November 8, 2010

My Faves of the Week (Week 11)

New favourites for the new week:

Meetifyr is a site that helps you to find the best time to meet with your friends. It gives you a page where everyone can show which days they are busy and which days they are available to meet. With all this information, you can easily pick up the meeting day.

VanityVid is service that turns your profile picture into a video that you can upload to different social networking sites. You can upload any kind of video or you can use your web cam to create your video that will let others see you move and talk.

PrintWhatYouLike is a free online editor that lets you format any web page to print. You don’t need to download anything to use this service. You can make the web pages more readable by changing the size and the font and you can remove the background as well. You can combine multiple web pages together and print them on one page or keep them on your desktop as a PDF or a word document. You can easily remove ads and junk that you don’t want to see.

www_storify_com Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as videos, pictures, tweets. You can also add your own text to your content. The readers can retweet or reply to the people quoted on your story. Storify also allows embedding.

Clueis a fun and an interesting way to test people (or you) about what they remember on your site. You just enter the link of the site that you want to test, share the test with people via Twitter, Facebook or other social networking services. People who take the test , look at the web page for a few seconds and write what they remember.

simplediagrams-com SimpleDiagrams is a desktop application that helps you to express your ideas using library items and backgrounds. You can drag&drop and size symbols from the library, add photos or notes, change the background, save it to your computer and export your diagram to PNG.

Stay tuned.

November 3, 2010

Text-to-Speech:Let the Computers Talk

Increasing access to the internet and different Web 2.0 tools have provided different, engaging and fun alternatives to teachers. Now, we can create our own web based activities easily with free and various tools that can be easily accessed by the learners. We can create our own videos, podcasts, upload them and share them with other teachers or our students, create digital stories using animations. Furthermore, there are many other websites that will help our learners to improve four essential skills; reading, speaking, listening and writing as well as grammar and vocabulary.

Text-to-speech applications can be an alternative way to check the pronunciation of words and sentences or to create listening activities. The applications let us listen to any written text, create audio narration of the text with a human sounding voice, adjust the pitch and decide on the speed and the accent. Here are some of these applications:

Vozme lets you turn your text into speech. You can choose a male or a female voice and you create mp3 files and listen to them anywhere you are.

ReadtheWords is a service that can generate sounding audio file from almost any written material. It can read the words out loud, that you you want it to read. There are 15 different voice selection and you can hear a sample before you create it. This application can also read Spanish and French too.

iSpeech is another text-to-speech application that will convert your text (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, blogs, RSS feeds etc.) content into audio with minimal effort, no software installation and no technical expertise. You can download it, podcast it or embed it to your blog or your website.

HearWho converts your text to speech and saves it as an MP3 file so that you can listen to it on any device capable of playing MP3 files, such as ipods, PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players.

NaturalReaders can convert your text such as MS Word, Webpage, PDF files, and Emails into spoken words. It can also convert any written text into audio files such as MP3 or WAV for your CD player.

Text2Speech is another free online text to speech converter.

Kakomessenger is a fun text to-speech application. It’s a singing telegram machine that will sing your text. You choose between two singers, Gina and Humphrey, write your text and let the singers sing them for you.

TalkingPets is another fun text-to-speech application that makes the pets talk. You chose your pet, accessorize it, write your text, choose the voice and your pet is ready to talk.

ReadSpeaker is a site that gives your website or your blog a voice. There are nine languages and 18 voices to choose from. By using this service, you can attract your visitors, make it easy to read your content and enable your readers to do something else while they listen to your blog.

Voki can be an alternative to text to speech applications. You can write your text, choose the accent and let the Voki avatar says it for you. You can get the link or embed it to your blog or your website.

SayitRight is a text-to-speech software that assists you with English pronunciation of the words. You can also slow down the text and see the mouth movements for a sound or word.

Although text-to-speech applications provide human sounding listening, give us a chance to facilitate learning, they sometimes lack the right intonation and stress, but I believe with the growing technologies, text-to-speech applications will provide us with the natural speech in the near future.

Cross posted on TechLearning.