Vocaroo- Maayan Gedge and Orel Radaye

Vocaroo is a digital tool that can help us work on listening and speaking skills. This tool is a digital recorder that is very easy to use. You enter the link of the tool website, and you press the record button. After you record what you wanted it is has been saved as a link. You can copy this link, and send it through all kinds of media devices, such as; Email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and more. Whoever has the link can listen to it online anytime. You can also download the record to your computer.

Vocaroo has a few pedagogical benefits that help us as teachers. It allows us to record ourselves and give specific instruction to the students, or other material, even if we are not in the class with them, so it is a great tool that assists us to overcome communicating from distance. Also, by listening to the recording the student practices listening language skills. It gives us a chance to teach listening skills creatively, and it gives the students a chance to develop their creativity, using speaking skills. For example; They can record us back what they learned, throughout a song, a story they are telling us, or any other creative reply they can think of.

Though it is a very useful tool, Vocaroo has a small disadvantage for us, EFL teachers. Every recording is attached to one link, and it might be uncomfortable for us to open it in a different window every time, to listen to every student’s reply. To overcome it we can use Google Docs to gather all of the replies. All we have to do is to send the recording of the assignment in a Google Docs shared document and to ask the students to copy their own recording link to the same document. If we would work this way, and everything will be gathered in one place, it would be much easier for us to see all of the replies and to enjoy the benefits of this tool.