List member, Eliot Frosst points us to a site that will be very useful to
all of the French Immersion Teachers and FSL teachers in the early grades.
He suggests that you take a look at the “Comptines” the song sets, some have
musical scores, words are often done in a very printable format and some
have basic music with them.
The URL:? http://www.momes.net
I should have clarified yesterday that I was going to also be taking a break
from Dec 20 to Jan 5…? Therefore, there is no need to suspend your acct
for the Christmas break.? I usually try to remind the ?down-under? gang that
they can suspend because they start their summer break at this point in the
year…
Today?s site, Audacity, was shown to me by my friend, Steve Fitzjohn.? Steve
explains more below:
?Audacity is a free sound editor that allows the user to record, edit and
export sound files.? I’ve been using it lately to record students’
presentations in a French as Second Language course.? The built-in sound
recorder that comes with Windows XP has a one minute time limit and limited
editing abilities.? Audacity allows cutting, copying and pasting of an
unlimited number of sound tracks of virtually unlimited time and size.? It
imports and exports in multiple formats and, with the addition of a plug-in,
downloadable free from another site, will export to MP3 as well. It runs on
Win, Mac and Unix.? You can choose from several sample rates when recording
voice to lower the file size to a reasonable size.? This program has made
use of a tape recorder obsolete in my classroom.? I highly recommend
Audacity.
One note that may help users recording sound:? I found that a small, highly
sensitive microphone that came with a WebCam I purchased is the best for
capturing student`s voices.? You might also have to go into the sound Volume
Controls in Windows, click the button for Advanced Control for the
Microphone then check the option for the Mic Boost.? This increases the
sensitivity of the microphone.?
The URL:? http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
For those of you looking for a new Internet browser, one of my students,
Justin, showed me this new one from Mozilla.org…
The URL:? http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/
My old pal, Mark Bouwmeester, wrote in about one more good tutorial site:
While you’re on the topic of free web design sites, another great one is W3
Schools.
It has very straight forward introductory tutorials to HTML, XHTML, and CSS.
They also have more advanced tutorials for things like Java Script, ASP, PHP
and lots of other acronyms 
? Along with the tutorials they offer
try-it-yourself examples that let you play with the code and see the effects
of your changes immediately.? The site is kept up-to-date and the tutorials
deal with the most recent web standards.? It’s an all round great resource
for learning about web publishing.
The URL:? http://www.w3schools.com/
