“Free Technology For Teachers” — that’s the name of a Facebook page and matching website that regularly publish links to, yes, you guessed it, free technology for teachers. Much is targeted at K-12 educators; I don’t know about you, but I’ve found many such apps to be quite helpful.
One recent link was to a newsletter called Practical Ed Tech. Both sites are written by the same busy guy named Ed Byrnes. I’m impressed! Anyway, the newsletter entry was titled “5 good tools for creating audio recordings online.”
Who would need such a thing? I do, actually. For all kinds of office skills classes, I need both to have a library of “answering machine” messages that students can practice transcribing onto written message pads, as well as an easy way for students to record speaking exercises, everything from vocabulary to “how would you respond to a client who asks this question?”
The app I chose to go with is Vocaroo, which is absurdly simple. You navigate to the website from a computer or device that has a microphone installed; you record your pieces; the app asks for an email address and then it emails the voice file. That’s all there is to it!
If you’d like to try it, I hope you’ll add to my library of “grooming request calls.” All you need to do is to pretend to be a pet owner seeking pet grooming services, or asking questions about the same. Remember, there’s no such thing as a dumb question, and also that all too many callers assume the recipient of a message can easily guess the correct spelling of their name, the area code of their phone number, etc. If you do record a message, please email it to me at kristi.murdock@kirkwood.edu. Thank you!
