Gigi Thiele

Head of LOTE and Teacher of French at All Saints College - Austrailia

Recording Made Easy in the 21st Century

Customer Experience

With a lot of pressure on keeping evidence of progress, we now face a battle on actually being able to record speaking. In previous years, we grabbed the tape recorder and away we went. Then came the trendy new tape recorders, which are wonderful, but:

a) don’t have a counter and

b) don’t have built in microphones. Add to that, that to purchase blank audio tapes, you need to go to a specialty shop, the tape recorder is well on its way out.

I haven’t made the jump to ipods etc. and I believe they are being used in some schools. As we are a laptop school, I was advised to use the recording function on my laptop but I didn’t want to have to lug around my laptop nor have the students use my laptop in small groups. I looked around and found a fabulous answer. It’s a CD recorder.

It functions exactly the same as a cassette recorder, but uses CDs and as such is very portable. Better yet, the clarity of the recording is far superior.

The in-built microphones are much more sensitive than the old tape recorders, and you can also burn a copy of your recording for the student or keep it on file as your evidence. You can keep many individual tracks on the one CD, thus meaning you can easily find the right student to mark and go straight to it, as well as compiling a continuation of student progress. Students could easily use it in class and what is great for our school is that you can record some dialogues with native speakers and use them in the traditional sense of listening comprehensions... Even make copies of your created dialogues for your students to practice!

I found this item through the net and would highly recommend the product. I was able to obtain it through Binary Designs Pty Ltd in Queensland. Karen Henderson is the person I was dealing with, and not only was it easy but prompt. Many music departments use this product, but as yet LOTE teachers have not caught up with it. I would very much recommend it to teachers for their use and use in their classes.

I would be happy for anyone to contact me to have a look at it (email: gth@allsaints.wa.edu.au or you could contact Karen at: karen@binarydesigns.com.au, or at the website www.binarydesigns.com.au.

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