Wednesday, February 18, 2009

French Vocab Slidecast

This is a little slidecast that I made along with our French teacher this past fall. I had kind of given up on slideshare as a tool for vocabulary mastery and review because the audio would easily become out of sync with the slides when pausing and skipping about in the slidecast. However, after revisiting my slideshare account today, I can see that the good folks over at slideshare must have put a fix in place. The audio is fully in sync with the slides and the user may zip back and forth, pause, and replay the slidecast without losing audio/slide sync.

I think it might be time to revisit using slideshare as a platform for these types of learning opportunities within foreign language classes, especially given that many of our teachers use a Mac-only program called "iFlash" to do these types of things. I really like the notion of using HTML tools like slideshare so that these learning materials can be available across various operating systems (and students aren't required to purchase a pesky client application as well). And, to take it a step further, when publishing to slideshare these resources become available to an even broader learning community.

Finally, placing materials like this online as HTML at a space like slidecast gives learners 24/7 access to these learning opportunities. No longer do they have to wait to go to the language lab to practice their listening and speaking skills...using an audio slidecast like this one, they can work through these materials as often as they'd like and in a time and space that works for them.

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