More and more AI-powered sites are letting you create podcasts out of materials you provide to them – Google’s NotebookLM, Eleven Labs, PDF2Audio (learn more about them at The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners).
But all of those sites have a little “friction” to them – they require some extra steps to make them truly useful in the ELL classroom.
Thanks to Russell Stannard, who runs a great YouTube Channel for ELL teachers, I just learned about a new AI-powered tool that is, in my humble opinion, the best listening site for ELLs on the web – for now (these things change). I’ve embedded his video about the site at the bottom of this post, and it’s worth watching.
It’s called ZenMic, and it’s free – again, for now, at least.
You just type in anything you want it to create a podcast about (any topic you’re teaching, for example) along with other instructions.
For example, I typed in:
Create a very, very, very simple conversation between two people about the rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo. Make the vocabulary accessible to a first grader. This podcast will be listened to by beginning English Language Learners, so please speak very, very, slowly.
It created the script within seconds, and you’re given the ability to edit it, if you want.
Then, copy and paste the script if you want to be able to share it with students (I don’t believe there’s a way to do it after it’s recorded).
I would then copy-and-paste that script into ChatGPT and tell it to make it a “cloze” with a blank every three-or-four sentences where students would have to fill in the word while they are listening to it.
Next, you tell it create a podcast, which takes a minute-or-two, which you can download.
Here’s what it came up with:
Pretty cool!
Here’s Russell’s video:
More and more AI-powered sites are letting you create podcasts out of materials you provide to them – Google’s NotebookLM, Eleven Labs, PDF2Audio (learn more about them at The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners). But all of those sites have a little “friction” to them – they require some extra steps to make AI, ESL Web, listening Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…