USING DIGITAL VOICE RECORDERS IN THE CLASSROOM (IOW CONFERENCE 08)

Kathleen Holton led this excellent session on using digital voice recorders (DVRs) in the classroom. Kathleen's school had got funding from CILT to do a project using the DVRs, in order to enhance performance in the speaking exam. Kathleen found that pupils didn't know how to revise for the oral element, and decided to take a more proactive and hands-on approach. The school purchased 9 Sanyo ICR DVRs, which have a good quality internal mic, as well as a battery recharging pack. The great thing about these DVRs are that they record as an mp3 file, wich makes them easy to upload and for the pupils to use.

USES & PRACTICAL POINTERS
-Upload individual conversation answers for each pupil
-DVD available from CILT Cymru, with 18 different case studies of ICT and MFL
-Record the conversation naturally, with teacher correcting mistakes. Pupils will benefit from hearing the mistakes when they revise.
-Introduce with KS3, to maximise improvement for the GCSE exam
-Practise dialogues in class then go out into corridor to record
-Start with name, so not confusing for the teacher when they upload
-When saving, change Track 1, etc, to pupils’ names
-Next lesson, start with their recordings – Excellent for AfL
-Build a positive culture for listening and evaluating – positive praise e.g. for not pronouncing stuff that shouldn’t be pronounced
-Use mistakes for AfL e.g. giggling
-Use recordings for departmental moderation e.g. ‘Is this an A? What is a variety of structures?’
-“Evidence at KS3” folder can be easily kept
-Recording dialogues = good for oracy
-Upload recordings to wiki
-Use a Voki to introduce your wiki home page
Go to voki.com Register yourself
Put a voki on your wiki and get kids to interact with the voki as a voluntary task
Send a voki back to reply
Select the ‘Text to speech’ box whereby they type and choose a French voice to read DON’T USE PHONE AS PHONING USA!! Mic or text as speech.

OTHER HANDY TIPS
-Moodle. If you use Moodle, put links to department wikis and blogs in the right-hand sidebar
-www.quizlet.com To improve vocab. Type up vocab from AQA list. Familiarise/learn/test = excellent way to learn and test. Embed into wiki for maximum exposure

This was an excellent session, full of very practical and helpful advice that we can put into practice immediately. Even if you don't have DVRs in your department, free software such as Audacity could be used to do a similar job.