Love Podcasting and Thinking of Making One Yourself?: Vocaroo

Every student has different capacities to comprehend a new language. Some students are visual learners, some will require hands on experiences just to grasp a concept others might be auditory learners. Accordingly, teachers need to be tactical and stay attentive. It is this what known as cognitive abilities that can be the deciding factor of how effective a lesson is regardless of other factors. Multiple intelligence as put forward by Howard Gardner do deserve a place in learning. After all, what is a teacher if there is no student?

online voice recorder

Click on the button below to listen to a sample of a recording that I had created.

Editor's Review
★★★
Acceptable

The good: If anything is free, it is always be a good news to everyone. It has this ability to reduce background noises and focuses on the voice instead. Can embed, comes in widget version, can upload own voice recording from a variety of audio format, not cluttered with fancy design, easy to use that is click and record, can save your recording, share it on social networks or e-mail your recording to your friends, fast and can work on terrible bandwidth.

The bad: It's not fit for ad hoc music recording. Its sound quality is compromised and rather distorted. My acoustic guitar reverberates like an electric guitar. You can't expect a 10 minute recording with this tool. It is still a BETA. Max size to upload a file is just 50 mb. You can't add image or description to your recording. You can't crop or remix the voice.

The bottomline: It is an applaudable tool though it is still BETA. There are many more free online voice recording tools that are free online like audioboo, Voisse and Aviary Myna (is no longer here when this post is created) and a free downloadable tool, Audacity. Nevertheless, each has its own unique criteria that worth to be looked upon.

How to

 1. Click 'click to record'

2. If a message above comes out, choose 'allow'

3. Something like this will come out if you're doing it right

 4. You can retry if you're not satisfied with the recorded audio. If not, just choose 'click here to save'

 5. Use the embed code to embed the recording to your blog or e-mail it your friends. And try to be more adventurous to share it on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can also have it in the form of QR Code to be scanned by an iPhone.

Suggested Class Activities

Revision Material

Despite its limitation to its storage size and the time limit for each recording, it should not be a problem if a teacher can maximise its ability by creating short audio recordings that can sum up their today's lesson. The clips can be episodical and students can listen to recordings at their own will whenever they want. The likeliness for students to listen to the recordings is high since the recordings are short, concise and can be uploaded on social networks like Facebook, in which of course can be listen to when they are busy typing out latest comment to their Facebook friends.

Transcribe

Vocaroo has an inert feature whereby it can make the usage of authentic materials possibly challenging yet receptive. One way is to ask students to transcribe the podcast, in which may be an audio that is recorded from a transaction that happens at a coffee shop or a conversation between friends talking about football as such. This activity will be intended to improve students' listening for information skill that is crucial in note taking.

Language Learning On-the-Go for Foreign Language Learning

For the record, podcasts are widely used as a tool for foreign language learning. Record various useful phrases for communicative usage like essential social conventions in Japanese and students can listen to the recordings repetitively on their iPods or mp3 where they can practise  their pronunciation to your voice accordingly. This is like audiolingualism. However, you need to be extra careful since poor pronunciation from a teacher will result in poor pronunciation from students.

Be Strategic and Let's Talk 

Make a benefit out of the limitation, Vocaroo has just provided students with a context whereby they are only given with a limit of time to speak on a topic that they are assigned with. Consequently, students will need to be strategic, precise and creative when making their voice recordings. Give students a topic that can trigger their affective schemata and something that is interesting to both students and teachers to listen to. After all, you are about to listen to 25 voice recordings.

Make Birthday Wishes

I came out with this idea when I tried it first with my friend's birthday. It went well. Students can come out with birthday wishes to their friends or family or they can just make simple farewell wishes to someone they are close to. This activity primarily focuses on fluency over accuracy but you can adjust the activity based on your preferences.

Pair Work for Peer Feedback

Students can work in pairs and evaluate each other's performance. One reason why peer feedback is valuable is that students are likely to notice their own errors as they evaluate other's work (Hedge, 2005).

Rationale

Confidence

Some students are more likely to feel more confident when they speak without the fear of being watched. Vocaroo creates a barrier between the speaker and the listener.

Can be a Supplemented Material

As suggested, it can act as a supplemented material to your lessons. You can either intensify your lessons or fortify students' knowledge by highlighting important points to your lesson in the short recordings.

Students can work at Their Own Pace

There is no rush needed if you want them to make their own recordings. You can choose to assign Vocaroo as a homework or you can just ask them to do their recordings during the ICT class.

 

You can have a go of how Vocaroo works with this built in widget embedded to classhacks.

 
Powered by Vocaroo Voice Recorder

Reference

Hedge, T. (2005). Writing. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.