Drawing with Bamboo Fun

I'm always looking for easy ways to make digital artwork and paintings. People always seems to need artwork for flashcards, games, picture dictionaries, and classroom posters, but using clip-art is not always appropriate.

My mother was a painter, and recently that's made me want to try to teach myself how to do digital illustrations. I called Mike Blum in our IT department, who recommended a painting tablet from Wacom called Bamboo Fun.

Bamboo Fun really is fun. For $99, you get the drawing tablet, a cordless, pressure-sensitive "pen", and a CD with Corel Paint and Photoshop Elements. It all seems pretty easy to use, and I really enjoy trying to reproduce the look of watercolor or pastels.It helps, of course, if you have something to draw from, even if it's just a photo. Corel Paint also has a feature where you can import a photo and trace around it, which is great for making coloring books.
I've obviously got a lot to learn still about painting, but having the right tools is a big help. Maybe if I keep practicing, my next drawing of a duck won't look so sick!

Two Games: Choskani Foskani and King Frog

For the last three weeks I've been in Louisiana doing my best to help with a Koasati language workshop. Our goal was to produce language teaching materials for little kids and for sixth graders. Each day we started the workshop with a game that could be used to teach a language. Here are two of the games that we enjoyed playing.

Choskani Foskani

Choskani Foskani is like the game "Telephone", except that it's a competition between two teams.

One person is the teacher. The others are students and form two lines. The teacher writes down something the students have been learning (a word, a sentence, etc.) on two pieces of paper. The teacher shows the message to the two people at the front of the lines. Each person in each line then whispers the message to the person behind them. When both lines are done, the last person in each line reports what they heard. A team getting the right answer gets one point.

We called this game Choskani Foskani, because we started with the Koasati sentence "Chinchoskanik hoopahchi?" (Is your duck sick?), which is what one person said when he saw my duck t-shirt. By the time it had gotten to the end of the line, it had become Choskani Foskani, a name we'll never forget.

King Frog (aka Thumper)

Stephanie Hasselbacher taught us this game.

Everyone stands in a circle. One person starts by acting out a word or short phrase and saying it. Examples might be thatho ‘fish’, biitlil ‘I’m dancing’, or chakaay ‘I’m full’. The next person to the right repeats that action and adds another. Then the third person repeats the first two actions and adds a third, etc.

Making Electronic Flashcards

Flashcards are a great way for students to memorize vocabulary. In the old days, we'd make flashcards by cutting up slips of paper and writing the English word on one side and the target translation on the other side. These days it's easy to do the same thing online.

CueFlash is one site that makes it fun and easy to make flashcards. You can search for an existing deck of flashcards, like this one for Coushatta tame animals. Or you can make your own flashcards by signing up for a free account. CueFlash allows special characters, but it isn't easy to enter them. The simplest way is probably to find the character you need on a website somewhere, and then to paste that into CueFlash.

CueFlash is designed for use on the web. If you're willing to download a program, you can make more sophisticated flashcards. One of the best free programs is Anki, which allows you to use images or sounds instead of words as the cues. The instructor could prepare decks of cards, and students would have to download the Anki program and the prepared decks.CueFlash and Anki both use programs that repeat flashcards based on how well you know them. The Anki system is more advanced, but CueFlash is more convenient.

Learning a language requires a great deal of memorization. Flashcards are an old-fashioned memory system that, with a few updates, still serves a useful purpose.

Designing a T-shirt

One way to boost pride in a language is to make the language visible with t-shirts, books, bumper stickers, and signs. These days designing a custom t-shirt online is really easy. I decided to make the shirt below.The first step was to make the drawing. I used a free online drawing program called artpad to make my masterpiece. I then took a screenshot of the image (pressing CTRL+PrtSc in Vista), and pasted that in a free image editor called IrfanView. That made it possible to crop and save the image on my desktop. Then I opened up a browser and went to Zazzle, a company that does custom printing. I selected the type of shirt, uploaded my image, and added the Coushatta label "chos-ka-ni". The resulting t-shirt cost $15.95 + $4.50 for shipping. And it's one of a kind!

I can't wait to tell people I'm Duck Clan!

Making a Cartoon Strip with Stripgenerator

Stripgenerator.com is a site that makes it easy even for people who can't draw to make cartoon strips. You can choose between various beings or animals, add objects, and then add balloons with text in your favorite language.

Creating a cartoon strip would be a fun class activity for kids, and the best cartoons could be published in a school paper or newsletter.

Using PowerPoint to Make a Language Lesson

Last week I reviewed Mango Languages and suggested that the basic format of their lesson could be recreated in PowerPoint and exported to Flash using free software like authorPOINT Lite. I sheepishly admitted that I had never used PowerPoint before, but I promised to give it a try. So here's a lesson in Koasati, designed to teach a short conversation involving greetings. Press the big play button, and then press the >> key to advance each slide.

This lesson would have been better with a bilingual person as the narrator. I used clip art for the image of "Jae", but using an image of someone in the community would have been more fun. I'd like to test it, too: This dialogue might be too much for someone to learn at once. Still, it does seem possible to make lessons like this using inexpensive materials.

Learning from Mango Languages

Last week I went to the local library to see what language learning materials they had. I like to go periodically to brush up on a language and to see what methods are being used to teach languages via CD's, cassette tapes, CD-ROM's, books, and videos. This time I was surprised to see that the local library subscribed to a web-based service called Mango Languages. (Even if your library doesn't subscribe, you can try out the first lesson in nine languages for free.)

The method used in these lessons is similar to Pimsleur and several other products you'll recognize if you've ever tried to learn a language from a cassette. I would call it programmed learning: small bits of vocabulary and patterns are fed to the student, who is quizzed with enough repetition so that the pattern sticks.

I always secretly liked this type of learning: I could learn at my own pace, skip forward if I wanted, and choose not to learn some expressions I knew I'd never use. Plus, for someone who finds it hard to start conversations, having a store of dialogues memorized makes it surprisingly easy to be sociable in a second language. And my impression is that these older cassette programs were more effective than programs like Rosetta Stone, which are strong on graphics and weak on pedagogy (see one librarian's amusing comparison here.)

Another aspect of Mango Languages that interests me is that it's essentially a slide-show broadcast on the web using Flash. Millions of people already know how to make multimedia PowerPoint slide-shows like this, and there are free programs like authorPOINT Lite that can convert those to Flash. So in principle, there's nothing stopping those working on endangered languages from making similar products in their spare time.

I have a confession, though: I've never used PowerPoint! This week I'll try to remedy that, and I'll post whatever I come up with!