Sounds Good – Using Sound in the Virtual Classroom at Languagelab.com Blog

Sounds Good – Using Sound in the Classroom Listen, hear, eavesdrop,, heed, To get the best out of your English classes at languagelab.com you need to be able to use and change the sound. Today’s blog will help you listen to your teacher as well as the other students in your class. We’ll learn how to mute and control the sounds you hear when you are in lessons and interacting with other students and your teacher.
Setting up To set things up yourself click Edit > preferences > voice chat. Push ‘device settings’ and you can change where you sound comes from (input) and where you hear it from (output). You can also change how loud you will sound to other people in class. Please make sure that your speakers are turned off when you are in class, this make a terrible noise called feedback which everyone can hear. If you are having very big sound problems then there are languagelab helpers who can give you some advice. Listening to the teacher and other students Your teacher will often ask you to talk to other students in your class. This might be in pairs or in small groups. This is really important and gives all students the chance to practise speaking a lot. When you are talking to another student or students you can ‘mute’ all the other members of the class you are not talking to. There are two ways you can ‘mute’ another students. Click on the ‘nearby’ button at the bottom right of your screen and select mute for each person. (right)
or Right click on an avatar and choose ‘mute’ from the circle menu
Ambient Sound Often there are places in language lab where there are sounds from the environment. This might be the waves crashing against the rocks or the birds singing in the trees. If this bothers you, then you can turn it down or off. At the bottom right hand side of your screen you will see a picture of a speaker to the right of IM history, click this to see this dialogue box and change the sound settings. ‘Ambient’ and ‘sounds’ control things like birds and water.
Which one of these common English expressions means that there was a lot of noise? I was all ears I heard it through the grapevine You could hear a pin drop I couldn’t hear myself think Next week: Clothes: How does what you look like help you learn English?