I missed class on February 27th because I was in California visiting my brother in Los Angeles. My blog post will include Vocaroo, which was covered in the mini lesson, as well as technologies covered in the reading for the week.
Vocaroo is a service that allows you to send voice messages through the web. According the general information on their site, it is still in BETA, meaning that it is still under development, and problems may occur.
I went to the Vocaroo website and spent some time playing around with it. I am impressed with the ease of use. You are presented with a clean, simple website with a single button that you click on to record. Once you are finished recording, you click it again to stop. Once you are happy with your recording, you save it. Next you are presented with a variety of sharing options including: send to Google, Facebook, email, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, or you may bookmark your recording in your browser. I emailed my recording to myself, and received a link to click on to listen to my recording. The quality of the recording wasn’t outstanding, but you could still hear what I was saying.
Vocaroo can be an exciting tool to use in the classroom. If students are preparing to give an oral presentation they can practice and record it, listen to it, and try again at any time. Voice messages seem almost like text messages, but slightly more personal because you can hear the persons voice allowing you to hear tone and volume shifts in their voice. Students can record and send messages to other students or classes anywhere in the world. Perhaps they could take turn exchanging questions or ideas.
Richardson, Chapter 8, discussed podcasting, video and screencasting, and live streaming. Podcasting was the first topic of the reading. Although I do not have a Podcast of my own, I have listed to a few others, such as NPR on iTunes. You need limited materials to begin a basic podcast: a digital audio recorder that can create an MP3 file, some space on a server to host the file, a blog, and an idea or topic to blog about. It is easy to create a podcast as well as subscribe to others. There are many podcasts by people all over the world discussing a wide variety of topics, making it easy to find one that you are interested in.
According to Richardson, elementary students love podcasting, and older students are becoming more interested in video, probably because of YouTube. Since YouTube is blocked at most schools, educations have begun to use sites like TeacherTube.com because they are free and house many videos produced by students and teachers. To make a video you need a video camera; I know that many digital cameras have video capabilities as well. Students and teachers can edit with software such as MovieMaker and iMovie.
Screencasting is a process that is one step up from podcasting. A screencast would be excellent to use in the classroom because you can create a narrative to go along with what you are doing on the computer. Teachers or students can create training videos, Internet, program or software “tours.” This has potential to be a good learning tool for teachers, students, parents, or peers. Students would learn a lot from setting up their own screencast and walking others through a process or new program that they have already learned.
A great example of a screencast suggested by Richardson: tinyurl.com/ydp2sfg
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