Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Tools for Connecting Through Voice and Image

As part of the Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2012 session Becoming a Webhead, I am trying out various audio and video tools to evaluate their usefulness for teaching languages.  As I progress I will be adding to a Googledoc called Communication Tools which I created.  It is open to the public for additions or changes.  Feel free to contribute.

Right now I am embedding a short message that I created using AudioPal.  It was extremely easy to create, but what I want to figure out is whether it is possible to set it to mute.  I don't think it's a good idea to have audio turn on as soon as people open a blog because sometimes they are in a public or group setting and it can be distracting to everyone else.  So here goes the message I recorded using text-to-speech on AudioPal.  (BTW I discovered that in text-to-speech it is better not to use abbreviations because the voice doesn't produce them clearly).




OK. I can see that you have control over the playing of the audio. Now I'm going to try Voki.
Here's a link to a character and recording I created.  But I am also going to embed the same thing here to see what happens.



Ok.  Now let's see what Audioboo looks like.

Test of Audioboo (mp3)

4 comments:

Meng Zhang said...

This website is cool and useful!

Maryanne said...

Meng,

I hope that you will also check out some of the edubloggers in my sidebar. They offer great ideas for teaching and learning.

Teresa Almeida d'Eça said...

Hi, Maryanne!
It's great that you've been trying audio tools BaW12.
I've been a fan of Audiopal for a couple of years and have come to like Audioboo, though I like the more discrete Audiopal widget.
I also like Voki, but it's a pity that we can't record our own voice.
Keep enjoying BaW12!!!
Teresa (Portugal)

sameh tharwat said...

This is great, congratulations :)