Gabcast+Trial

[|Gabcast] is an easy way to involve students in listening and speaking tasks that can be captured and used again. All the students need is a telephone to make the recording. All that is needed for listening is a computer with the internet. You can listen directly online or you can save the recordings to any portable device (mp3 player or burn to a CD-ROM) for listening away from the computer!

I set up my first gabcast account to introduce this to instructors and test out the features. If you would like to add to my channel discussing how to use this tool in a language classroom, please follow the instructions below for calling in from Calgary. Call 775-9947 Channel number 11149 # Channel password 00001 # Recording begins after the beep. Press the # key to end the recording.
 * Press 1 to create a new recording** (press 2 to set up a conference call.)

You can respond to my original gabcast. The text of this first recording is below.

//Hi. You are listening to a podcast created by just a local telephone call. I know we have been exploring different ways to capture speech samples from our students and this may be the easiest so far. Up until now, we have used the digital voice recorder which has the benefit of being portable and can easily capture both an individual or a group. But the drawbacks have been the fact that we only have one of these devices and that it requires the instructor to come back and download/save and upload the files before they can be shared. Another option Cynthia (one of the Mount Royal instructors) has tried is Yackpack – a convenient tool on the web for you to create a community which can save audio files for others in the group to listen and respond to. But it means doing this in a computer lab with headphones and microphones and setting up a quick account before you start and once you leave the lab, it is difficult to expect students to use this on their own, simply due to the lack of access to this equipment. But everyone has a phone – Anyone can create an account, log in and start a new channel and use this channel information to call in and make a recording. And we all know how many have cellphones and can easily complete their homework from anywhere. Is it really this simple? That is what I am trying to determine with this test. Is the free account a large enough size to accommodate the class? Are there any unanticipated surprises? If you want to help with this experiment, just follow the instructions I sent in my email to create your own recording. Is this something that would work for you?//

After you have recorded a message, you are presented with the following three options.
 * save, publish or delete your recording

When a recording is published – you can use the title of your gabcast to search for it on the gabcast website or go to the channel number. This channel is called MRC Teacher Talk. The gabcast website is [|www.gabcast.com]

Select play to listen - if you want to download the recording as an .mp3 file, first select play to listen, pause the recording and then click on download. Select the location to save the file.

If you are logged in and looking at your own channels, you will have options to give the audio clip a title, description, tags, or to download or delete the audio clip.

If you don't have computer equipment in your classroom, it's great to be able to download, burn a CD and bring the audio recordings to class in this way.

If you want to do more with the recordings - look at the information on using Audacity, a free sound editing program to edit and mix the sound files to create something new.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to use this in the classroom!