I found it fun and interesting to explore the audio tools for this week’s sandbox. I used Audacity earlier this school year for a quiz in my English classes. Since we were all virtual at that time, I wanted to create a quiz using Google Slides that provided the students with audio for the short story and the questions that were based on the short story. I was able to use Audacity to record myself reading the multiple choice questions and answers. I think it was helpful for the students to be able to choose to listen to the questions and answers if they wanted to, while at the same time not bothering the students who didn’t want to use the audio.

I am teaching a new class next year that will give students the opportunity to read/listen to books that they are interested in. While I am not going to be assessing their reading, comprehension, or writing skills, I do still want them to share their thoughts about the novels they are reading. Keeping this new class in mind, I thought I could find an audio tool that would allow students to record their thoughts without having to make them write them down. I wanted to find a tool that didn’t require a lot of steps to use the tool or share their recording with me.  I looked at Vocaroo, but after recording myself I saw that I would have to save the recording to my laptop and then upload it to whatever platform or document in order to share it with others. I am concerned that I would lose some students with the extra step of saving the recording to their laptop and I don’t want to waste a lot of time showing my students over and over again how to save and then share their recordings with me.

Next, I explored SpeakPipe. I immediately noticed that it works with iPads, which is helpful since I am planning on my students using iPad to access ebooks and audiobooks. Users do not need to sign up or save recordings to a hard drive. After completing the recording, you can choose to save it to the server and then you get a link that you can share. I think I would create a spreadsheet-like document in Google Docs and have my students copy and paste the links in that one document so all their recordings are in one place. Here is a link of a recording I did about a book I just started reading.  I think I would like my students to record something similar. I noticed that the time limit is 5 minutes, but I don’t think they would need more than 2 minutes for their recordings.

I did also look at using Google Slides to create animated, talking characters. Good grief, that looked like an incredible amount of work! Since I work in a high school, I don’t think the students would appreciate all the hard work and effort required to make those talking characters.