Fabulous! I can see myself using this web 2.0 tool. A lot. I have always struggled with oral work. The kids feel uncomfortable in front of their peers for an oral evaluation. Pulling them aside one by one is too time consuming when you have a large class. My solution Gabcast. This site allows students to call in and record themselves. I gave them five questions dealing with movies and verbs that use indirect object pronouns. The student picked three to answer. They called in and recorded themselves, and now I can listen to them for an oral assessment. It's online. It's free. I can embed on the blog if I want them to reply/react back. I can even download to my iPod if I want to listen to movie recommendations while running :)
Gabcast! Bell 4 #14
Sunday, February 15, 2009
I wanted to follow up with some thoughts on grading the Gabcast homework. The online features with this service make it pretty easy to grade. I created a separate channel for each of my classes, so I could organize my recordings and be more efficient. The biggest problem I had grading this assignment was the students who did not identify themselves during the recording (about 1/4 of each class). I will publish the recordings in their class wiki & the kids without a grade can find themselves and tell me what recording number they are. On the side of my gradebook, I gave a grade for each of the anonymous recordings (with their corresponding episode number), so I don't have to go back and listen to them. None of the episodes are labeled (other than given a number) when the students record, so it is necessary when you have a large number of recordings on one channel to give a couple a tag or title for ease of reference. The first class took the longest to grade because it was my first time doing this activity. By the time I got my system down, a class with 26 episodes about 40 seconds long each took about 30 minutes. This grading does not lend itself to any kind of multitasking. I really had to focus and give it my full attention to get done quickly. I like the fact that I could do this assessment outside of class. The same type of evaluation would have taken a lot longer to do in class because of class room management multitasking. The recordings themselves are clear and easy to hear, unless the student recorded in a loud and busy location.
March 7, 2009
An update to this post that I really didn't want to make:
Since I tried this out with my students, Gabcast has changed the terms of their service agreement. The service is still free for those who would like to set up a podcast with a mic & computer, but sadly, the ability to post a cast through a phone will cost now.
