TinyChat

TinyChat looks to be a very useful little Twitter-related tool for meeting up with students or colleagues on the fly, especially if you have a Webcam built into your computer. It's free and anyone can enter by typing in a nickname--or you can make the chat private.


My own room is at http://tinychat.com/twitter/ElizabethHS

Thanks to fellow Webhead, Rita Zeinstejer for the tip.

My Interview on Absolutely Intercultural

I was very pleased to be interviewed by Anne Fox for Absolutely intercultural. It's a great podcast for learners, carefully planned and executed, and Anne has a terrific speaking voice.

Our interview topic was language learning websites, and I spoke about my experiences with using Babbel (see my earlier blog on that). Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the time to keep up with it, but I notice I am getting a lot better at following conversations on TV programs in Spanish, so I guess it was of some use.

Embedded Chat Widgets

Although I have found it inconvenient for users (and me) to have interactive widgets on this blog, one of these might be useful for a wiki page as it could be more self-contained.

Suggestions from the Webhead elist include (from Robert Squires):

Yackpack - the Walkie Talkie Widget formerly available directly on PBWiki, and which has Voicegroups.

Meebo - you create your own chatroom and paste the code into the sidebar of your wiki or blog.

Gabbly - the PBWiki default, was mentioned several times as having horrible advertisements that you can't get rid of. However, any person who visits the wiki can chat with other visitors who are there at the same time while with Gtalk or Meebo, the visitors can only chat with the owner of that widget (ie.e, the creator of the wiki) but not with each other (per Negiz in a responding email).

Robert also offered an interesting blog site with a list of ten more chat widgets: ReadWriteWeb.

I followed this breadcrumb trail and found an interesting site, built by Kiernan, that strings together YouTube videos so that you get continuous play, one after another, on a particular subject (in this case rock groups). Anyone can add a video without a password, though this feature might present problems in a school setting. Nice code, though a little removed from the original subject, chat widgets: http://www.chann3lz.com/.