Monday 22 November 2010

BESIG

Things are really popping at BESIG, the IATEFL special interest group for Business English.



Wiki: http://ibow.pbworks.com/w/page/31583454/FrontPage
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/iatefl_besig
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/IATEFLBESIG
Ning: http://iatefl-besig.ning.com/
For more links, see the Community Page on the BESIG website: http://www.besig.org/community/index.htm

Wednesday 17 November 2010

Invitation: Come join me in this Bitstrip comic strip

I presented Bitstrips as part of the workshop series last summer, but thought I'd just post, step-by-step, how to make one.
Step 1: Join the Bitstrips site and browse it.
Step 2: Create a character and make it look a little like yourself.
Step 3: Create a comic strip with yourself and some of other characters featured in the "library".
Here's a screencast with Jing that shows you how to handle the controls.

And now ... roll the drums...
Step 4: Engage in social networking through Bitstrips: Add a friend's character to your strip. Or copy a friend's cartoon and add yourself to it, and then let them know!



Short URL: http://bitstrips.com/r/G30WL.

I've set the editing on this strip so that friends can edit it. So come and friend me, copy my strip and put yourself in the last frame :-) Please leave a link.

I've never done this before, so I have no idea whether it will work. Don't be shy :-)

Do any of you already have Bitstrips accounts/ characters? Just let me know.

PS: My favorite review of Bitstrips.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Voki



This is a Voki that I typed text into, and which turned my text to (robotic) speech. Create your own at http://www.voki.com/, and see what it does with the text you type in.
Then, below, I've made a second one using a recording of my own voice. You can either record directly into Voki, or create an mp3 using Audacity or (as I did) GarageBand on a Mac.

Caveat: Voki uses Flash, which is not installed on all computers and sometimes causes trouble.

iSpeech Player


The simple text-to-speech app iSpeech Player Code lets you embed a player on a regular blog, but the embed code doesn't work on Ning or Posterous. Instead, you need to download the file as an mp3 and upload it to the site.

The app lets you share a link on any of the sites on the left.




For an excellent overview of text to speech spps, see Özge Karaoglu's blogpost.