sabbatical logs

​The more I work on the project and hear these women’s story, the more excited I get about what I am doing, what I am learning and what my students can learn.  The editing process can get a bit tedious and sometimes I find myself, after hours of listening, re-listening, and listening again, speaking like these women with their accents and tone…it makes me laugh.  Anyway, I had to go back several times and reduce some picture sizes for the Janina video.  The file size is too big to upload to the website so unfortunately the quality of photos is not the best but it’s the audio and what is being heard, the listening that is the important part.  I am now working on Lena’s video and editing; however, I am finding the audio quality is not the best due to all the noise in the background.  I interviewed her at her family’s deli and it was very busy—so all that background noise comes in…I decided to add some subtitles even though Lena speaks in English.  I thought the slides with the subtitles could be used as future lessons for my students.  Some slides are written in English for clarity, some slides are written both in English and Italian and some only in Italian.  These slides can be used as an example of what my students can do in case their own sound quality of their recordings are not the best and also used as translation lessons.  I will be adding a tab on the website for possible lessons that can be taught from the videos…I can see these lessons for Foreign Language classes, History, or English Electives…it’s fairly multi-disciplinary.  For the rest of the week, I will be taking a break from all this and come back to it after the Holidays!  Happy Holidays!