Listening to Blogs

Scenario - Listening to Blogs

Blogs provide opportunities for students to read, reflect, and write in an open environment for learning through feedback, revision, and sharing. Converting them to spoken text enhances learning opportunities in different ways by empowering students to:

• Listen to blogs if they have a visual impairment.
• Read and listen to blogs at the same time to help improve their reading comprehension.
• Listen to their writing as a tool to spot repetitions, choppy phrases, awkward sentences, and misspelled words. Listening to spoken text can help students detect lack of rhythm and sentence variation in their writing.

Students can subscribe to the spoken text in each blog post as podcasts, which can synced to an iPod touch for mobile listening, although the text is not copied.

Click the Listen Now button at the top of this post to evaluate the quality of spoken text.

Software: Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad; http://odiogo.com

Hardware: iPod Touch (or iPhone)

Process for Blogger (works similarly with WordPress and TypePad)

• Go to http://odiogo.com and submit your Blog URL and e-mail address.
• Click the Add Odiogo Listen Button Widget
• Log on to your Blogger account
• Select the blog that you want to convert to audio.
• Click the Add Widget button.
• Rearrange the Subscribe to My Podcast Gadget in the Layout menu.
• Click the Save button.
• Click the Listen Now to hear your blog!
• Click the Subscribe to My Podcasts button.
• Click to Subscribe to the blog's podcast in iTunes. (audio-only)
• Copy the blog Podcast to an iPod touch and listen to the posts!