The Mixxer is an educational site which enables language learners to sign up to an online database and contact native speakers of the languages they are studying. Designed by Todd Bryant, language program administrator from Dickinson College, the service has allowed both autonomous students to meet other individuals or for teachers to set up group discussions. The Mixxer is free to use as it works via the popular VoIP telephony service Skype.
An English native speaker in England for example could contact a French native speaker in France so they could practise each other's languages through mutual support. If both parties agreed they could even record conversations allowing them to listen again later on their individual computers. See the FAQ list for more ideas on this topic.
Simon Ager, a language learner from Brighton, England who runs his own blog Omniglot had this to say about The Mixxer:
"This is a great idea and seems to work well - since I joined the site, I’ve chatted with people from Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Japan, Spain and Taiwan, practised my Chinese, Japanese and Spanish, and have learnt some more Russian and a bit of Bulgarian."
To hear more about the project, listen to this podcast from Barbara Sawhill's website LanguageLabUnleashed where Barbara chats to Todd about The Mixxer and how it has helped language learners network with each other across the world. The conversation starts at approximately 4 minutes 15 seconds in.
This really seems to be another great learning platform! Thanks for sharing!!!
Posted by: Anita | 26/09/2006 at 17:46
It certainly has potential. Being able to record conversations opens up even more new possibilities.
Posted by: Joe Dale | 26/09/2006 at 18:44
Hi there Joe -
After finding various places to host mp3s, and uploading photos to our blog, I finally discovered ohShare.com, where I can store worksheets and pdf file for students to download. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it, or whether you know of any other potentially better file hosting sites. To go back to the post above, we have just had skype installed in our interactive whiteboard classrooms, and are about to prepare for an attempt at videoconferencing with a school in Germany. Should be interesting!!
Posted by: Alex Blagona | 27/09/2006 at 20:09
Hi Alex,
Can you not upload word documents or pdf files to your blog? On Typepad, it's just a question of browsing for the file and uploading it. If you can't do that, I would consider changing to Typepad. You have to pay, but I think it's worth it.
Talking of pdf files, I've come across two useful sites for making free pdf files.
http://www.pdfonline.com allows you to upload a document in say Word and have it automatically sent to you as a pdf file to your email address with no need to download any software.
There is also http://www.cutepdf.com/index.htm which is free software for converting Word documents into pdf files.
Anyway, that is beside the point, I guess!
I'd be very interested to hear about your videoconferencing experiences. I'm in the process of writing an article on videoconferencing in MFL which I'll be sending to the TES soon. I'll keep you posted.
Best wishes
Joe
Posted by: Joe Dale | 27/09/2006 at 21:23