Sound Animator

Blog #4
I wanted to blog about the sound animator that was posted in Blackboard, I think it is a great tool. I specially liked it because not only was I able to hear the sound of a letter, but also it showed me where it was located. I used the sound animator quite a bit at the beginning of the semester. It definitely helped me with my homework. Using the sound animator reminded me of a year ago. Last spring, I was doing community service at Lane Elementary. I was fortunate enough to work with a special child who needed help in various academic areas. He was eight years old and had a major speech and memory problem. Everyday we worked on saying the alphabet, that wasn't working, so his teacher suggested that we try something new. I began showing him a DVD that had pictures for each letter of the alphabet, and it showed how to pronounce the word. For example, the first was a picture of an apple, then it would say the sound "a," this is "a." The student would repeat after the DVD. He seemed to learned the alphabet much faster like that. I'm not sure if this is consider phonetics, but it was definitely focus in the pronunciation of the alphabet. The sound animator was similar, I was able to repeat after the voice.