What's New at Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab

Website Information

What's New

Website Changes, Additions, and Ongoing Projects:

Visitors often want to know what I am currently working on to improve my Websites listed here:

With many new things going on, it is difficult to point you to all of them, but I often am spending a lot of time making current listening activities even better by adding new features. Here is a short list:

Ongoing Website Projects:

I announce all of my new listening and video activities on my Facebook page, so please consider becoming a fan so you find out what I am currently developing on my sites.

> > New Mini-Lecture Videos [Ongoing]: I have been experimenting with a new listening/video format to provide mini-lectures related to some of my existing content. The idea is to give learners additional practice through a different learning format in short, digestible chunks. Here is one example:

- Credit Cards

> > New Listening/Video Activities [Ongoing]: I am always working on new listening and video activities. This process involves coming up with ideas, writing scripts, recording and editing sound/video files, developing language-learning tasks, and creating the Web pages. Creating just one complete listening activity with all its components involves a lot of steps and time.

> > Portable Media Playback [Through 2013]: Reconfiguring my media files so that they can be played on more portable devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. This is taking some time, but I am working on it as fast as I can. I hope to have much of this completed by summer 2013.

> > Grammar Exercises [Currently in the evaluation stages]: Experimenting with grammar exercises and quizzes that can reinforce, recycle, and supplement the content found in the listening activities. Read more about this project HERE.

> > Post-Listening Activities [Through 2013]: Revising many of the Post-Listening Exercises to encourage more application and recycling of the language skills presented in each listening activity (i.e., a focus on putting the listening skills into speaking practice for additional learning). The newer exercises encourage greater use of critically-thinking skills, including analyzing information in the form of an Internet-based task (see example HERE).

> > Online Investigations Tasks [Through 2013]: Realizing that students need opportunities to use their language skills to improve critical thinking, I am adding tasks that students can do using the Internet that require them to look up and analyze information and then make informative conclusions based on what they find. Such activities try to reflect they types of real-life tasks we encounter in our daily lives.

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