Tech stuff

I had a very techie week last week:

• I went to NYC to learn more about Adobe’s editing software
• I attended a BESIG conference online. (Thank you @carldowse and the BESIG BOT for making virtual attendance possible
• I went to a face-to-face edubloggers conference in Philly (saw the delightful Shelly Terrell, who incidentally was astonished that I don’t have a US cell phone or a tablet computer – am I weird that way? )
• I unpacked a new desktop computer and discovered it has a sort of Star Wars appearance and theme. Apparently I share an attraction to fast graphics cards with video gamers who tend to be interested in scifi. I even found a baseball cap with an alien on it in the packaging. ( ‘merican husband thinks it’s very appropriate. To him, I am an alien)
• I made a 30 second video of Brad Patterson speaking about a free dictionary app that EduLang has developed called SnaPanda. (I included shots of real pandas, for those who prefer the non-virtual kind.)

Phew!

Quick thoughts on tech and teaching:
We’ll be seeing more mobile apps for English learners and more data in the cloud. But my hunch is that the tech that may impact most on EFL/ESL course design and teaching soon is voice recognition.

Speech-to-text has been slow to materialise, but…
1. Youtube/Google does a good job matching captions to videos when I provide the script now.

2. My video editing software also does a good captioning job with a script. And importantly it can also tag when each word is spoken in the metadata of the video clips, and make them quickly searchable. (I mentioned the search capabilities over at English Central the other day – similar thing.)

These speech to text capabilities mean we can automate the compilation of metadata – so we’ll have much better search capabilities. I do hope we use them wisely though – just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I wouldn’t like to see a proliferation of unthought out learning objects. More on that another day, but in the meantime, whaddya think of my new baseball cap?