Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Day 6 Vocabulary Building + Translation and Grammar Checking

Discussion of Reading
  • Students are going to use online translators anyway. Better to teach them how to use them properly (use shorter sentences, being aware of nuances of language)
  • Jeff's blog post: giving up one self; not translating word for word from the native language
  • Interesting idea suggested in the article: inserting a passage from the target language into babelfish and help students become aware of the potential pitfalls
  • Analogy of Judo: not becoming stronger than your opponents, but knowing your opponents' weaknesses 
Vocabulary

  • Languages with pronunciation on mp3 - IE languages
  • WorldBook has some visual vocabulary things - pick the French version and once inside, there's a Spanish tab to change everything into Spanish
  • Visuwords - ESL only. Can be used to teach etymology
  • Visual Dictionary (Merriam - Webber) with 3D pictures - ESL only
  • IB Realia - Photos from native country for authentic language teaching (no Spanish yet) [Google "images from Spain"] :) 
  • Alternative realia source - The Realia Project (search Spain)
  • Create flash cards on Quizlet - Ways of using: 1. Free account allows maximum 8 people per group where they can compete against each other 2. apps for most device 
*** useful embed code for any webpage: <iframe src="http://www.google.com" style="width: 90%; height: 300px"></iframe> " Make it big enough so the flashcard shows, and students can play the thing on your blog! ***
  • Build a Jeopardy game or browse through other people's

  • Rather elementary vocabulary, but different ways of testing good for perhaps time filler. A word is read out, we click on the object the word was referring to, the object disappear. Digital Dialects.
  • IMAGES

    • Search by a text, bookr then scour publicly available images from Flickr and create a book for you 
  • Live Mocha - free membership for all benefits? 
  • TRANSLATION
    • A list of bookmarklets from google translate to embed on browser. Pick the language to be translated into 
    • Spanish spellchecker - still work without signing up