Audio Recording with Mic Note

Audio Recording with Mic Note

I was wrong!

The first time I took a look at Mic Note for recording audio clips to assist our students who struggle with reading or have written language or other disabilities, I thought that it was clunky and awkward.

After much searching for a perceived better option, and coming up blank, I returned to Mic Note, only to realize that I was wholesale wrong about it.  It offers more than just audio recording, which is amazing, but for the purposes we want it for in CESD, it’s brilliant!

Among my first misconceptions was my assertion that it was difficult to record in .mp3 format, and awkward to direct to Google Drive. Wrong.

The key advantages it offers over other audio utilities are important details for educators.

Firstly, it allows for up to four hours of recording time. None of us require that much for school uses, but we definitely need more than 5 or 10 minutes as the outer limit, which is where most other applications cut the recording off.  Some sources for exams take longer than 10 minutes to read aloud.

Secondly, it can be set to store the recordings directly into your Google Drive, making them yours forever. This is another advantage over the “competition”. There are some decent applications out there – Talk & Comment and Vocaroo come to mind right away – but they store your audio on their server and delete it after an amount of time has passed. This means that for all the time it takes to record the audio, a year down the road when you wish to reuse the resource with your students, you no longer have access to your recordings from last year, or even last semester. That’s no good!

Thirdly, Mic Note allows you to edit your audio as you are in the process of recording. So, if you get your tongue in a knot reading aloud, and you need to try again, Mic Note facilitates this easily.

So, I hereby retract my earlier position about Mic Note, and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a video outlining how I recorded an English 30 exam for students requiring the accommodation, and the templates for the two exam booklets can be copied to your Google Drive through the templates section of the CESD Teachers Share Website.

Help Teaching

Help Teaching

Help teaching is a website to assist with test and quiz creation along with worksheets. With a free login, teachers have access to all the questions in their database, but your documents will be restricted to ten questions each.

Problem Attic – Exam Creation Software

Problem Attic – Exam Creation Software

Exam creation is a time-consuming process for teachers, and historically many teachers have utilized software such as examview at great fiscal cost. We are pleased to show our teaching staff Problem Attic.  Problem Attic is the largest bank of examination questions available to teachers, and even more amazing, it’s an online (cloud) FREE resource, so it is constantly updated, and new questions are regularly being added.

If you need to create a re-test for a student who bombed an exam, this resource may be exactly what you are needing!

Problem Attic lets you search for questions by topic. This eliminates the need to search the database searching for questions that fit your need, you can now draw those questions out quickly.

 

Problem Attic has recently added new select options on the arrange tab. This allows you to do any of the following:

  • Select all multiple-choice or free-response problems in your document.
  • Move certain types of problems into a new part (and add directions).
  • Find all problems with custom answer spaces or other formatting details.
  • Save paper by grouping together problems that are “full width”.

Problem Attic permits you to change multiple choice questions to fillable questions, and it also allows you to separate questions into parts and subparts. This will allow you to insert custom answer spaces such as:

  • “griddables” (also known as grid-ins)
  • coordinate graphs and numberlines
  • snippets of graph paper
  • blank lines for writing prompts
  • grids, boxes, and empty space for student work

Problem Attic is great for outcome-based assessment. They refer to this as “curriculum development”, but as we have our Alberta curriculum already established by the ministry and we don’t need to develop our curriculum, we would use these tools to sort questions into their outcome categories.

Problem Attic allows for sharing your documents with other teachers. It will share in an editable format, so teachers you share with can make adjustments to tailor the material to their needs.