Archive for May, 2010
A great software that can generate loads of kids audio books instantly!
Long ago, I used to have a software to convert text to audio. Its name was ReadAloud and it was open source.
I don’t know if anyone has tried this software (that still exists by the way), but it used to be quite painful to listen to the robot voice reading the text. You could barely listen to the voice more than 2 minutes, and you had to be extremely concentrated to be able to understand what was read.
Last week, while wondering if there had been any advance in that kind of software, I did some research, and I came across a lot of titles that pretend to read text. I did download all those I could find on the first two pages of google, and I can say that there has been a lot of advance in the text reading voices software field.
Now, instead of the robotic voice, the software titles come with many natural sounding voice options. The reading can be boring if the material we listen to is very long, but for a short kid story book or for classical children audio books, the result could be acceptable.
Below, I am including the link for one particular software that caught my attention because of the many options it has. For instance:
- It can convert any text including pdf and web pages to an audio format (mp3)
- It has many voice options, including american english, british english, french, spanish and german among other languages
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) comes with 1000 free ebooks
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) allows the creation of audio books with background music, echo, etc. which is great
This kind of software could be a great resource for parents looking:
- To easily and freely create children audio books for their kids of numerous kinds
- Improve their kids language skills
Please try it and give me your opinion.
Read Aloud
Cartoons v/s Kids Audio Books
Most children love cartoons (Adults too as a matter of fact), but what benefit do they take from cartoons?
Sure, cartoons are entertaining, and they can also develop a child’s imagination, but how do that compare to the advantages of audio books:
- When the child can see no image in front of him or her, his or her imagination is stimulated much more than if he or she can see an image
- When the child has no picture in front of him or her, he or she gets himself to concentrate, thus developing his or her concentration skills
- When the child can only rely on his or her hearing to understand what is going on in the story, he or she gets better at listening comprehension
These are only some of the advantages your child gets by listening to audio books of all sorts, whether they are kids story books, or christian audio books, or any children audio book for that matter, so it should be our duty as parents to encourage them from their young age to listen to audio books, and to allow them to get into that habit, and to make them derive pleasure from that habit, we need to select the good audio books, not just anyone that we can find around.
As stated in a previous post, I am conducting a study about the various kinds of childrens audio books that we can find on the web, and I will be posting the study results shortly. Stay tuned!
Free Children Audio Books – Do they have any value?
Generally, people are attracted by what is offered free of charge. While that behavior is only normal and makes one feel good, and feel like one has hit a jackpot, not everything that is given free of charge has value.
In the past two days, I have browsed the internet extensively in search of free childrens audio books, I have come across some of interest to which I will be linking in a separate section shortly. I have also come across many small kids audio books that are also of value, not because of the story or the way it is told, but because they are accompanied by a text that can be printed, and that can offer good value for someone learning a language. I will also be posting links about these shortly.
These free resources of value represent about 10% of all the free resources on the internet concerning kids story books, most of which are of little use from a parents and from a child point of view. Unfortunately, the best resources available in the form of audio books are paid ones, but it’s like everything in life, nothing is really free.
Christian Audio Books and Spiritual Development
In the hectic times we live or that we put ourselves into, and because we are busy all the time doing things for our work, for our home, for our family, and for our kids, we usually do not have enough time to develop ourselves spiritually. Throughout our life, we can become very rich financially, we can amass a large amount of friends and acquaintances, we can even reach to a point where we are at our best personally, but what it is of our spiritual development.
On Sundays, many times, we look for all kinds of excuses not to go to church. At times even we go, we are busy thinking about what will come next during our day, we get easily distracted by the voice of the priest, or what this and that person is wearing. This is especially true on occasions when we go to the church to witness the marriage of a friend or close person. In summary, we reach times where we are completely away from our christian and parish life, and by the same token from our christian values.
This emptiness in our spiritual life is not compensated for elsewhere. We barely read the bible, we rarely meditate, and on top of all that, our children follow our mediocre spiritual life, unconsciously by following our example. We later wonder why so many kids turn into delinquents nowadays, and we even tend to push away the thought that this may happen to our kids. In one sentence, we mask our eyes, and we make ourselves believe that things do not exist because we are not seeing them, while we have our eyes masked in the first place.
What if we can turn all this round in an easy way, not cumbersome, and rather easy to follow? What if we get ourselves to listen to christian audio books for a fixed number of minutes each day? What if we make it a habit not only to listen to christian audio books ourselves, but rather to play them or to play the bible for 5 or 10 minutes each day in family, and later meditate together about what we have just listened to? Would not that be an enriching experience both for ourselves and for our kids? Would not that put back on the right track to spirituality and self-fulfillment?
Today, we have incredible means to develop ourselves spiritually, in a fun and easy way, while involving all the family, and benefiting immensely from the experience. This can be done through the tens of christian audio book titles that we can find pretty everywhere, so we really have no excuse to remain on a dead road spiritually.