Using the Internet to Help with Pronounciation

I know that I say this often, but I love getting the chance to work with other teachers when I teach a graduate class. I almost feel guilty because I learn new ideas every time I teach and I get paid for it! In all seriousness, I do learn many great ideas from my graduate and high school students alike.

One of the most recent ideas that I learned about came from one of my students from New Jersey, Christina. She was doing a project for my class and introduced me to a site called Forvo. It is a site that claims that it has "all of the words in the world. Pronounced." She was having her class read a story, which contained many Hebrew words. She decided to use the site to help correctly pronounce the words to her class, so that they would get a better understanding of its meaning and usage.

I decided to check it out and found it to be a useful site for any classroom in any subject area. Users have the ability to search through a library of audio files, which offer the correct pronounciation of any word in dozens of languages like English, Italian, Estonian, and even Mongolian. When you find your word, it will provide the link to an audio file, which will play the word.

One of the most unique parts of the site is that members can contribute by recording their own voice recordings to the site. It also provides different categories that users can find words in. For example, do you need to find a certain pop culture word? Are you studying about another culture and want to pronounce a certain holiday? There are a variety of words in a variety of characters to choose from.

Overall, I would say that this is a great site to use in any subject area because of the shear variety of words pronounced. Check it out and let me know what you think! Reply below with your thoughts.