Audioboo... Cesar y Jose part 1 and Part 2!!

Part I



Part II

Software and Education

Nowadays technology has had a great development in some areas (military issues, social…etc) but, some of the areas where technology has been improving is in education, because almost every day we discover a software to help us with our educational activities (to learn or to help with homework), these softwares maybe have been created to others purposes but we can use it to learn much more about an specific subject or to gain time. Here, I am going to explain the use of some software in education.

ABBYY Finereader 8.0

It is an OCR (optical character recognition) software that is very helpful when you use a scanner and have to modify the text that is in the handout or another paper and it is completely impossible because you only have an image. This software recognizes the characters in the image and change it into letters, so you can edit it easily.

Adobe Reader (Adobe Acrobat Reader)

It is a very important tool or software to read a lot of files that there are in the internet, so many people or universities use this format because you can put restrictions to edit or copy o anything else to the document.

Ashampoo Snap 4

It is a very good tool if you need to take a photo of a document in your PC or a photo of a web page, or maybe only a part of a window. It is very useful when we are talking about a paper with a partner and he does not understand what we mean, we only take a photo and send it, so easy, it is very good to create tutorials too, because you can create videos.

Atube Catcher

Sometimes there are videos hosted in youtube.com that are so useful for our education but not everybody has a good connection to view them at the page, so with this program you can download them to your computer and watch them when you want.

Audacity

It is a great tool to modify, edit, mix (and a lot things) songs or recordings too. If you want to improve the pitch or velocity or the volume of a recording, this program is essential for you

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Buzan´s IMind Map

It is a software what main purpose is to create mind maps, with the style of the creator of mind maps: Tony Buzan. This program is an official version of Tony Buzan. It has a lot of functionalities.

Dragon Naturally Speaking

If you don´t like to type and type and type and type… and you like speaking and speaking and speaking, you need this software. It is a dictation software: you dictate to your computer and it transcribes! So useful if you are tired of type!

Dropbox

This software helps you to save your files in a folder in your PC and send it to a server in internet and if you want to find this file in other PC you only have to download and install this software in other computer, log in with your account and in some minutes the file is going to be in this PC.

EDraw Mind Map

It is another software to create Mind Map too, it has more styles than Buzan´s Mind Map, but it is not an official version to do mind maps.

Hot Potatoes

Very good software to create exercises to teach or to reinforce the knowledge. It has different type of exercises to create: JMix, JCloze, JMatch, JCross and JQuiz.

Nitro PDF Professional

With this software you can edit, create, join, modify, etc, a PDF document. You can convert some PDF in only one, edit the PDF, aggregate some pictures or boxes to write. It is so useful.

PDF protection Remover

Sometimes we find surfing on internet, some protected PDF and we can´t do anything to this file (no copy, no edit, nothing!) with this software we can eliminate that restriction and do what we want with the file.


By CESAR FLOREZ

Evaluation of ESL Web Site

Name of the site: English-Zone.com... the BEST English-Learner's site on the 'Net!

Site's URL: http://english-zone.com/index.php

Author (s): Kaye Mastin Mallory

Last Update: N/A (not available)

Objective of the site: the objective of the site is to provide a lot of exercises of grammar, reading, writing, vocabulary and other interest things related to the English.

Skills the site builds: Grammar, reading, writing and vocabulary.

Objective: the most important objective of the site is to provide on-line activities, and links to some resources of interest.

Scope of audience: Worldwide

Target level: Basic level to advanced level

Sensory input: Poorly

Feedback: non-intelligent error feedback

Interactivity: Some

Communicativeness: None

Context: Some

Content: 10 minutes.

Revisitability: Once a year maybe. The date of the first post is not showed.

Appearance: Good. (The site makes above average use of all the design elements but is not outstanding.)

Navigation: Easy (Very clear navigational aids and easy and quick to find specific pages.)

Load speed: Fast (The site loads faster than most pages, or it may load surprisingly fast despite having several prominent graphics.)

Technical (HTML) quality: this site load faster in Opera web browser than in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. (Internet connection: Movistar and Digitel BAM), we did not test this site in Internet Explorer and Safari.

Brief description of the site:  the site English-Zone.com is a very useful page to ESL/EFL learners because it has a lot of exercises for beginners and these exercises are very useful to practice and reinforce the knowledge. The web page provides a lot of online exercises (grammar, vocabulary, reading, and writing) and link to resources of interest.

What we liked about the site: we liked about this site is that you can practice and reinforce your knowledge, although you are intermediate or advanced level learner, or only to refresh the knowledge.

What we don´t like about the site:  we did not like about this site is that there is a lot of exercises that you have to pay a membership to access them. The site does not have an index to guide you in the page. It has a poor main page (it does not have images, graphics etc.) so, to some people do not call the attention. It provides a few lessons.

ESL/EFL Pedagogical implications of the site: the site is helpful to ESL/EFL learners who want to know how good is their grammar, vocabulary, writing and reading comprehension. 

Evaluation score for 
Content usefulness: 4/6
Interface design: 1/4

Our overall evaluation grade: 5/10   

César Flórez & José Aular 

Hot Potatoes Mind Map

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