Hello all. I´m relatively new to Moodle and am currently setting up a course. I want to be able to record students speaking for a short time and then provide them with feedback on a language course. I was wondering which is the best way to do this. Some speaking requires them to view some pictures and talk about what they can see. At the moment, I have set up a forum where students can reply with an audio (by pressing record audio). Anyone know a better way to do this as it is a bit difficult to look at the pictures and record audio at the same time. Many thanks, Tom.
Hi Tom,
Where are you putting the pictures? In a forum entry, or in the forum descriptions, or somewhere else?
You could do this with the builtin database activity. Put the pictures on the add entry template. You could show them the pictures anyway you desire and have them make an audio recording, mp3, with Audacity, then have them upload their audio files in to the Podcast plugin. Little more complicated, though.
Before I retired, I liked to use the Journal plugin for stuff like this. I put the picture (or whatever) in the description. The description was visible to the students while making their recordings. I also used the Generico filter, so I could show multiple items, one at a time. The advantage to me as the teacher was that I could see all the submissions on one page which really cut down on the clicks when grading. I also used groups, so that if the grading page got to long or too slow when loading, using groups made the page shorter and load time quicker.
As a matter of fact I was testing this again over the past couple of days to make sure it still works, which it does. In fact, I was also making sure that it works in my greatly modified version of Journal, renamed as Diary. A huge difference is Journal gives the participants only ONE page to work with. My Diary version, gives them a new page every day starting at midnight. It is usable right now, but I still have a couple of items to fix before trying to get it released on Moodle. Anyone interested? Let me know and I will tell you where to go to try it out.
As you are a beginner in Moodle I'd suggest keeping it simple - the forum is good but have you tried using an Assignment and adding the images to the assignment description/instructions? Then students can still see them as they are recording their audio unless your images are many and huge. Worth experimenting with and no need for extra plugins.
I'm a language teacher working in Japan, and recording for reflection and assessment is a very big part of our curriculum. We use Poodll plugins for recording (audio and video) because they are by far the most versatile. Off the top of my head, it seems like the Poodll recording question type might work well in this situation. Students would be able to see the picture and record a response right inside Moodle's Quiz module. At this point responses would need to be manually graded. There's been a lot of development in this area, though, and Poodll will probably have some form of AI auto-grading for spoken responses very soon.