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Audacity is software for using sounds. You can record things, and edit them, and then save them and send them to other people. It is free, is available in English, Japanese and many other languages. You can use it with Windows, OSX (Macintosh) or Linux. I use it 3 or four times a week to make an audio podcast (like an Internet radio show). But you can use it in a few minutes to record your voice, or have your students record their voices, and send them to you for homework. Audacity uses lots of different sound formats, but most people use MP3, because it makes small files that any computer (or your iPod) can use.

On this sample here, you can see the buttons that look like a tape recorder. Use them to record and save your files. You can edit the sounds much like a word processor, cutting out parts you don’t like or adding background music if you want to get fancy. You can then use the sound files in presentations like PowerPoint, or to make examples for students, or put up on the Internet for people to download and listen on their iPods.

When your students are learning languages with the web, they will need to listen to sounds and to speak into a microphone. The easiest way to do this is to buy a headset, which is a set of headphones with a microphone coming out one of the earpieces. There are hundreds of models, and they aren’t very expensive, ranging from Y1,000 to about Y10,000.

Many manufacturers make models that are good enough for language learning for about 3,000 to 5,000 yen ($30-50).

A few simple things you should pay attention to when buying:

1) Get stereo, ones with speakers on both ears, not just one.

2) Get a noise canceling microphone if you can, it helps when you are in a noisy room.

3) Get a USB model, one that plugs in using the USB. The quality of sounds is better than the old fashioned ones with the “regular” plug.

Sony makes decent ones, but they are usually overpriced. I like Plantronics, and people I know in the radio business like them for podcasting too.

Originally called del.icio.us, you can find this web site at delicious.com.

Using Delicious has several advantages over regular bookmarks (or favorites). First, the sites you save are saved to the delicious computer, so you can access from any computer. Once you save a bookmark, you can give it many different tags (for example, my web site here might have 3 ro 4 tags, such as teaching, learning, language, tokyo, kevinryan, japan, computers, and women.  I can then search b any of these terms to find the web page I want.

By far the most important, though, is that you can share your bookmarks and tags with other people. You can find other people that are interested in the same kinds of things you are, and look at their bookmarks.

I often get all my students in my computer literacy class to sign up for delicious, and we make a small group to share bookmarks. When we do a research project, we can help each other find interesting sites. They are shared immediately and automatically. Very simple, very powerful.

Tagging is a simple concept with great power. Tags are similar to bookmarks (or favorites, in Internet Exporer), but they are also so much more. Tags are central to the new social media and web pages in the last few years.

Tags are labels. You can put as many tags on a web page as you like. That way, when you search for information, you can get different lists of web pages depending on the key words (tags) that you use.

Email, for example, in Google (called Gmail) is not put into folders to organize. You tag the emails you are interested in, sometimes with 3 or 4 tags, and then you put all your emails into one folder. It is easy to find simply by searching for tags. Tomorrow, I will show you a specific web site that does tags.