21 Reasons for Making Your Own Audio Files for Jigsaw Listening

My school’s resource room is brimming to the rafters with listening materials. There are CDs that go with coursebooks, audio accompaniments to graded readers, listening courses and a whole lot more. Add to this the millions of files online on websites and via podcasts and you have several billion hours of listening material.

But is that good enough?

Is it exactly what your students need in that lesson?

I’ve usually found the answer to these questions to be ‘no’. Sure, it’s practice, but it all seems too “textbooky / EFL classroom-ish”. None of the CDs, tapes (remember those?) or MP3s and WAVs was exactly what I wanted for my class.

So a long time ago, in 2005, I started making my own listening materials, using the free audio editor and recorder Audacity, which is my favourite piece of software ever in the whole wide world, ever.

This post isn’t a how-to on Audacity, so I’ll direct you to Russell Stannard’s excellent teacher-training video for that.

Here I’ll describe a few things that work for me when making jigsaw listenings tailored to my students’ needs of the moment.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Jigsaw.svg/600px-Jigsaw.svg.png

Jigsaw Listening

OK. When was the last time you saw a jigsaw listening CD? Never. Thought so. I think jigsaw listening is one of the most valuable communicative activities around. It’s an audio information gap activity. Different groups of students listen to different parts of a text, then exchange information with each other to complete a task – piece the info together, find out who or what is being talked about, etc. It is great as the centerpiece of an integrated all-skills lesson.

The fantastic things about recording jigsaw listenings yourself are:

1. you control the level and content of the audio text.
2. you can build the rest of the lesson around the jigsawed listenings.
3. you can use them to recycle vocabulary, grammar and other language taught earlier.
4. you can make games out of them.
5. you can make the listenings from student-generated work.
6. you can use them to introduce factual content (giving each group different sets of facts).
7. students love the fact they have to listen and then share and find out.
8. the element of having to pass on information heard seems to make students “listen harder”.
9. today’s technology means iPhones, laptops and classroom PCs do away with the need to drag 12 tape recorders/CD players to class.
10. you can use the jigsaw listening for anything – introduce an important piece of school news by cutting it into different recorded pieces.
11. get students to put events in a chronological order.
12. you can beef up a lackluster textbook reading be recording it as a jigsaw reading.
13. you can add intrigue to graded readers by creating jigsawed summaries.
14. focus on different tenses by giving groups parts of the story set in the past, present and future.
15. use it as a critical thinking activity – give students different parts of a set of instructions  / cooking recipe / directions, etc for them to piece back together logically.
16. liven up mystery stories.
17. explain grammar by giving students different parts of the puzzle.
18. explain word families by giving students different information about a word (collocations, parts of speech, antonyms & synonyms, use in phrasal verbs, etc).
19. it can save you time (especially if you re-use the audio). They can take as little as ten minutes (the time it normally takes to do three one-minute recordings plus editing, saving, etc. The students then spend ages (all quality time) on the listening and piecing back together of the text.
20. it’s free.
21. you never have to visit that dusty resource room again.

If you have other suggestions for jigsaw listening, please share them in the comments below.

Thank you.

‘Classroom Conversations’ feedback

This is the conclusion to a three-part series on how I use audio files to provide my students with feedback. As I said in the previous two posts, my students really like getting feedback orally for a variety of reasons. I like using audio because it provides me with an authentic  and pedagogically sound medium for both further listening  practice and communicating with my students on a more personal level (I hope my voice is warmer than my pencil).

The third use of oral feedback I would like to describe is that of conversing with students on a more fun and informal level. I call this ‘classroom conversations’. I suppose it could be sub-titled ‘The Teacher’s Weekly Journal Entry for his Students’.

All I do is press record and chatter away to myself at the end of the week about what I thought of the week and my classes. I then put the saved mp3 file on a shared folder for my students to access. I do an online version of this using the excellent collaborative timeline site OurStory.com. I thoroughly recommend this site for building up the story of your class throughout the semester.

For some reason, my students seem to like listening to me rambling on about nothing in particular. I think the real reason is that I try and mention each of the class by name and they want to get to “their bit”. This sometimes makes for a bit of fun conversation / banter at the start of class after the weekend. Some students want to know why I said what I said, while others want to know why they didn’t get a (bigger) mention. This is usually a good carrot to encourage students to work hard in class. Hard, diligent and studious workers always get lots of praise

This form of feedback really gives me a chance to tell students my side of things. The classroom can so often be an ‘us’ (teachers) verses ‘them’ (students) situation. It’s a good opportunity to show students that teachers are humans. And that we have feelings

Here are some of the things I have put in a ‘classroom conversation’ mp3 file that surprised my students and hopefully made me more approachable:

• My heart was beating overtime when Supervisor X was observing me last Tuesday.
• I didn’t sleep well on Monday night because I was so worried about students’ exam scores.
• I was so proud to be with my class on the recent field trip – They were all so responsible.
• I was very happy that class told me about Student Y’s problem. It meant I could change my lesson plan and do something more fun.
• Student Z told me she liked my lesson and that made me happy all day.
• I hate giving presentations so much I lose control of my lips and my voice goes up and down at will.
• I worry that when students waste time or don’t do their homework, they won’t get the job they want or go to the university of their choice.
• I was very sad at the mess the students left the class in on Thursday afternoon and had to spend 30 minutes tidying up their rubbish.

Some of the good things about using this kind of feedback are:

• It brings you closer to your students.
• Students like it.
• It practices students in authentic listening.
• You can introduce things that you might not have time for in class.
• You can reinforce things students might not have been prepared to listen to in class (especially good after a poor set of exam grades).
• Students will respond – either face to face, in writing or with their own mp3.
• It’s another avenue to address classroom management issues.
• It’s a good way to recognize quieter, less confident  students and show them they are valuable members of the class.
• It gets students taking more of an interest in their role in the class.
• It gets me thinking more about my class and how I can make or do things better.

Try it at the end of this week and let me know how it goes.

Progress reports

I have found that providing students with progress reports via audio files is a very motivating alternative to providing written feedback on their progress. Generally, I do both. I am required to enter written feedback in the online records kept for my students. However, there are several things that don’t overly excite me about this:

1. I sometimes find them to be overly formal and (on occasion) stilted.
2. They occur too infrequently – usually mid- and end-of-semester – to provide students with useful information.
3. They can (on occasion) fall prey to ticking-the-boxes syndrome and thus can (on occasion) not be so overly heartfelt.

Now…

This is why I like giving audio files to students as progress reports.

Reasons for this are:

1. It gets students to practice authentic and relevant listening. They have a real reason to listen and are usually extremely motivated to do so.
2. It is more relaxed than the formal, college-required progress reports.
3. You can make the feedback fun and irreverent.
4. You can (on occasion) say things that you could never put online.
5. You can really personalize it.
6. Their parents don’t know about the audio files (Shhh!!) whereas parents usually see the more formal written progress reports.
7. You can say a WHOLE LOT MORE in an audio file than you could ever write in a formal written report (unless you wanted to dedicate your winter break to progress-report writing).
8. You can do it very often. It’s not overly difficult to do every two weeks. Would love to do it every week, but…
9. It’s quick – You can do progress reports for a class of 20 in 30 minutes.
10. Students really appreciate the personalization and extra effort.
11. The effect of the feedback can be extremely immediate– you can almost guess from a student’s face which part of their feedback they are listening to.
12. Providing lots of enthusiastic praise in the audio files works wonders.
13. I have found students like to listen to each other’s feedback more than they would read it.
14. You can easily tailor it to those who need it more.
15. It really gets you thinking more about your students, what they need and how they are doing.
16. You can provide the class with a global feedback file on how they’re doing collectively in addition to individual files.
17. Giving students audio files can encourage students to respond – either via their own mp3 or in writing.
18. It makes me appear more human to them (I think – could be wrong).
19. Given regularly, it really comes part of a system of monitoring progress.
20. It’s fun – Students like it.
21. They can reciprocate and give you mp3 feedback.

In the upcoming semester, I’d like to try and provide this kind of progress reporting using VoiceThread. I’m sure students will respond so much more to the threaded audio format than the clunkier option of mailing the audio file or leaving it on shared drives. It would be nice to have more of a conversation with the students using media they are so comfortable and familiar with using.

Will keep you posted.

PS I use the free audio editor/recorder from Audacity. It’s pretty much like MS Word except for sound and not letters (you record, copy, paste and save!).

The Audacity manual is here.

Here are some YouTube tutorials on how to record and how to edit.

Feedback on Writing

I provide feedback to my students using mp3 files. I record them using the free audio editor and recorder Audacity (you can download versions for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix).

I have found providing recorded oral feedback via an mp3 file to be a very useful addition to my feedback arsenal. I needed a little time to get into the swing of things but once I did, I loved it (and so too did my students). It’s very easy. I just record the feedback, save as mp3 and then e-mail it to the students.

I would suggest reducing the file size to 32 kpbs (if you can) so files don’t clog up e-mail InBoxes.

Example

Here’s an example text. I write numbers on the text where students need to focus their attention. When I record the feedback, I ask the students to look at number one, and then provide the feedback, and then do the same for #2, etc.

Teachers have asked me if it’s quicker than providing written feedback. In my experience, it takes a little longer if the text is short but saves time if the text is longer. Using audio files also saves time if you want to provide more extensive and comprehensive feedback.

Here are some of the things I initially had to get used to:

• Finding what to say and how to say it to be of maximum benefit to students.
• Starting a new sentence again if I made a mistake (in Audacity you just select the mistake and delete it, as you would do with a piece of text in Word).
• Cutting down on umms and ahhs.
• Creating an easy to recognize naming system when saving the mp3 files. I used the class name + student initials + writing task name (e.g. DF2-05_AM_cities.mp3).
• Finding the time and a quiet area to get into the habit of recording feedback.
• Some people might say they don’t like the sound of their own voice, but this disappears after a while.

Here are the reasons why I like and recommend using sound files for feedback:

• Students like them
  They really pay more attention to what’s on a sound file than what I write on paper. They also seem to get ‘excited’ at receiving one in their mail.
• It makes a change from red ink
  Whatever colour ink you use for correction, it’s usually messy business. Some students might need a microscope to read your notes. I know my corrections can sometimes look more like a maze of insertion marks and words.
• It practices listening
  Listening to the corrections is a valid and authentic listening task. Students are usually quite motivated to listen and will press play several times to make sure they got it all.
• It’s an activity in itself
  This is a sneaky one – The audio provides students with a whole new activity of listening for specific information and re-engaging and correcting their text. Great for recycling language and getting students to think.
• It makes the students rewrite the draft
  Always a good thing. In my experience, they are more engaged in the rewriting process with audio correction than with my scrawled notes.
• It gets students used to metalanguage
  The audio files are a good opportunity to reinforce grammar terms they might not be so familiar with. This is particularly useful for lower levels. Audio files give students more processing time to work out exactly what those big, confusing words are the teacher keeps saying in class (like present progressive, apostrophe, adjective…).
• It is quicker than writing if there’s a lot you want to say
• It’s useful with tiny handwriting on A8 paper
  No matter how hard I try to convince my students of the virtues of A4, I still get essays on Post-It-note-sized paper. You need an ultra thin pen and a microscope to notate these. Using numbers and audio makes this process cleaner and easier.
• It forces me to think more carefully about grading my speech and saying what I need to say as succinctly as possible.

So, I thoroughly recommend using audio to provide feedback. However, if you really want to push the boat out – use audio and visual. This is one of my New Year resolutions. Russell Stannard has excellent tutorials on how to use screencasts in providing feedback on writing:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=207117

and
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec08/mart04.htm

Or check out Vance Stevens’ list of screencast software:
http://vancestevens.com/casting.htm#screencasting