Wes Fryer: Chapter 3

Audio

This chapter focused primarily on how teachers can incorporate audio recording into their lesson plans. Fryer gives a few points as to why audio recordings might be more impactful, and easier to use, than video. Such as, less equipment, more anonymity so students can be more comfortable about posting their audio recordings online, audio recording files take up less space and are usually far smaller than video files and more devices have audio recording capabilities. Fryer also talks about how teachers can use audio recordings and how they can be implemented in classrooms from grades K-12.  One of the things I learned was the idea of an digital portfolio, which would require students to make audio recordings, or even podcasts, about their learning that can be shared with a teacher. An idea, that I have never heard of before that I found to be a really interesting idea. I also loved the idea of having students record their essays as another way for teachers to grade and critique them. This I thought was really great and I learned a lot from, because this can play into the VAK model, teachers who are more auditory learners can have another way to have their students work. This chapter also highlighted many different audio recording technologies and websites that I had never heard of before. 

For my three websites, I decided to look at three different audio recording websites that Fryer talks about in the chapter. I ended up selected, AudioBoo, Vocaroo and Narrable. The most straight forward of these three websites was Vocaroo, where the homepage has a record button and you just press record and start talking, which I thought would be really good for younger students, so they don't get distracted by other things on the webpage. Both AudioBoo and Narrable had sound recording capabilities but also allowed you to listen to other recordings that are on the site. I loved that aspect of both of these websites. I think overall I preferred Narrable the most because it was geared towards students, and had mostly student and education based recordings, where as AudioBoo had a larger range of topics.