Select Page

e-Auzaar – Vocaroo : A simple online audio resource creator for teachers

Partha Ghosh

Savita ma’am is an English teacher at a Govt. school. She is concerned about the poor reading and listening skills of her students. As a solution to this problem, she wondered if she could record the stories and poems from the syllabus in her own voice and share it with her students so that they could listen to the same, at their own time and as many times as they liked. She would suggest her students keep the relevant lesson in front of them while listening to her recordings. This would give them a better understanding of the pronunciations of different words. Later, they could practice reading it the same way to improve their reading skills. We suggested to her some audio recorder applications that are most popularly used. But she indicated her low/no-tech proficiency (knowledge on how to download, install and configure) as a hindrance to using such software. Moreover, these kinds of applications require many other supportive tools to manage the recordings. This made us search for a suitable tool that is simple, intuitive and effective. We found a simple online tool for voice recording- Vocaroo. It does not require any kind of login, or additional support tool and is free to use. Let us take a look at the features of this tool.

    Features of Vocaroo :

  • It’s a web application. So, a user does not require to download the app.
  • It has an intuitive and easy-to-learn interface.
  • Recorded audio can be saved and kept on the Vocaroo cloud server for a period of 3 months, free of cost.
  • Users can download the recorded audio on a local device as mp3, as and when needed.
  • The web link of the recorded audio can be shared through mail or any social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.
  • To embed the audio recording into a blog or a website, users need to only generate a code by a single click.
  • It is possible to upload audio files from the local device to the Vocaroo cloud server to keep the files secure and share them with others, if required.
  • It supports almost all popular audio formats like mp3, ogg, flac, wav, wma, amr, m4a, aiff, aif, aac, mp2, gsm, 3ga, au and ra with a maximum file size of 50 MB.

How does it help a teacher to improve the reading skills of her learners?

  1. Ways to improve reading skills : A teacher may ask students to read a story from the textbook individually, record it and share. A teacher can give her inputs, suggestions and corrections via shared recordings. Students can also listen to themselves for self-assessment and reflection.
  2. Feedback & comment tool : A teacher can give her feedback or comment on a student’s work in the form of audio. Similarly, it can be used for peer feedback, which would be great for collaborative learning. .
  3. Formative assessment : Audio quizzes can be easily created using this tool and students can respond verbally. .
  4. A tool for digital storytelling : Digital storytelling activity is used to build communication skills as well as to encourage creativity. This tool can help a teacher in assigning such activity to her students. .
  5. It can help both teachers and students in creating & sharing Podcasts and Audio blogs. .
  6. A teacher can record her lecture in small nuggets prior to her teaching session and share it with students, if necessary. .

In order to use this application, a teacher can visit https://vocaroo.com/

To know more about Vocaroo, visit the following links :

Hope this online tool will help you in making teaching-learning more interactive and engaging.

Submit a Comment