After hearing about colleagues at Pomona College using Chinswing (now Voxopop) in language teaching, I decided to have a look myself.
From the website: “Voxopop is essentially a message board/forum system that uses voice instead of text.” Voxopop is reminiscent of Voicethread, which Natalie blogged about yesterday. Both are asynchronous tools for conversation. However, there are two key differences: Voicethread allows embedded media (images and documents) and Voxopop does not; Voxopop allows users to export conversations to iTunes or as an RSS feed – thus, like being notified when a new podcast episode is published, listeners can be notified when someone contributes to a conversation.
Another great feature of Voxopop: users can set up private “talkgroups” that don’t appear on the public search results. This is excellent for language classes particularly, to control who participates in a conversation.
Some ideas gleaned from other blogs and ones I brainstormed for using Voxopop in teaching:
- record a prompt and have speakers of the TL from around the world contribute
- record a prompt for students to respond to
- have students start their own discussions on topics of interest in order to get TL speaker responses
- storytelling
- have students pick sides and debate an issue
- making introductions at the beginning of an online or hybrid course
- have students listen to an existing discussion amongst native speakers