SoundCloud – Making Oral Commentary Practice More Dynamic

In September, I wrote about VoiceThread, a tool to which we subscribe that allows users to upload, present, share, and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio, files, and video through a series of slides. This week I want to share another online tool that promotes oral language development called SoundCloud.

SoundCloud is a “social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere.” Its most popular use is for bands and musicians to publish songs and albums to the world to hear for free. In this context it has helped many artists gather a following and become successful in the music world. You can hear some of my music here. 🙂

Music publishing isn’t SoundCloud’s only application, though. Since “anyone” can create sounds, which are ultimately just audio recordings, it can be used in an educational context. Any teacher who has a need for students to practice oral commentaries can use SoundCloud. This has the capacity to improve students’ oral communication skills greatly, especially for formative assessment.

SoundCloud has a built-in recording device, so no other tool is needed to do a voice recording. You can upload audio files, however, if it was ever desired to record in a more robust audio recording app (like Garageband or Audacity). All you have to do is hit the “Upload” button, and then the record button when signed into your account, and you are ready to record.

The main advantage of SoundCloud in comparison to VoiceThread is the ability to give pinpointed comments on the audio track. This can be very useful for students since teachers (or peers) can give specific feedback at any point in the track. The student will be more quickly able to process the feedback and learn what changes or adjustments that need to be made. They can also be immediately aware of what was done well.

These tracks that are recorded can be set to private so they are not publically searchable. The students and teacher can easily share the private link with each other.

Sophie has been using SoundCloud in her Chinese classes to practice oral activities. In this example, Sophie did an interactive group oral where she provided the instructions and prompt for the students, and then the group of students took turns speaking. They recorded directly into SoundCloud. Later, Sophie then gave the students pinpointed feedback about their response.

Creating a SoundCloud account is free and easy. You get a total of 3 hours of space with the free account. If you would like a tutorial about how to use SoundCloud and/or if you want to tryout SoundCloud in your class, let me know.