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English/Portuguese and Chinese/Tagalog?

By Barbara Dieu · May 20, 2005

Avatar Guilherme CJ is in Taiwan while Rodrigo, Pedro, Guilherme, João and a group of students live in Portugal. They have been Having Fun in English. They chose a SitePal avatar to represent them and recorded introduction messages to their friends. They not only exchanged voice mails in English but also managed to teach each other some words in the languages they speak at home and show their artistic talents.

Send them a voicemail as well, tell them where you are and add some words in your own language.

The ladies behind this intercultural multimedia interaction are two of the most active Webheads in Action: Aiden Yeh in Taiwan and Teresa Almeida d’Eça in Portugal.

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Previous: Blogging and Poetry in Sallaumines
Next: Our English Class Two

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Link to this comment! John Hibbs wrote on May 20, 2005:

It is hard to imagine an group of English language instructors operating any more inventively, innovatively than those mentioned here.

Correct that. It is hard to imagine anyone operating any more inventively, innovatively in any kind of work.

Nice work. Very, very nice work!!!

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Link to this comment! Candace Pauchnick wrote on May 20, 2005:

What a joy to learn about such an awesome project. These two outstanding teachers are certainly world leaders in education. Teresa and Aiden,you are real trail blazers! It’s teachers like you who give the rest of us motivation to try new things. Many, many cheers for your creativity, all your dedication, time, and true love of teaching. Your students are lucky indeed!!!

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Link to this comment! Cristina wrote on May 20, 2005:

You are amazingly innovative and you really make English a language to have fun with.

Your students are lucky to have you as their teachers!

Congratulations on the extraordinary work!

;-)
cris

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Link to this comment! Marleigh Greaney wrote on May 20, 2005:

What a great project! Reading about such a project has made my mind race a mile-a-minute; I am going to think about how I can implement something similar. I can’t imagine how much your students must enjoy and benefit from such a collaboration. Congratulations to both of you, Teresa and Aiden!

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Link to this comment! rosa wrote on May 21, 2005:

Fantastic project Tere & Aiden!
I’ve posted it for my students to ‘hear’. You are inspiring many of us to try new things all the time. Many thanks!

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Link to this comment! aiden wrote on May 21, 2005:

Dear Bee,

Many thanks for featuring Tere’s project here. My son has enjoyed the asynch. interaction and he’s thrilled to hear his own voice. CJ also find learning new languages exciting. He would sometimes ask or tell me, “Mama, Hola means Hello, right?” and he’ll give me a run-down of all the words that he has learned. I think this project with Tere has given my son a renewed spirit to use English more often, and I hope that he’ll keep this spirit with for a long time.

Aiden

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Link to this comment! susan burg wrote on May 21, 2005:

Hello everyone!! I have just sent one of my student’s voice mails to you in an email attachment so I hope you can listen to it. It is very clever and so is Lorenzo, my student. I might tell my virtual group about this group, some of them would enjoy it!!
baci
Susan in Florence

P.S. let me know if you find Lorenzo’s work, if not I will find another way to get it to you.

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Link to this comment! Rudolf wrote on May 23, 2005:

Hi Susan—welcome to Dekita.org and thanks for passing Lorenzo’s voicemail along! I converted it to the mp3 format and uploaded it to our server.

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Link to this comment! Teresa wrote on May 24, 2005:

Hello teachers!
You have a very nice page!! :-)
Thank you for your comments,we are very happy,excited and drooling.

We hope to have a nice surprise in our blog/plog!
Pleassse, send us more messages!!!!

Bye-bye from the drooling class(6ºF)

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Link to this comment! Alyne wrote on May 25, 2005:

Hello, Teresa and everyone… I’ve been recording my pupils’ voice as well and they are about the same age as yours thought they are not as fluent yet! So far, they have written to introduce themselves (http://6i63.blogspot.com/)and used their voices for “fiction”: they’ve recorded voices for little monsters they have created (http://alynepiazza.neuf.fr/pupils/monsters/accueil.htm). Everything is not online yet, but I think I may put a little extra pressure on them by suggesting they record their voices for you!
Next year, I intend to try using skype for real conversations… Have you ever tried that?

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Link to this comment! susan burg wrote on May 27, 2005:

Rudolf…thanks for your cool work!! Must tell my class to listen in!! Have more wonderful people to show off here. For example, my student Elena Baldacci has joined in the group, talking about Sweet Dreams!! Very nice.

Ciao a tutti!! Susan

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Link to this comment! Teresa wrote on May 28, 2005:

Hi, Alyne!
I’ve just listened carefully to your students’ recordings and read your blog. Very nice work! Kudos to you all! :-)
I will include your message and my comment in our blog.
I’m updating the blog and hope to have a couple of surprises by Sunday evening. They worked very well on Tuesday and we had a couple of first experiences.
I’ve tried Skype with friends,but not with my students. I plan to have them experience a voice chat before the end of the school year only 4 weeks away, probably at Yahoo Messenger.
Let’s keep in touch!
Teresa

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Link to this comment! fabrizio agostini wrote on June 02, 2005:

Congratulations for your work!
I have only seen a small part of your site, but I like it very much.
I will certainly suggest it also to the English teacher of my school, I’m sure they will be very interested in it.

Thanks to our teacher Susan for having suggested this site to us.

bye
fabrizio

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