Ladies, Gentleman and all chickens it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to an absolute legend and amazing ICT teacher who I am fortunate to work with ‘The Hozz’ – please follow him on twitter @hozmeister. Here is his guest blog!
Ten seconds. That’s how long I give a new web 2.0 tool or resource to prove itself as worthwhile. About the same amount of time as it’s taken you to read this opening paragraph (assuming you haven’t left already!)
With suggestions filling my inbox, links in tweets and friends’ status updates it’s not possible to give them all a decent go. But that’s a copout really. The real reason they only get ten seconds is because if they want to impress my students they have to be instant and intuitive to use. After all, we don’t have time for technology to get in the way of learning.
The Chickenman himself has introduced me to some great examples of these instantaneous and intuitive tools, including the online animation tool Dvolver (http://www.dvolver.com/) and the website-based notice board Wallwisher (http://www.wallwisher.com/), both of which I have used in lessons as creative solutions to learning and sharing information.
Recently I came across Soundation (http://www.soundation.com/). It passed the ten second test with time to spare. No instructions needed. If you can double click and drag & drop you can make a multi-channel audio track in seconds.
It’s free to use with a library of over 400 sound loops ranging from drum & bass to electric guitar solos (although there are more to purchase in the sound store if your personal taste isn’t accounted for). It’s great because it just works – for example, when your sounds don’t match tempo it gives you solutions to choose from. It has loads of other features but why read about them when you can go play instead?
I’ve already used it in my year 7 ICT lessons. They have been reflecting on their spreadsheets unit by recording podcasts in another free piece of software, Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net). I suggested some of them try Soundation to see if it could add depth and production value to their podcasts. Soundation allows you to export and a WAVE file and Audacity allows you to import these, so file formats was no problem and once again technology wasn’t a barrier to learning but rather a facilitator of learning.
Here is just one example final podcast from that group.
I have of course spread the word about Soundation to my ‘friends’, colleagues, followers and now the chickenman’s esteemed blog readers. Let’s hope you have ten seconds to give it a go.