#LangChat-ing It Up

So last night was my first 'real' teacher chat experience on Twitter. And I survived! :D

I say survived because I had tried to follow an #edchat conversation a few weeks ago, but found myself just lurking while trying to keep up with the super fast flow of discussion. Even with using TweetChat to help regulate the influx of tweets I found myself feeling a bit overwhelmed and lost. But knowing all of the good things that can come from a chat session I was determined to give it another go... and I'm very glad I did.

I decided that since I'm a foreign language teacher I should check out a #LangChat discussion. They meet every Thursday at 5pm PST (8pm EST), so I set a phone alarm for 4:55pm so I wouldn't miss it. With my Tweetdeck open and other distractions aside I was ready to go this time! I also decided it might be a good idea to drag my #LangChat column over next to my Interaction column in Tweetdeck too, just in case, and it helped tremendously when I was trying to see who had responded to me so I could reply back.

Ok, on to the actual chat. The topic was, "What are some strategies that help strengthen students' reading skills?" The discussion was fluid, interesting, friendly, and not overwhelming at all--there were enough people posting that discussions were insightful and productive, yet not so many that I couldn't keep track of it all. I was able to give out some suggestions of my own and was happy when I could respond to someone's question or add to the conversation. I came away with a bunch of new ideas on how to encourage reading in my Spanish classroom, new educators to follow on Twitter, and some new followers myself. The best part about it for me is having applicable professional development and conversation with educators all over the world at my finger tips--pretty awesome! Overall, I highly recommend participating in a Twitter chat if you can--it was a great experience and one that I will definitely be doing again soon!

Adding Subtitles to YouTube Videos

For one of my other classes we were required to record ourselves teaching so that we could analyze it in class and find ways to improve. It sounded like a great idea.... except that I teach Spanish and very few people in that class speak Spanish.

Hmm.... How are they going to understand what I'm doing or saying to help me improve without a ton of pausing/stopping/explaining? I know! SUBTITLES! :) Perfect for a Foreign Language teacher!

The basic process of adding subtitles, or closed captioning, to YouTube videos is pretty easy and straight forward using CaptionTube, a Google-based Beta program. I used this site to help guide me, but here are the steps summarized in my own words.

1. Upload the desired video to your YouTube account. 
2. Go to CaptionTube; Sign-in with your Google account and select a video to upload/sync.
3. Click 'edit' next to the video to get started.
4. Click 'add caption' at the spot in the video where you would like the text to appear and type your text into the box. 
5. Then adjust the caption start time and duration to ensure it starts and ends where you want it to. Use the CaptionTube Help page for shortcuts, visuals, and other FAQs.
   (I did a lot of pressing 'play'/'pause' to know where in the video I wanted the caption and where I wanted it to end--if I had seen the shortcuts earlier, I'm sure it would have been faster).
6. Once you've added all the captions you want, click 'publish', and select 'Publish on YouTube'. 

And voilà, you have a subtitled video. Pretty cool, huh? If the subtitles don't show up initially on your video, click the 'CC' button on the bottom right corner to turn them on. Here's an example video I captioned to show you how it looks when it's all done:



(Note: My class video was about 10 minutes long, and I speak quite quickly, so it took much longer than expected to write the transcript of my lesson and the caption it. BUT the captioning process itself is not difficult! Just don't choose a long video and expect it to go quickly. Also, having a typed-out transcript is really helpful for longer videos--you can just copy/paste into the caption box quickly once that transcribing part is done.)