There are so many resources out there that you can pay for to learn a new language. With the internet, there are so many great resources for language learning for beginners (even to advance) you’ll ask yourself why pay all that money for a copy of Rosetta Stone? I found two great free sites to help you learn that language and have the resources to practice it with free peer review included. The sites are Livemocha and Busuu.com

Both Livemocha and Busuu.com have free accounts you can sign up for. Each gives you lessons with a vocab review, a writing exercise, an audio exercise, and a chance to have the exercises graded by native speakers (you as a native speaker of a language have the ability to grade others as well) and to chat with native speakers to practice your new found language skills. Both have paid subscriptions where you can have access to more contention and more advanced lessons. Here are some of the differences between the two services:

Livemocha:

Pros:

• At free level ,able to download vocab lists from the site
• More languages are available to you to learn at free level (like Arabic and Hindi)
• Have more flashcards to review and fill in the black word exercises at free level to help you retain vocab and helps you with writing and audio exercises

Cons:

• The vocab is not conversational in nature (you say things like I am fat, and I am thin)

Busuu.com:

Pros:

• Vocab is conversational in nature. You learn things like hello, how are you. Welcome. Good day. What is your name?
• To help with comprehension and vocab review, you are quizzed on a conversation a few people are having in that language. It is spoken at the normal pace and with the vocab you learned.

Cons:

• Free subscription limits you to only a few languages.
• To download vocab and print it (like  flashcard review), you need the paid service (also get podcasts with paid service)
• There is not enough vocab review exercises to prep you for the written and audio exercises. I felt that I retained little when I went into the written exercises and audio exercises.

Both are great tools, it just depends on what you want to learn and how you learn. I would sign up for both and give them a try and see how you like the service. You can use both as well to supplement each other. Good luck!

Livemocha: http://www.livemocha.com
Busuu.com: http://www.busuu.com

I am a Facebook user. I use it to keep up to date and connected with my friends. I often hear people say, why not use Facebook in the classroom? The students already use it and it would be a great way to send out assignments (basically a replacement for LMS like Blackboard).  Here are a few thoughts I have about Facebook and why I like the idea of using Facebook in the classroom but why I think it’s the wrong tool.

I use Facebook as a social device and I like to keep it private. A lot of people that use this site do as well. They share things, stories, videos, pictures, etc. They share very personal things with their friends. Now some students would feel that their privacy would be invaded (even though you can set privacy settings on Facebook). Some faculty may feel the same way. It has a lot of applications that can be used for education, but the most popular ones on Facebook do not have much to do with academics (like Mafia Wars and Which Muppet are You? Quizzes). This is the appeal of Facebook. Would students or faculty like to share that kind of information with one another? Usually no (and this also depends on education level and age).

There is also the assumption that all students are on Facebook. Not so true. Some are on MySpace and some non-traditional students may have never signed up for either a Facebook account or a MySpace account. So as with all technology, there is a learning curve. There is also that fear that once you joining Facebook, people not related to your class (family members, etc), will be asking you to friend them, which runs along the same lines with the privacy issue.

I would like to see a Facebook alternative for the classroom. One that is kind of structured like Blackboard, but has more appeal and social aspects like Facebook. Blogs come to mind to achieve this, but what if the students and teachers want to make the class private (just like viewing a profile on Facebook)? Social interaction apps like the ones Facebook has would make learning a lot more fun and memorable and features like wall messages cold be used for assignment posting and  announcements and having a private or group messaging system tied into your email like Facebook has would be great for teacher and students to get in touch about group or individual projects. We need a service that is a clone of Facebook but acts like a online classroom supplement (or distance learning course like Blackboard, Moodle or Sakai).  Maybe we can call it FaceClass or Classbook.

I just recently downloaded a program called Any Video Converter for free (click here to download: http://download.cnet.com/Any-Video-Converter/3000-2194_4-10661456.html). At first, it looks like a freeware or shareware version of a program that may download something bad or extra stuff on your machine. I was skeptical at first, but when I actually opened it up, I was surprised and how easy it was to use (and a nice interface design). I recently had to convert Real Video into a flash (.flv) format.  Now, if you worked with video, you know it’s hard to find a reliable tool that will work properly and convert the file in a clean way. Any Video Converter (AVC), did just that. You can convert into .mp4 format, flash (.flv),  mpge 2, a mobile phone format just to name a few. You can also convert audio using the usual formats like ACC, wave, and MP3.  There’s a professional version that allows you convert into the ipod format, but you need to pay. The free version gets you by for the most part. Another great feature I like is previewing what you are converting. That is a time saver if you need to split a long film into clips and convert them into another format. I really recommend this tool to anybody. Enjoy!

Did you ever have a long audio clip that you wanted to break up into smaller files based off of pauses or silence breaks in your audio? Sure you can do it manually with a program like Audacity, but Audacity also has a Silence Analyzer that will insert labels in places where there is silence in the clip and from those tags you can export the audio into smaller chunks all in one step. Here’s how to do that.

1. Open up Audacity. Load your audio clip.
2. Now use the cursor to scroll over the shortest silence period in your clip. This is where a label will be inserted to show a break in audio parts. You are measuring the time.
3. Look at the bottom of Audacity. You will see how long that silence period is.
4. Now select all your audio clip by clicking Control  + A.
5. Now go to the Analyze menu.
6. Choose  Silence Finder
7. In the minimum silence duration text box, type in the number you saw at the bottom of Audacity when you measured the shortest silence period in the clip.
8. Click OK
9. Now you will see a series of labels with a S. You can also manually enter labels (if the analyzer missed any spots) by clicking on the silence spot and pressing Control + B.
10. Now that all your silence spots are marked to break up the clips, go to File  and choose Export Multiple.
11. Choose the format (wav, mp3), where to save it, how to name it, and choose Split based on labels.
12. Click OK.

I hope this helps. It worked well for me.

I have been using Twitter for close to two months now. I actually had a twitter account a year ago, but just never used it. I thought why would I use this? Who cares about where I went to lunch? Then in March I created a new account and decided to give Twitter another shot.  I found some people to follow (I started out with 10). Nobody was following me. I thought that was fine. I kept reading, following others and tweeting.

I recently came a across a new tool called Prezi. It’s a web based application that allows you to create slideshows and display information on a screen. So what’s so new about it? It’s the way the information is presented. You have one giant screen with all your information on it, instead of a group a slides that you navigate by clicking the forward and back buttons. Here, you can go up, down, left, right, sideways, zoom in, zoom out. You can draw graphics like circles arrows to call out to information, add text, and media (like images, video, and PDFs). It’s a nice alternative to the typical presentation, but the zooming and bouncing around effects can becoming dizzying and over used. You can sign up for a free account here (there are also paid accounts with more space and the option to keep presentation files private, with a free account, your presentations are public. I also did not see an embed feature which would be nice in the future) :

http://prezi.com/

I recently had to figure out how to get the webcam attached to my computer (Win XP, MS Office 2003), to show up live in a PowerPoint presentation (without leaving the presentation). With some help from this forum (http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-919143.php -Thank you Glenna Shaw and Mike M.), I was able to get my webcam to stream live in a PowerPoint presentation.

What you’ll need:

• PowerPoint (I have PowerPoint 2003)
• Windows Media Encoder (free download)
• Webcam

Steps:

1. I downloaded the Windows Media Encoder.
2. Then I opened up PowerPoint and added a new slide.
3. In PowerPoint I went to Insert—>Object—> Windows Media Player.
4. I opened up Windows Media Encoder and chose Broadcast a Live Event.
5. Choose my camera for the video and audio devices. Clicked Next.
6. I chose Pull from Encoder
7. I decided to click on Find Free Port but 8080 is fine.
8. I did not change the Encoding options but you can play around to see what you like.
9. I did not archive my broadcast
10. I chose No to include Video Files
11. Clicked the Finish button
12. Click on the connections tab and copy either the LAN address or the Internet address (by clicking on the appropriate button)
13. Click the Start Encoding button at the top of Windows Media Encoder.
14. I went back to the PowerPoint presentation and right clicked on the Windows Media Player Object and chose Properties
15. Click on Custom at the top of the properties and click the button with the three dots.
16. Paste the Internet or LAN address into the File Name or URL text box.
17. Click OK
18. Now play your PowerPoint file and click on the play button on the Windows Media Player.

Please note: I am not sure how secure this is by broadcasting on port 8080. I am also not sure how well this would work on a Mac machine.  Also, I had a 5-10 second delay from the encoder to the PowerPoint slide. I hope this helps.

I know the add-on Firebug is not new for Firefox, but I am currently using it to tweak the CSS and design of a web site I working on, in Roxen. The hierarchy of the Roxen CSS design can get a little confusing when you are trying to over write the CSS code in Roxen (and you are not familiar of the layout of the code since you did not write it).

How It Works:

You install Firebug and it’s part of your web browser. You can then open up a website you are working on. You click on the Firebug icon at the bottom right. A pane will open up on the bottom of the browser. It will have the HTML code for the page (which you can hover over and it will highlight the section the code comes from) and the CSS that is associated with that HTML on the page. If you click on the tag in the HTML, it will skip right to that section in the CSS. You now know what exact part you need to tweak in the CSS. Just for that, this add-on is worth installing. Based off the HTML tags and CSS, it can show you how the site is laid out. For example, if you have a content wrapper, then a content main tag, then a content nav, it will show you the nesting of the tags in a diagram if you click on the layout tab.

This add-on has made my life with Roxen a little easier over the past couple of days. If you would like to install the add-on, click on the link below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

This is a screenshot of the FIrefox add-on Firebug

BubblePLY is a web based service that allows for you to add comment bubbles (in different shapes), subtitles, images, clipart, and even a webcam feed over different sections of a YouTube video 9other services like Google Videos, Dailymotion, and metacafe work as well). You can use this service to circle something on a video and add a comment box (maybe a vocab review in another language) or add subtitles to a foreign clip. It’s super easy to use. You can sign up for a free account to save your BubblePLY videos. Another great thing about the service is that it allows for you to embed the video into a website or quick post it to different services like Facebook, Blogger, Live Spaces, and much more. To take a look at the service (which you can demo without signing up) click on the link below:

http://www.bubbleply.com

View of adding items to YouTube using BubblePLY

SUMO Paint is a free web based (online) image editor. What’s really nice about this service is that it has some of the features that you would see in image editor like GIMP or Photoshop (that you need to install on your computer). SUMO Paint can do many things like transform an image, it has support for multiple layers and many other features like a smudge tool, blur tool, and symmetry tool. This is a great tool to have in your toolbox if you edit maps or create images for a presentation. You can edit them online and them download them.

SUMO Paint also has a community you can post your images to for others to see and comment (but you can not directly save the image to services like Facebook or Flickr, you would need to download them to your computer first). If you want to explore the tool before creating an account, you can by visiting the link below:

http://www.sumopaint.com