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Text-to-Speech tools
March 2010
http://xtranormal.com
Since I showed this tool to some of the teachers at the school I work for in Brasilia, they've been exploring it for pedagogical purposes with great success. They generally create their own, first, but students get so excited about it that they end up producing their own.
The first interesting use I heard of for Xtranormal was in the images4education 2010 group (part of the Electronic Village Online sessions). One of the participants, Janet Bianchini, used it as an introduction to a new class.
Here's how she used it:
Carla Arena
Pedagogical examples of XTRANORMAL:
- Teacher Maria da Luz (Brasilia, Brazil) used it to introduce new topic to her students: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6199597/
- With younger kids, dictation can become a fun activity with the avatars.
- Let your students produce their own xtranormal videos based on a topic.
- Student's production - Teacher Maria Da Luz's class in Brasilia
- Teacher Alexandra Francisco (Portugal) used it to talk about her school in the school blog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umEICvIEVxE
- Teacher José Picardo used it to introduce a new topic in class (video in spanish): http://vimeo.com/7376426
Add your own ideas here on how to use xtranormal pedagogically:
- Ask students to create dialogues around a communicative topic . Ex: complaining, buying something, arguing about something.
- The whole class creates a dialogue using the structure and vocabulary learned that day (in class).
- After studying about job interviews, ask students to create successful job interviews.
- Teacher José Picardo asked his students to create dialogues of teachers complaining to parents about their children at school.
- Teacher Ana Maria Menezes used it to greet teachers at a Teacher´s training course and tell them the agenda for the day.
- What do you say after you say 'hello'? Ask students to introduce themselves to one another in a way that will imply further conversation. --Elizabeth HS
- Great for introducing and reinforcing idioms and new vocabulary generally.
Your Examples of your movies here:
| Name | Link to Xtranormal |
| Ana Maria Menezes | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS3qBFUodh4 |
| Elizabeth Hanson-Smith | http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6222649/ |
| Natasa Bozic Grojic | |
Other fun Text-to-Speech tools to explore in the classroom:
Add your links to extra resources related to text-to-speech here and to our Diigo group.
- iSpeech - is a good small blog tet-to-speech reader (has a limited number of output words) and can be used to podcast. You can see it work on my blog, Virtual=Real -ElizabethHS