Welcome to From Reading to Listening

This blog has been set up to activate an idea.  I discovered recently that English language colleagues were creating listening exercises for their students by recording themselves reading them, so I suggested they set up a blog with the readings and have them read by Odiogo.

To explain how this can happen, I've started a document outlining a presentation here: http://tinyurl.com/vance112110gdoc.  The presentation will take place Sunday November 21, 2010 at 1300 GMT, in Elluminate, at http://tinyurl.com/y3eh.

For this session, I have in mind setting up two blogs (for comparison purposes) and creating a tag for them whereby we apply the Writingmatrix principle that anyone can find each other's similar blogs, and show everyone how we can collaborate on setting these up so that we essentially create a set of podcast sites with beginning, intermediate, and advanced listening passages.

All interested teaching practitioners are welcome, but what we need from participants is for you to come prepared with at least one good story for a short listening passage. I'll add you as contributors to the two blogs and get you to post your story (as text) to this blog and/or email it to a Posterous one at http://fromreading2listening.posterous.com/. And we'll see how each of these can be enabled with Odiogo to create the listening exercises that will benefit our students.

The last step will be to label our posts writingmatrix and fromreading2listening (see the "labels" for this blog post).  When readings are posted, we should set up additional tags for beginner, intermediate, and advanced, to distinguish the types of listening passages there are. The listening passages will be created in podcast format automatically when Odiogo renders our posts from text to speech.

If others around the world create similar blogs, they can tag their posts similarly to ours, and in theory we should be able to find one another's posts using blog searches such as Technorati, e.g. http://technorati.com/search?usingAdvanced=1&q=fromreading2listening&return=posts&source=all&topic=overall&authority=all&sort=date&x=65&y=13.

So, be thinking of a story of particular use to second language learners (we can try out different languages ;-), and hope to see you online, or find out from you later if this might be of any benefit to you and your students (leave comments below if it is, thanks :-).