speaking, listening, and learning

Listen before reading for a justification about why incorporating audio recordings and tools can be useful and fun in the classroom.

1. Send students to Blabberize, and they can make objects speak by uploading a picture, giving it a mouth, and recording audio. Imagine the possibilities if the rosebush from The Scarlet Letter could explain its meaning in the novel, if a beaker could explain a lab procedure, if visual representations of vocabulary words could use the word in a sentence, or if national landmarks could justify their own importance. Chatterpix is somewhat similar, though it is an app for an iPad instead of an Internet-based tool.
2. Characters from stories and people from history can be brought to life with Voki, a tool that allows users to create an avatar and let it speak. Students can practice Shakespeare by creating a Romeo and recording one of his monologues, they can give the historical perspectives of famous or notorious leaders, and they can even create propaganda or public awareness campaigns without needing to record any video--with the added benefit that they can put a little more time into speaker credibility without needing stage makeup and costumes. My recommendation for using Voki for any sort of speech, commercial, or PSA is to ask students to create their product for three different audiences and explain how their message and speaker change for each.
3. What I love about Clyp is that students can record and share audio without the messiness of learning programs such as Audacity or converting and sending files. Clyp makes it easy to record a clip and save it as a unique URL for easy sharing, allowing students to record and share their own stories.
4. A tool very similar to Clyp is Audiopal. The major difference is that instead of housing an audio recording as a URL that can be shared like a website, Audiopal makes an audio recording that can be easily embedded into a website or blog. My recommendation is to use Clyp if the purpose of the assignment is to practice and evaluate speaking (the audience is the teacher or a few other students), and to use Audiopal if the purpose is to share the message (the audience is the world).