"Would you like to relax your students' tired eyes? Is it sounds good to convert any written text such as Microsoft Word into spoken words? What about running a PowerPoint presentation and have a narration of the text on your slides? Would you be interested in a list of 19 Free Text to Speech tools?"
Minute of Listening is an exciting new creative learning initiative that promotes curious, engaged and reflective listening in the classroom. Piloting in 70 primary schools around the UK from January to March 2012, Minute of Listening creates a daily opportunity for pupils and teachers to access and explore a huge range of music and sound as a stimulus for class discussion and imaginative enquiry.
This is a great FREE site for beginning readers. They have tutorials on all the sound and show examples and phonic sounds, several different fonts, and video examples of context.
Interesting to think how this relates to primary and secondary education.... not just tertiary.....
"In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely-or seriously reshapes them-might produce a very effective new form of college.
That was the provocative notion posed here recently by Randy Bass, executive director of Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, during the annual meeting of the Educause Learning Initiative.
He pointed out that much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do."