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.

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)

1. I was all ears
2. I heard it through the grapevine
3. You could hear a pin drop
4. I couldn’t hear myself think

Next week: Clothes: How does what you look like help you learn English?

It’s fantastic having the opportunity to teach and/or participate in a lesson in a virtual world written by a qualified, experienced
teacher who has thought about how to really get the best out of a virtual world.
Paul Swindells wrote this week’s lesson. He’s also known by his online
avatar’s name of ‘Zakarias Trenchcoat’. You’ve probably
met him in class or hosting one of LanguageLab’s specially organised student
events.

The gallery was full of paintings that exemplified the
past 500 years of Western Art. There were loads of interesting activities designed to help students, not just to increase
vocabulary and practice talking about art but to be able to describe things in detail and express opinions about the meaning
and central themes of the paintings.

My favorite activity was studying a painting for one minute then turning our backs to it and trying to describe it to our
partners in as much detail as possible without looking at it. It was interesting to talk about the western art tradition and
I learned some fascinating things from hearing the students’ presentations. I hope we can come back soon to practice English
and discuss art from other cultures.

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