiency Guidelines online." (Cutshall, 2015, ¶18, 2015.11.09)

Barry Bakin's use of Pageflakes to put all his assignments, resource list and other timely information for his class is awesome; check it out.

Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds

Tool for Online and Offline Language Learning (TOOL) project, funded by the European Union, is building Blended Learning language courses in five European languages (Dutch, Estonian, Hungarian, Maltese, Slovene).

Online Magazine for Learners of English