- Post text for your students to read. When students encounter words they don't know, they can just click on the words to get definitions. They can also add the words to a set of flash cards to test themselves on later. This saves students innumerable hours of flipping through a dictionary, and each minute of dictionary-flipping is one that could be better spent learning. For a German text example, please see the first paragraph of Kafka's Die Verwandlung on langolab.
You can also add notes to text -- just select the word, phrase, or sentence and click "Add Note" in the dialog box that appears. The notes are useful when there are phrases or sentences that are difficult to understand. The aforementioned text contains a few notes that you can check out (just click on the "4 Notes" link at the upper right corner of the text, then mouse over and click notes). - If you see a video on Youtube that you'd like your students to watch, you can post it on langolab. Just go to the video page and click on "Add new video". You can add captions to the video using langolab. Langolab treats the captions just like any other text, meaning that your students can click on words in the captions to get definitions as they're watching the video. Like regular text, you can also add notes to the captions, and students can ask questions on them. For an example, please see Loki und Smoky: Wer ist der Kaiser? or the Die Prinzen music video for Küssen Verboten.
- Need a great way to give your students the vocabulary list for their next test? Get together with another teacher and then get creative and record a short skit using the vocab words. You can either record the skit directly on langolab using your webcam, or you can upload the video file to langolab. Once the video is captioned, your students can watch it and build up a list of flash cards for the vocab.
11.02.2008
Things foreign language teachers can currently do with langolab
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2 comments:
I just put up a new Chinese text on the site. How about if you put a button to allow users to increase the font size? The small characters are kind of hard to click on.
Hi, thank you very much for the feedback! I assume that you're talking about this Chinese poem. Your wish is my command: I will add the button you describe.
I should mention that at some point in the future the site UI will probably be rewritten in html/javascript. I've already completed the riskiest parts of this implementation -- the parts that are difficult to get right cross-browser. Once the site is in html, it will be easy to change text size using the built-in browser text size machinery.
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