I’ve decided to give this topic its own post. It takes me back to my first day of learning Brazilian Portuguese with Mike Peto this summer and I have not stopped thinking about it for the past 25 days. In fact, we are still using these activities daily in our classes, and I still love them. 

I feel like this post should also say: Feeling accomplished! 

“AHA” Moment ~ Day 1: The Song 

This reflection takes me back to day and hour 1 of my Brazilian Portuguese learning experience. I really hated to start the prior post with this aspect of the class because it is not the core of any lesson but I loved Mike Peto’s use of a song. 

So what has he created? They are web-based activities in which you click on a sound bite from a song and then you have to match it with either the written Portuguese and English or, for more of a challenge, just the English meaning. This activity does a great job of breaking a song into meaningful chunks that you hear and make connections to the written word and meaning. His activity also randomizes and creates a new activity each time you do it based on any number of sound bites that he included for that song. For members of Mike’s yearly subscription to his Master Class via his website you can access and use the songs that he has prepared in Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, but now I cannot stop thinking about how to do this with the favorite songs I teach. 

Many of his virtual students have liked the song activities because in his follow-up classes he said that he’s received many emails about how to make the great song activities. Since this “AHA” moment I have looked for a way to replicate this song experience with my own students. Mike did provide us with his “how- to-guide” but it includes understanding HTML and servers and many steps of coding that frankly are beyond me, and he even did not recommend we try to replicate it without having that skillset.

So after twenty-four days, I finally figured out how I could create my own versions of the activities. After thinking through all of the online learning options like Quizlet and so many others, I realized that I should be able to accomplish it using my Voces Digital Teaching Platform (The only other online platform that I think might provide a similar experience is the paid version of Educandy). So after many hours of trial and error and some help from their Lead Developer, Kris Warshefski – we got it. It is still a lot of work because you have to create individual sound bites for the song and do the same with the lyrics but once it is done, it is done 🙂  If you are using the Voces Platform, let me know and I can share my template with you.

To create the individual sound bites as MP3 files, I used a program called Free MP3 Cutter Joiner; it is freeware but I did donate a bit to continue using the program (there may be a work around to not donate but I did not try to figure it out). I know Audacity could be used also, but I have bad memories of trying to work with that program in the past. The one I found was simple and painless. 

Before cutting the sound bites as MP3 files I found the lyrics to the song and made sure that each “Word Chunk” was on a separate line. I then used Magic School AI to translate the lyrics to English with a prompt like: “Translate the following song to English, writing the English next to each line:” The Chatbot’s response to me was “Here’s the translation of the song into English, line by line.” The result was what I wanted, generating the song lyrics in the format: “Word Chunk/Lyrics in Spanish – Lyrics in English.” After this I started to cut an MP3 of the song into the sound bites I would need. 

I then started to create the activity using the Voces Digital Teaching Platform’s Editor, which in itself has a learning curve. When things did not go my way and I needed one more feature to produce the perfect activity that I wanted, I reached out to Kris for help and it was solved a few hours later. The result is a clickable version of the picture above, and as I said, I am Feeling Accomplished!  (Again for Voces Digital Subscribers I can share my template with you, and you would just have to upload the sound bites and lyrics). 

Gary  

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