Recording voice messages for your class, and audio feedback too!

Recording voice and uploading to a website or online course system may require certain steps, as you may have seen in my tutorials on how to use Audacity. Or it may be very simple if you just use a chat application that allows you to record a voice message and sends it back to your email as an mp3 file. You take that file, embed into your website or course, and that’s it…
This is what i tried with Google Talk and it worked really well, so I am going to share what I did:

1. I opened Google Talk and from my list of contacts I selected one and clicked on the arrow that shows me the option of sending a voice mail

Select voicemail in G Talk

2. The message will start recording after a “Beep”. When you are done recording you click “End Call”

Record and end call

3. When you ended the call, your contact will receive the mp3 file in their gmail, in this format:

G talk mp3 file and console in email

You can send a voicemail to yourself so that you receive that file, or you can have the contact send the mp3 file back to you.

4. Download the mp3 file and you can use it directly in your course, blog or website, or you can also edit it with audacity.

This is an example:

Sample of MP3 recorded in G Talk

How can I use that in my online course site?

1. Create a welcome message for your students

2. Provide audio feedback for their assignments

3. Add audio to images, screenshots or powerpoints

4. Create podcasts with information, minilectures or comments to your class.

“Say it” instead of “Type it”: Tutorial to produce audio for online interaction

Feedback is key in a teaching and learning interaction. In fully online courses, it helps to keep alive the flow of communication between the members of the virtual community (Scagnoli & Willging, 2003), and it increases the sense of “presence” of the instructor or classmates in the interaction (Ice et.al, 2007) .

Feedback usually took the form of text or talk, in face to face interaction. Now, with the easy access to more sophisticated and less costly (free!) voice recording applications, audio feedback has become more popular in teaching. Either as MP3 files or in other formats, instructors record their voices and post them on the web, in the Course Management Systems, or in sites such as iTunes, My Podcasts, Del.icio.us, so that they can reach the students with their comments. Some instructors even invite students to do the same, and post comments or their assignments using audio. This task has become more easy to perform due to better access and more flexibility in producing, storing and re-producing audio files. Educational and Social podcasting is another phenomenon that is changing the way that students and faculty interact.

Social bookmarking:Del.icio.us

Printable handout

“I have everything in my favorites in my computer, I cannot remember those URL when I am using your computer”, my friend complained as we were developing a training seesion. Then I asked: “Have you tried del.icio.us, or furl?”. “What are you talking about, I am talking computers here”…”me, too” I explained.

“How would you feel about having all your bookmarks or favorite sites in an Internet bookmark, as a list of favorites that you find in any browser, in any machine connected to the Internet?” I asked…”That would be a future perfect!” my friend exclaimed. “Let me take you to that future” I said, and I “walked her through” the del.icio.us tutorials online. “I can’t wait to try this myself”, she said, and a couple of hours later my del.icio.us account was being hit several times by my friend and I was receiving new and very interesting links from her, who, (of course) is in my network.

So what is so special about del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites?

Using Gizmo as a teaching resource

In this post I am going to introduce Gizmo as an application and as a teaching resource.

Gizmo5 operates on SIPphone VoIP platform and it offers free VoIP services. It is a new way to use voice, a way where calls were free. It is very similar to Skype but has some unique features that make it appealing for online conferencing

To read more about Gizmo, click below,