I was talking about Audacity and one of the activities our teacher has them open an original
file from the CD, and then they, the student hits record, “two, six, three, eat, it”
and hit stop, and when they play that back, “two, six, three, eat, it.” And when I
do a file export as an Mp3 it merges the two soundtracks together. So this is actually,
the CD soundtrack is here, and if I scroll down, this second soundtrack, no not that
one, this second soundtrack is my recording. So when I export it, it merges those two together.
So the teacher can hear the comparison. So that’s Voice thread, I mean no, not Voicethread,
I mean that’s Audacity. Do I want to save the changes? No. I would want to export, not
save. Vocaroo.com is a free, web-based recording.
The sound quality is not as good as Audacity or other computer-based recorders, but it
is simple to use from any computer with a microphone. That’s the advantage, that’s
why a lot of teachers use it. The audio from Vocaroo is not downloaded, but the link to
the audio file can be copied or embedded into an email or another web page. So once you
click to record, and you have click “Allow” always, then you’re recording, you’re
recording and then you put stop. And then down here it says it’s waiting, see that?
So now I have an option, I can copy the link and I can either put that link under the email
address or I can copy this code if I know how to embed a file. But I don’t have to
know how to embed, or the students don’t have to know how to embed, I can just copy
the link. But I can’t download the audio file and then load it on a podcasting site
for example. And then there’s PowerPoint. We shouldn’t
forget about PowerPoint because is actually a very powerful tool also for audio. It has
an audio recorder built into it that allows students to add their comments to PowerPoint
slides. Or what most of my teachers do is they record oral questions that are in the
slides so it combines, it has the picture, and then it has the teacher’s oral recording
of a question and the students will answer it either on paper or by recording their voice
on Audacity or another program. So we’ve talked about speaking through the
computer and asynchronous is kind of speaking to the computer, but there’s also speaking
around the computer. And you can always, even if you don’t have recording software, you
can always have the students speak around the computer. In other words, if you have
computers for each and every person in the class, there are still times you want to put
them into groups or pair, and have them work together with just one computer because that
way they going to acquire more language. So if you have two people working together on
one computer, they’re going to talking to each other, so that’s what it means to be
talking around the computer. They’re talking to each other to complete the process. We
always want to be thinking about the best way for our students to acquire the language.
And that’s usually not through independent work, to be honest with you. Usually students
will learn the language faster if they learn to collaborate with each other.