Teacher Discussion Forums

[Matty]

Hey guys!

After a long time away, I'm back.

I've been working on creating some applications for students, mostly dictation exercises that are a little more effective than the ones I've seen elsewhere.

In keeping with web standards, they keep the presentation and content separate and use XML files to create new exercises.

They're at:

http://watchtvlearnenglish.com/dictation_sentences/dictation_sentences.html

http://watchtvlearnenglish.com/dictation_essay/dictation_essay.html

Any thoughts, ideas or opinions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Matt

[fractal]

Matt, the links are dead (got the 404) - have you removed the exercises? I did check the date you posted.

[Matty]

Yeah, those links got removed from my site a while ago. Sorry! My new website is still in the experimental stages and is at:

http://matbury.com/

http://matbury.com/moodle/ - sorry, you can't access this part, I have students using it!

http://matbury.com/wiki/

[fractal]

Thank you, Matty. I will try and see what I can there. Could you upload somewhere public a sample of a dictation? What software do you use to compile these dictations?

[Matty]

Hi fractal,

The dictations are 'under review' at the moment. In other words, I'm giving them a big overhaul to make them better, more dynamic, and to include all sorts of Learning Management System related functions.

I compiled the old ones in Actionscript 2.0 and now I'm compiling them in Actionscript 3.0 (Flash). AS 3.0 knocks the socks off AS 2.0 and can run up to 10 times faster. It's also a fully object oriented language now which means it's much easier and more efficient for creating more complex programs.

The final 'product' wouldn't require any programming skill at all to create your own dictations. You'd just have to use the SWF template along with whatever media MP3 files, video and/or images you want to use, depending on the SWF template you're using, and edit a simple XML file that contains all the dialogues, questions and answers in text, and references (URLs) to all the media files. You can achieve all this using open source (free) software and no programming expertise.

[matbury]

I've updated my Flash resources. I've still got loads to do but this is a start:

http://matbury.com/moodle/

Have fun!

[matbury]

P.S. I've changed my user account. I'm no longer Matty!

[Lorikeet]

Looks interesting. By the way, on the demo info you spelled "enroll" as "enrol" once.

[matbury]