Software or Softwares?

Reading Ch 9 brought up an old question I have ... is it possible to say softwares? The dictionary shows it is not possible but what I have read in the internet says the contrary. How do you pluralize this word?

Anyway, going back to Ch 9 I love the tables this Ch presents, they are a great wrap up, but I think it would have been better to see this before even "learning" the many pieces of software in class. It could have been useful to create the web lesson and even the CMC activity knowing this tables, because it presents the kind of software and class activity, as well as the teaching difficulty level. With new software you never know how deep you can get or how difficult it would be, therefore having this summary before hand would have just eased the load in a meaningful way.

The list of Selected Authoring Software looks fancy, I didn't recognize many of them and those which I did are beyond my understanding. There are three programs we worked with in class: Audacity, Composer and Hot Potatoes and the latter is the one I like the most but sadly have spent less time on. It is tiring to collect pieces of software for diverse uses, this one for recording, this other for blogging, and this one for checking blogs ... I think too many products in the market will hinder people to play with many of them. Personally I like Google because it combines several features under a good umbrella.

Second Life and miscelaneous

Linda Jacoby's presentation was great! It was informative, interesting, paced, useful, clear, complete ... I learned that there is more about Social Networking than Facebook. I think I will not try to use it in class in a billion years, but also that professionals should not be that cautious about it, as Linda said you decide what you put on the web, and after it is there, there remains.

And Second life sounds like a video game to me, lots of time and energy are required, as well as some ability ... and I don't see myself using it in the near future, it is just time consuming. I may look around the page and if possible check a tutorial (a popular word in this class), but that is all. I have already created an avatar using other web page, so there is no much curiosity left.

When I was teaching adults in Colombia I was part of a project that was exactly about Social networking. We used Yahoo 360 and teachers and students were in touch through it. We taught students how to open e-mail accounts in English, build their avatars, make postings, use feeds and link their classwork to their site. I think it worked great, it was safe, educational and focused (students were not there to meet other people). 

The picture you see is the avatar I created long time ago. I chose to represent myself exactly the way I am, and I think I did it. It was fun to change my outfit and background according to the season, and obviously to be able to include my country in it with its flag. If you were to create an avatar, or already had, would you represent yourself the way you are in this one life?

Presentation and Hot Potatoes

Last week Dr. Evan Bibbee presented his way of working with wikies in a french as a foreign language class. It caught my attention that he has done this for three years now and that the project involved the cultural aspect of the language. He gave good tips on how to implement it and what he has learned by doing that project. I will definitely give it a try for my next Spanish class, one of the components of the course deals with culture, and a wiki will work great for online learners.

We also saw the so famous Hot Potatoes ... I had no idea it was that easy and most importantly free. I didn't get to actually do my own exercise due to time, but I can ambition this feature in the lessons' section in my web page. I bet with time I can turn old worksheets into catchy exercises using Hot Potatoes ... all I need is time and patience, sadly I have the latter but not the former.