In which Google gives our students voice in at least 10 ways
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on April 3, 2009
In a previous post post I wrote about how GrandCentral had much of the functionality of a $100,000 audio-lingual laboratory for about $100,000 less, making the audio-lingual method sexy again. Well, GrandCentral is now officially the super-sexy Google Voice. and after having the chance to play with the service for a few weeks, I’d like to list ten ways in which Google Voice might be used to manage student-to-student or student-to-teacher interactions.
1. Call management: This means that you can give your phone number to anyone: your students, your colleagues, your boss, even those pesky telemarketers. It does not matter who has your number because you can control how those calls are filtered. So for me, calls from my mother get routed to my cell phone whereas calls from my students go straight to a customized voicemail box in Spanish. My in-laws from Italy can go to my wife’s cell or to another mailbox in Italian and telemarketers can hear an “out of service” message.
2. Phone number for life: Imagine if alumni twenty years hence can contact you to tell you that they now are president of an international firm. Imagine if the person you met at a conference three years ago could call you to ask if you want to collaborate on a project. How would this change your availability and expand your options?
3. Call recording: Simply press 4 to record incoming calls. Outgoing calls can not yet be recorded, but if each of your students had a Google Voice account, they could record calls in the target language and keep a portfolio of their work. Imagine, too, interviewing interesting individuals in the target language and making these available to your students on your site or through your course management system.
4. Embed, download, email: All voicemail messages can be downloaded as mp3 files, emailed to someone or embeded in a website, all while still remaining on your account. If you ever tried to do podcasting in your class and thought it too difficult, here’s your solution. All you have to do is record a message, choose embed, copy the code and paste it into your website. Embedding the audio to the website is no different than embedding a YouTube Video. Best of all, you don’t need to ask for access to a server from your network adminstrator in order to upload your mp3s. If you want to create a true podcast, you can still download the mp3 file and do a bit of editing with Audacity or GarageBand. The email feature makes it simple to give feedback to students, simply respond by typing back feedback, but be careful not to break any FERPA laws.
My fellow blogger, Barbara, left me some feedback about his post on my voicemail and so I thought I would make it public and embed it here. You can imagine that the ability to embed really makes it easy for those colleagues who were not technical enough to do a podcast with their students. If they can cut and paste, they can do this.
5. Conference calling: When you’re on a call and a new call comes in (call waiting required), you’ll have an additional option to conference the caller in to your existing call. You can conference up to four callers together. Why not organize study groups or conversation groups? Record the entire conversation and make that available to the rest of the class on your website. Others might have the same questions. Imagine conducting first-round interviews this way, too, instead of traveling to conferences like the MLA. With budgets as tight as they are these days, I’m sure this use of Google Voice will resonate at your institution.
6. Customized greetings: I already talked about group managment in #1, but it’s worth repeating. Greeting messages can be customized infinitely so that particular groups can hear a particular message or so that each person could hear a particular message. Imagine (if one were so inclined) customizing a greeting for each student so that if a student needed help with a particular linguistic structure, the teacher could present the student with a scenario that would require the student to use that structure. I’ve done this kind of activity with my Spanish students before where I invent a scenario in which a voicemail picks up and they need to leave a message. Example: They call a medical clinic in Cancún because their friend is ill and get a voicemail greeting. They need to leave a message with information about where they are, what is wrong and how they can be contacted.
7. Call Internationally for pennies: Why not require your students purchase $10 of calling rather than a workbook for one course? For $10 students could talk to someone in Western Europe for almost nine hours in the target language, record the entire conversation and embed it on their student blog. With the added email and SMS function supporting reading and writing skills, current pen pals or even e-pals exchanges are a thing of the past. Here is a list of the rates by country.
8. SMS: Contact your students via SMS for free! Since all SMS messages get logged into Google voice, I can envision an SMS assignment in which students send messages in the target language via text message which you, the instructor, can keep track of it all online. Since it’s 160 characters or less, this assignment could work well for a beginning level language class.
9. Use any phone: All of these services can be accessed with any telephone. One simply dials one’s Google number first to then call out to another number. So for study abroad, there are lots of opportunities to set up interactions between the students traveling and students back home. What a great tool in our efforts to advocate for language learning and international education. And if you have a web-enabled moblie phone like the iPhone, you can even work/learn on the go…
10. Call widgets: Have your students, parents and international colleagues leave messages for you without giving out your number by using a call widget on your site. Go ahead, give me call and let me know what you thought of this post.
In which Google gives our students voice in at least 10 ways by Kevin Gaugler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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