Who is also in Classroom 2.0 here that knows bilingual education & biliteracy ?

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Permalink Reply by Jean Gerardi on April 13, 2008 at 6:40am

Hello Jorge,
I am new to classroom 2.0 and your discussion question on biligualism caught my eye. Are you in California? I am an American elementary school teacher. I have been living and working in a "bilingual" private school (grades k-12) in Buenos Aires, Argentina for the past 10 years. What do I mean by "bilingual"? Students are taught all subjects in English and Spanish. English instruction is from 8:30-12:00 daily with an English speaking classroom teacher and then we break for lunch. After lunch the "Spanish teacher" takes over and continues with her national curriculum until 4:30pm. (middle school and high school even later!) In the morning, we teach all subjects: math, science, social studies, etc. completely in English. Our language Arts curriculum comes from the Cambridge International Primary Programme (England). They monitor the students' progess and achievement through standardized test scores. One challenge we face is environment, our students do not come from English speaking families, nor are they surrounded by the language in their environment,as Argentina is a Spanish speaking country. However, our greatest asset is the desire to learn and the willingness of our students. As I mentioned above, the school is a private school and parents pay a monthly tuition fee. (directly related to the parents desire for their children to succeed..hahaha) Why do they choose bilingual education? What I hear from the parents is a "recognition" of the importance of English in the world today. And yet I think it is fundamental for Americans to also learn other languages, as you mentioned above. So after this long explantion....sorry... I just wanted to say... I hope you continue teaching "foreign languages", and we in "foreign countries" will continue teaching English and hopefully one day our students can meet somewhere in the middle on the bridge that we helped build to close the gap. Thanks for reading this.

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Permalink Reply by Philip Wagner on December 31, 2008 at 8:00pm

Hello,
The following shows how to make a "Karaoke-Style Captioning-Subtitles video".

First I use AVI2WAV to save the audio from the video. I then use Audacity audio editor to know what is said in video one sentence at a time. I separate the sentence from the rest of the video's audio in Audacity and save the audio. I bring the audio just saved into Audacity, clean it up a bit and slow it down 30 using the effect Tempo and save it with a different file name. Having heard the sentence enough that I remember it well enough to type the sentence using Wordpad. Wordpad is in richtext format. It is important to keep it in richtext. Next I highlight the text which will be the sentence that becomes the captioning-subtitle. I make the font larger and use the bold font I copy the sentence by using edit/copy. In microsoft Paint I load a picture from the video, which I had captured, and paste the sentence onto the picture. With some editing I make the sentence fit in well with the picture. I save the picture which now has the captioning-subtitle in it. In Paint then I put a rectangle around the first word in the sentence, reverse the color and save the picture with whatever name and two zeros after the file.name. I put a rectangle around the second word, save this picture as I did the in the previous picture except instead of 00 it is saved as 01, and so on. I use Audacity audio editor to save individual sentence audio clips. I load the pictures saved in Paint to Microsoft Movie Maker. The sound needs to be synchronized with each individual word highlighted. Individual frames at the timeline need to be wide enough to click on them to change the width of the frames according to how long it takes for a word to be said. There may be pauses or slowness when a person says a sentence so these frames are made wider to slow down the movement of individual word-frames so the sentence a person says is in rhythm/synchronization. Longer words require wider frames. Certain words like at, in, it, or, etc. require the frames for these words to be narrowed to speed up the rhythm because they are said faster.
Movie Maker is the only application that I know which does this. I happened upon this function by accident about six months ago. I was lucky to come across this function. I don't read much how to do something, Instead I tinker around because I like using different multimedia applications and I don't like paying for any of them if it is at all possible. I have bought many but only when I couldn't find what I want from freeware.
The process of making the videos for a Mac can be done if there is a word processor which has the equivalent of writing a sentence like in Wordpad's rich-text-format, and then highlighted and copied. A paint application must also allow highlighted and copied sentences to be pasted into a picture previously loaded into the paint application. Unfortunately, not all word processors nor all paint programs allow these things to occur. You can download a Mac version of Audacity at Sourceforge.net.
That is probably more than you wanted to know about the process. Thanks for your patience and attention.
.If you have any questions please email me. philip5147@aol.com
Phil Wagner

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