Thursday, October 19, 2006

Podcasting in Japanese Classes

Another MCISD ITS and I are attempting to get the teacher and students in the interactive video Japanese classes to record speaking assignments using the free Odeo Studio.

Here's how it will work: The teacher will record the assignment in Odeo Studio, then copy the HTML code generated by Odeo to embed a flash player on the class Moodle page. Like this:


powered by ODEO

After students listen to their assignment in Moodle, they will log in to their Odeo Studio account to record their podcast. Odeo has a simple web based recording tool so the students will not need any other software on their computer. Odeo Studio also automatically generates an RSS feed, so the teacher will use an aggregator (we'll use Bloglines) to subscribe to each student's podcast.

Another nice feature of Odeo Studio is that the teacher can then record verbal comments (like the correct pronunciation of a word) and/or type in feedback right on the student's Odeo podcast page.

Traditional foreign language classes could also podcast, but we wanted to initially focus our attention on our distance learning classes.

UPDATE: I'm very disappointed that Bloglines hasn't yet picked up our sample recording. So I subscribed to the podcast in iTunes and VOILA! it went right out and got it! I think I'll have the Japanese instructor use iTunes instead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jim:

Great! I've placed the Odeo audio file on the Moodle site titled "Correct Krauss Sensei's massacre of the Japanese language"