A surprising response

About two weeks ago I came across a blog post about Audiopal on the Free Technology for teachers blog. A free way to post a minute or less audio recording on your website using your telephone or keyboard. If you chose to type in your message there was an electronic voice that read it ... I didn't especially like this so I gave the telephone version a try. Even though I dislike hearing my voice, I thought I'd post daily homework like this for a few weeks to see how things went. There are a few steps ... first phone the toll free number and record your message, second go to audiopal to get the code and lastly edit my sharepoint and updating the code for one of the webparts. Not terribly difficult but more steps than just updating the calendar with the assignment which I'm also doing. Its kind of cool so I figured I'd continue this for a while longer.

Last class one of the students said something about what I said on the website. After further inquiry I found out that he'd been checking into the website daily to "hear" the assignment. To check that he had written it down correctly etc. Cool! When I asked the class there were at least 10 students who indicated that they check out the recording. I guess I've just identified all of my auditory learners :) Its pretty neat that something I was just playing around with has been as useful as it has been (and I didn't even direct any of the kids there to check it out).